Master of the World (1961 film)
Encyclopedia
Master of the World is a 1961 science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 film based upon the Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...

 novels Robur the Conqueror
Robur the Conqueror
Robur the Conqueror is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne, published in 1886. It is also known as The Clipper of the Clouds. It has a sequel, The Master of the World, which was published in 1904.- Plot summary :...

and Master of the World. The movie stars Vincent Price
Vincent Price
Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. was an American actor, well known for his distinctive voice and serio-comic attitude in a series of horror films made in the latter part of his career.-Early life and career:Price was born in St...

, Charles Bronson
Charles Bronson
Charles Bronson , born Charles Dennis Buchinsky was an American actor, best-known for such films as Once Upon a Time in the West, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape, Rider on the Rain, The Mechanic, and the popular Death Wish series...

, and Henry Hull
Henry Hull
Henry Watterson Hull was an American character actor with a unique voice, most noted for playing the lead in Universal Pictures's Werewolf of London .-Life and career:Hull was born in Louisville, Kentucky...

, was written by Richard Matheson
Richard Matheson
Richard Burton Matheson is an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. He is perhaps best known as the author of What Dreams May Come, Bid Time Return, A Stir of Echoes, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and I Am Legend, all of which have been...

, and directed by William Witney
William Witney
William Nuelsen Witney was an American film and television director. He is best remembered for the movie serials he co-directed with John English for Republic Pictures such as Daredevils of the Red Circle, Zorro's Fighting Legion and Drums of Fu Manchu.He directed many Westerns during his career,...

.

The film was an attempt by American International Pictures
American International Pictures
American International Pictures was a film production company formed in April 1956 from American Releasing Corporation by James H. Nicholson, former Sales Manager of Realart Pictures, and Samuel Z. Arkoff, an entertainment lawyer...

 to create a prestigious epic adventure along the lines of 1956's Around the World in 80 Days. While it boasted a larger cast and more location work than was then the norm for AIP, it still utilised stock footage, including the opening miniature shot of Elizabethan London from Laurence Olivier's Henry V
Henry V (1944 film)
Henry V is a 1944 film adaptation of William Shakespeare's play of the same name. The on-screen title is The Cronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France . It stars Laurence Olivier, who also directed. The play was adapted for the screen by Olivier, Dallas...

as a stand-in for Victorian London, with the skyship Albatross superimposed over the top. Additional scenes of the Albatross destroying both sides in a naval engagement are created in the same manner, with stock footage borrowed from model shoots of Napoleonic sea battles. Vincent Price played the dangerously idealistic Captain Robur, who traveled the globe in his Albatross, in order to force peace on the world.

The script combined elements of both Jules Verne's novels, Master of the World, and Robur the Conqueror. Robur, genius, inventor and in this instance, creator of powered heavier than air craft Albatross, with his hand picked crew chooses to use weapons of war to force the governments of the world to lay down their arms and live in peace.

Cast

  • Vincent Price
    Vincent Price
    Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. was an American actor, well known for his distinctive voice and serio-comic attitude in a series of horror films made in the latter part of his career.-Early life and career:Price was born in St...

     as Robur
  • Charles Bronson
    Charles Bronson
    Charles Bronson , born Charles Dennis Buchinsky was an American actor, best-known for such films as Once Upon a Time in the West, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape, Rider on the Rain, The Mechanic, and the popular Death Wish series...

     as John Strock
  • Henry Hull
    Henry Hull
    Henry Watterson Hull was an American character actor with a unique voice, most noted for playing the lead in Universal Pictures's Werewolf of London .-Life and career:Hull was born in Louisville, Kentucky...

     as Prudent
  • Mary Webster
    Mary Webster (actress)
    Mary Webster is a British actress best known for her 45 appearances as Sarah Onedin in the BBC nautical drama The Onedin Line .Webster's first television appearance was in The Man from the South for Cameo Theatre...

     as Dorothy Prudent
  • David Frankham
    David Frankham
    David Frankham is a film and television actor. After serving in India and Malaya in WWII, Frankham worked first as a news reader, and then a writer, interviewer and producer for the BBC from 1948 through 1955....

     as Philip Evans
  • Richard Harrison
    Richard Harrison (actor)
    Richard Harrison is an American B-movie actor and occasionally a writer/director/producer.Harrison was very prolific and worked with most of the better-known names in European B-movies during the 1960s and 1970s, branching out to exploitation films shot all over the world in the early 1970s...

     as Alistair The Helmsman
  • Vito Scotti
    Vito Scotti
    Vito Scotti was a veteran character actor who played many roles, primarily from the late-1940s to the mid-1990s. He was known as a man of a thousand faces, for his ability to assume so many divergent roles in more than 200 screen roles, in a nearly 50 year career. He was known for his resourceful...

     as Topage
  • Wally Campo as First Mate Turner
  • Ken Terrell
    Ken Terrell
    Ken Terrell was an American western and action film actor and stuntman best known for playing Joe Marcella in the 1956 film The Indestructible Man. He died March 8, 1966 from arteriosclerosis-Partial filmography:...

    as Crewman Shanks
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