FASTEN your seat belts, fellows. Get those space helmets clamped to your heads and hang on tight, because we're taking off this morning on a wonderful trip to outer space. We are guiding you to "Forbidden Planet," which is appropriately at the Globe. And we suggest you extend an invitation to Mom and Dad to go along.

For this fanciful interstellar planet, which has been dreamed up at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and put on the screen in Eastman color and properly spacious CinemaScope, is the gaudiest layout of gadgets this side of a Florida hotel. It offers some of the most amusing creatures conceived since the Keystone cops.

Best of the lot is Robby, a phenomenal mechanical man who can do more things in his small body than a roomful of business machines. He can make dresses, brew bourbon whisky, perform feats of Herculean strength and speak 187 languages, which emerged through a neon-lighted grille. What's more, he has the cultivated manner of a gentleman's gentleman. He is the prettiest piece of mechanism on Planet Altaire.

You will note we said "piece of mechanism." The prettiest thing there, by far, is Anne Francis—also known as Altaira—the daughter of Dr. Morbius. He is the lone American scientist who has survived from a previous trip that was made to this distant planet twenty years before. And it is he and his beautiful daughter—who, we might add, has never been kissed—that intrigue and confound the handsome space-men that descend in their flying saucer to see what's what.

Take it from us, they see plenty—and so, we promise, will you, if you'll take our advice and fetch the family, from 8 to 80, to the Globe. You'll see the dry and ragged face of a worn-out planet, looking for all the (modern) world like some of those handsome illustrations in the slick-paper picture magazines. You'll see the vast subterranean powerhouses built by the superhuman Krells who inhabited this far-off planet 2,000 centuries before earth-man was born. And you'll see—or, rather, you won't see—the fearful monster created by the Id, which (according to Dr. Morbius) is the evil impulse of the subconscious mind.

You won't, see him because he is invisible, but when he gets caught in the electronic grid that the fellows put around their flying saucer and he glows a fiery red, you'll get a vague idea of his giant proportions. And, brother, will you hear him roar!

Don't ask us who deserves top credit for the creation of this film—whether it be Irving Block and Allen Adler, who wrote the story, or director Fred McLeod Wilcox or screen-playwright Cyril Hume. The people who built the vast arrangements of queer machinery and multicolored lights that constitute the flying saucer and the fabulous ranch-house of Dr. Morbius did their share.

So did Louis and Bebe Barron, who developed the "tonalities"—the accompaniment of interstellar gulps and burbles—that take the place of a musical score. And so did Walter Pidgeon as Dr. Morbius, the counterpart of the old "mad scientists," and Leslie Nielsen as the captain of the spaceship and Miss Francis and all the crew.

Also, a mention is merited by whoever is inside Robby, the Rover Boyish robot, and whoever speaks his courteous words.

Certainly, every one of them had a barrel of fun with this film. And, if you've got an ounce of taste for crazy humor, you'll have a barrel of fun, too.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D06E1D7103CE03BBC4C53DFB366838D649EDE