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I always think of this title like so - you know how 'Golden Agers' have guilty, childhood pleasures, just based around one aspect of a film- like pirates, dinosaurs or something cool that held your childish attention at the time, even though the movie was no good
Well said! That's a real phenomenon in my life, for sure.
For me, the compelling things about SATURN 3 are the "outer space" setting, production design, and Farrah Fawcett. That's enough to keep me interested.
Per Wikipedia, Roy Dotrice ("Father" on BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, now age 94) was dubbed over Harvey Keitel. I love Dotrice but HATE this particular voice work. And it was a Stanley Donen decision to ditch Keitel's real voice.
I suspect that this film could have been way better had Donen (age 93 now) hired a more appropriate director than himself.
Below is a private review of SATURN 3 I wrote in 2012. I'll just paste in it here:
One line synopsis: a sinister robot builder (Harvey Keitel) intrudes upon the space habitat love-nest of Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett.
The silent main title (white text on a plain blue screen) was a bad choice, too dead, and it must have burned composer Elmer Bernstein. That time should belong to him. And for such a scenic movie, wouldn't you put the opening credits over its visuals, to get the audience into this new world? Maybe the titles were not created in time to artfully super-impose them over pictures and have Bernstein score the sequence. So you end up with this unfinished feeling, like it was rushed to print.
They spent a fortune building a full-service sci-fi playground, but the pieces never came together. Director Stanley Donen's forte was song-and-dance musicals; I think he was out to sea in a cardboard boat on this one. He didn't have a clue how to make this material gel. Many scenes just end awkwardly because the dialog was going nowhere and they didn't know what else to do.
There's not enough human interest. Too few characters with too little to say.
SATURN 3 is one of the many projects that were made not for their own good idea, but to ride the sci-fi wave of that time. Overall I felt it was a missed opportunity. The film is derivative of STAR WARS, ALIEN, SILENT RUNNING, DEMON SEED, and 2001.
All the effort went into the fabulous sets, not the story, and maybe that's not surprising because according to Wiki, set designer John Barry (no relation to the composer) was the father of this project. And being a set designer, he probably looked at those admittedly gorgeous, complicated sci-fi corridors that Farrah was running through and thought, What a great film!
About one minute into the movie, the villain puts on a helmet that seems an exact cross between Darth Vader and the ALIEN exomorph. His pressure suit design, had it been black, would almost be an ALIEN body.
The miniature work is not clever enough. For two different "small ship speeding somewhere" scenes, it looks like they parked a model in front of a rear-screen of speed references whipping by. And the World Spaceways passenger liner at the end looked so fake, they almost could have shown us a Ralph McQuarrie painting and let it go at that. I think the filmmakers loved STAR WARS but badly underestimated how difficult it is to make spaceship fx look good.
They were trying to add human touches, like Farrah having gotten her hair done for the final scene, as a woman will do to cheer herself up, but it didn't gel because not enough humans are in the script to flesh out such character details.
Harvey Keitel was so badly miscast that they threw out his whole vocal performance and dubbed him over with someone else. It was killing me to recall who that familiar voice really belonged to and I had to look it up. It was Roy Dotrice. The biggest speaking part in the film is uncredited! And as with the dubbing of Lazenby's "Sir Hilary Bray" voice in OHMSS, it just comes across wrong. The feel is wrong when a voice doesn't go with a face. It grates on the nerves. It's bad for the movie.
Farrah got top billing over Kirk Douglas himself. That must have been a heady thing for her, but of course the film ended up doing nothing for her career. I love some of the bits and pieces (this sci-fi wave was OUR time), but from a holistic standpoint the film is a train wreck from start to finish. It suffered from what I call the Lord Grade curse; he lost much of his fortune on misfires like SATURN 3 and RAISE THE TITANIC.
Still, I'm glad to have this one under my belt. I wanted to see the fx, hear the music, check out Farrah (SAT-3's one shining light, so human, so vulnerable, plus you can see her boobs), and so on. It's just not respectable for sci-fi fans of our vintage to be walking around not having seen this crap.
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