Does anyone still follow the hocus pocus about the Bermuda Triangle? Maybe you do, or maybe it’s all Greek (or Atlantean) to you, but you’ll gain a little insight and a lot of nonsense on this far-reaching phenomenon in Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray of a 1979 “documentary”. As a concept, the alleged triangular stretch of ocean between Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico is a vortex that, like a black hole, pulls a vast array of paranormal tropes into its maw. As a film directed by Richard Friedenberg, The Bermuda Triangle is a revealing intersection of pseudo-science and independent cinema.
Opening with the kind of impressive production values that will be shown throughout, The Bermuda Triangle presents a handsomely decorated ship sailing the ocean blue. Christopher Columbus is aboard in 1492, so we must presume it’s the Santa Maria. His sailors call him on deck to witness strange post-production blips of light glowing and whooshing across the sky. Thus, the spooky reputation of the Bermuda Triangle, or at least the capacity to ballyhoo hogwash, is presented as part of America’s foundational mythology.
Then we’re greeted by the highly familiar voice and less familiar face of Brad Crandall, whose narration was ubiquitous in commercials and documentaries throughout the 1960s and ’70s. He’s a portly, bearded, avuncular figure, less extreme than Orson Welles or Sebastian Cabot, who presents himself in a study showing off lots of books or spinning a blue globe.
Crandall materializes in many contexts throughout The Bermuda Triangle, walking along ships’ corridors or by hotel swimming pools, always nattily dressed, and grumbling baritone questions at us like, “Did such a fantastic project as the Philadelphia Experiment ever really take place? We don’t know for sure, but to date, at least a dozen books have been written about it.” So there!
Just as you’re shaking your head, he elaborates: “The key question is this: Did the government have a top secret project involving the [USS] Eldridge and an application of Einstein’s unified field theory?” He then reminds us we live in an “era of vigorous investigative reporting as demonstrated by such exposés as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate”. By citing government cover-ups all over the 1970s news, he makes viewers consider time-traveling battleships because, after all, you can’t trust the government, so maybe there was an experiment that resulted in sailors lost in time. As Crandall puts it, “Only the lucky ones went mad.”
The Bermuda Triangle was the first film to play with an idea that would become the subject of its own films invented out of whole cloth, Don Taylor’s The Final Countdown (1980), in which an all-star cast aboard the USS Nimitz travels through time, and Stewart Raffill’s The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), which takes off directly from the USS Eldridge conspiracy theory. Indeed, The Bermuda Triangle is an encyclopedia, a smorgasbord, a broom closet of themes from all over its era’s pop culture.
Here’s how Crandall summarizes all we’ve seen: “Whatever our differences as nations, we are all one family of man and this planet Earth is our home. We can all unite to solve the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. Has some highly intelligent aquatic race found its way up from the depths of the ocean? Is the Triangle a base of sorts for aliens from outer space? Is lost Atlantis below these waters, and just who or what is collecting human specimens? Blue energy, time warps, or a window into another dimension?
Together, the nations of the world must find the answers before it’s too late. Our very survival may well depend on knowing what’s going on here in the Bermuda Triangle.”
You pays your money and you takes your choice, but whatever the explanation to all the largely fabricated mysteries in The Bermuda Triangle, here’s a plea for the world to come together for survival. This, too, is an eternal message in pop culture.
Charles Berlitz goes to Bermuda
Ehy all this heavy breathing about the Bermuda Triangle? For that, we must consult Charles Berlitz. The name is forgotten today, except perhaps as a scion of the Berlitz language schools. He used his fortune to become a writer on parapsychology, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories. He was especially interested in Atlantis, which he located beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
Berlitz published his bestselling book, The Bermuda Triangle, in 1974. He claimed that hundreds of boats and planes disappeared there, or at least that wacky stuff happens, and this touched-off tidal waves in pop culture.
To some extent, Berlitz was jumping on the bandwagon started by Erich von Däniken’s 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods? Harald Reinl adapted that book into a hit 1970 documentary, which received an Oscar nomination. For American TV, producer Alan Landsburg modified the feature into the one-hour In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973), narrated by Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone (1959-64). Landsburg later rode that paranormal pony into an extremely popular syndicated series, In Search of… (1976-82), hosted by Leonard Nimoy in place of the late Serling.
In direct response to Berlitz’s book, 1975 brought two TV movies: Sutton Roley’s Satan’s Triangle, starring Kim Novak, and William A. Graham’s Beyond the Bermuda Triangle, starring Fred MacMurray. These were only the tip of the iceberg. Rene Cardona Jr. directed a feature film called The Bermuda Triangle in 1978, starring the illustrious filmmaker John Huston as a patriarch whose family comes to grief.
Some of us recall an intriguing, short-lived TV series, The Fantastic Journey (1977), in which voyagers get shipwrecked on an island in the Bermuda Triangle that hosts multiple realities. They spend the episodes traveling from one civilization to another after blipping through invisible barriers. Creator Bruce Lansbury was a major producer of TV sci-fi adventures ranging from The Wild Wild West (1965-69) to Wonder Woman (1976-79), which locates the Amazons’ Paradise Island in the Bermuda Triangle.
We’d be remiss not to mention other short-lived series of the amazing ’70s. The Man from Atlantis (1977-78) starred a shirtless Patrick Duffy showing off webbed digits. Jack Webb’s Project U.F.O. (1978-79) was a sober drama inspired by the files of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. Darren McGavin starred in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75) as a journalist investigating occult shenanigans. He’d later star in James Conway’s Sunn Valley film Hangar 18 (1980), about military UFO conspiracies, and all this would be absorbed by young Chris Carter for flowering into his series The X-Files (1993-2002), on which McGavin had a recurring role.
Another impetus for all these projects was a wave of real-life UFO sightings that dominated the news in 1974, making the largest such phenomenon in US pop culture since a similar wave in 1947 led to many 1950s sci-fi movies and other media incarnations of flying saucers. Please note that Berlitz’s Bermuda tome also came out in 1974 and was more than ready to cash in on UFO speculations. That’s timing.
Berlitz gets a proprietary credit above the title of The Bermuda Triangle, and then the credits tell us it’s based on his book, and then Crandall in his library waves it at us. That’s a lot of product placement. The author’s daughter, Lin Berlitz, even gets a role as a stewardess. Maybe that was in the contract.
Utah’s Sunn Valley Classics and Richard Friedenberg
As producer James L. Conway explains in a commentary track with film writer Howard S. Berger, the Utah-based Sunn Valley Classics purchased the rights to Berlitz’s book. Sunn Valley is one of the great success stories in US indie cinema. Originally called Schick Sunn, as founded by the man who founded the Schick razor company, Sunn Valley went methodically about its business with audience polls to gauge interest in various topics.
They decided the way forward was twofold: G-rated family films with lots of nature and animals, and pseudo-science woo-woo documentaries. They employed the time-honored distribution process known as four-walling, a common practice among producers of exploitative “educational” films who rented a hall for local showings and circumvented censorship restrictions.
Sunn Valley would go region by region, renting space in commercial theatres for a few days or a week. After paying the rental, they kept all ticket sales, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. They would buy local airtime and saturate the airwaves with attention-grabbing commercials telling you the film played at such and such a theatre for so many days, and people attended. Crandall was the voice of these commercials and many Sunn Valley movies. At first, theatre owners had little faith in these Utah oddities, so it seemed a good idea to take a flat rental fee. They soon learned differently.
For Sunn Classics, Richard Friedenberg directed Don Haggerty in two westerns based on real people, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1974), which inspired a 1977-78 TV series of the same name, and The Adventures of Frontier Fremont (1975). These very popular family films were instrumental in putting Sunn on the map and validating its business plan.
Friedenberg went on to receive an Emmy nomination for co-writing the TV film Bitter Harvest (1981), based on contemporary events; win an Emmy for writing the TV movie Promise (1986); and receive an Oscar nomination for writing A River Runs Through It (1992). He wrote and directed the TV film Mr. and Mrs. Loving (1996), based on the same Supreme Court case later filmed by Jeff Nichols as Loving (2016). In other words, he worked on significant, honorable projects.
As his record shows, Friedenberg wasn’t a bad director, and Sunn Valley was his training. In the Bermuda Triangle, he and excellent cinematographer Henning Schellerup showcase the production value provided by a military base in Harlingen, TX, and ships in Galveston. We see plenty of real ships and planes, not models, and the many vignettes are crammed with dozens of actors and extras. A few are familiar character actors who were all over television, such as Harriet White Medin, Thalmus Rasulala, Roxie Roker, and Warren Kemmerling.
Those vignettes ring bells very familiar to ’70s filmgoers from the string of airplane disaster movies and Steven Spielberg’s big-budget hit Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Of course, the glowing post-production-optical UFOs in The Bermuda Triangle don’t come close to that level and may induce modern snickers, but they’re comparable to 1970s TV work. We also see snippets of stock footage here and there, notably clips from George Pal’s Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961).
Producer Conway also directed many Sunn films. Besides the above-named Hangar 18, these include In Search of Noah’s Ark (1976), The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977), Beyond and Back (1978, a “documentary” about life after death), Donner Pass: The Road to Survival (1978 TV film), Greatest Heroes of the Bible (1978-79 TV series), The President Must Die (1981 JFK conspiracy doc), and the all-out horror film The Boogens (1981). He moved into regular TV, including several Star Trek franchises. He was a producer on Charmed (2000-06) and has most recently directed episodes of The Magicians (2016-20), so he’s tended to stay in sci-fi and fantasy.
Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray of The Bermuda Triangle presents a 2017 remaster from a 4K scan, and its colors shine. Theatre-goers in 1979, who saw ragged prints trucked across the country, probably didn’t see it looking this good. As a docudrama or lexicon of folderol, Friedenberg’s mildly amusing film isn’t important in itself so much as a souvenir nexus of all the streams of parapsychology feeding bestselling books, high-profile films and television product of its era, all of which continues to the present day. It’s a reminder of a time when regional ingenuity dominated the box office.