ID the Movie!

Cafe Society
1

I come to the greatest repository of pop culture trivia minds on the internet - okay, that may be an exaggeration - for help in identifying a movie. Difficulty : I was told about this movie by a friend, and have not seen it myself.

He remembered the title being something like ‘Doors’, and it was a 1970s French film that he believed inspired 1994’s Stargate. There was a technological or mystical set of devices that could be attached to doorways to make them portals to any other doorway with a similar device attached, regardless of distance.

Annnnnny help?

2

Nothing? I am shocked, dismayed and flabbergasted. You guys get most of these in like, twelve seconds.

3

It really does sound familiar, and I spent almost an hour looking through my old sci-fi movies, but came up with nothing. I hope someone has an answer, it sounds interesting.

Could it have possibly been Italian? And do you know where they went when they walked through the portals?

4

Was it perhaps The Terrornauts? That was a 1967 movie involving teleportation. It was a British movie but it was partly set in France.

5

Doesn’t sound like the OP’s description.
The Terrornauts is based on a Murray Leinster novel, The Wailing Asteroid, and had a wonderful but completely misleading poster:

In reality, the movie looked like this:

You can read more than you want to about it here:

That’s my recollection of the film, which I saw a long time ago. It reminds me of a Star Trek the Next Generation script.

6

As I said, it’s a third-hand description, so yes, it could have been Italian. I believe the portals led to other worlds, like in Stargate, but more specific, I don’t have. I can ask the original viewer, though…

7

Nein. He was very specific on the turning-doors-into-portals device.

8

Sounds like a third hand description of Monsters Inc. from someone that has seen it in France.

9

You’re telling me I can read more about it at the link I used in my post?

10

Yep – didn’t click the link in your post.

11

Additional data : I asked the fellow about where the doors led, and he said this :

“French revolution (the past), some desert place (which is where the movie took place mostly I think), some place filled with fire (insert Hell jokes here)”

So they seemed to move through time as well as space.

12

I can’t think of any direct matches. Some points are similar to the 1964 low-rent The Time Travellers – portals to different times, desert, fire (IIRC). But no French Revolution, and it’s not a French movie from 1970

In fact, the only French Time Travel movie from that time frame that Wikipedia lists is La Jetee, which doesn’t match the description at all. Besides, if it had been La Jetee the things that would have stuck in one’s mind would be the weird, organic Time Machine, the fact that it’s in black and white, and the fact that the film is really a string of still images. (The film was the basis for the later film and TV series Twelve Monkeys.)

13

Time Bandits actually has similar elements:

Time travel, obviously, although not through doors (but there is a wardrobe that kicks the time travel part of the story off)

French revolution (the past) - The Napoleonic Wars

Some desert place (which is where the movie took place mostly I think) - Mycenaean Greece

Some place filled with fire (insert Hell jokes here) - the movie ends with a house fire

14

I thought of La Jetee, but no, not it. The movie was in color, I have also confirmed.

And this guy would know Time Bandits. I think. I’m pretty sure.