by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the disastrous Sergeant Dead Head I wondered whether the proprietor of the Vintage
Sci-Fi screenings, http://sdvsf.org/, had shown
his two movies last night, that one and the 1967 Don Knotts vehicle The
Reluctant Astronaut, in that order to make The
Reluctant Astronaut seem even better than
it is. (He said no: the order was just chronological.) The Reluctant
Astronaut is a better movie than Sergeant
Dead Head, though that’s really damning it
with faint praise. I must say that even when Don Knotts was making these rather
ramshackle rural comedies with himself as the milquetoast lead, I really didn’t
like them much: I had enjoyed Knotts’ lovable incompetence as Andy Griffith’s
sidekick on The Andy Griffith Show
but didn’t — and still don’t — think he was a strong enough personality to carry
a film. The Reluctant Astronaut
opens with Roy Fleming (Don Knotts) in the interior of a spacecraft, receiving
instructions from Mission Control on how to launch himself into space … and
then the camera pulls back (stop me if you’ve heard this before) and we find
that his “spacecraft” is a mockup that’s part of a ride in an amusement park
called “Kiddieland” that looks like they took it over from the “Kiddyland” in
Abbott and Costello’s last film, Dance with Me, Henry (though not only was the spelling different but Dance
with Me, Henry wasn’t a Universal film).
The ride is staffed by Fleming inside and a bored old carnie outside who has to
be cued when to throw the rocks onto the exterior of the prop spacecraft when
Fleming’s narration tells them they’re supposed to be experiencing a “meteorite
shower.” (My understanding is the term “meteor” is the correct one for a rock
hurtling through space and “meteorite” is specifically the word for a fragment
of one that actually lands on Earth.) There’s a somewhat tasteless but still
funny gag when Fleming goes into his spiel to end the ride, saying the ship
will touch down on earth in 20 minutes. One of the girls inside the ride
protests, “I have to go to the bathroom!,” whereupon Fleming says, “We have
just touched down!” It turns out that Fleming still lives with his parents, his
dad Buck Fleming (Arthur O’Connell) and his mom (Jeanette Nolan, who played
Lady Macbeth in Orson Welles’ film of Macbeth — so Sergeant Dead Head isn’t the only one of these two films featuring
someone who once played in the cinematic majors, as frightening as it is to
think that Don Knotts’ mother was Lady Macbeth!), and his dad is still obsessed
with his experience as a combat soldier in World War I 50 years earlier.
Indeed, he’s so obsessed with it
that when his son, who’s supposed to be 35 years old, is at home Buck literally
barks military commands with him, sort of like Captain Von Trapp in The
Sound of Music.
Buck Fleming has also
secretly sent a job application for his son to join the Houston Space Center
(which supposedly plays itself in some scenes) which he thinks will make him an
astronaut, though Roy is so scared of heights he keeps sneaking out of the line
to get on the plane to fly him there and taking the bus instead. (Apparently
this plot gimmick came from a brainstorming session between the film’s writers,
Jim Frizell and Everett Greenbaum, who were trying to figure out what the
unlikeliest job would be for a man who was afraid of heights: they concluded it
would be an astronaut.) When Roy arrives at Houston he finds that he’s been
hired solely as an apprentice janitor, and his big concern is to make sure his
parents don’t find out he’s a lowly menial at the space station instead of a
trainee astronaut. About the only friend he makes in Houston is real astronaut
Major Fred Gifford (Leslie Nielsen in a totally serious role — a lot of people
who only know him from the Police Squad and Airplane! movies
don’t realize he was a straight dramatic actor before he got sidetracked into those
loony comedies, and when he says he’s been in space before, we science-fiction
connoisseurs are likely to think, “Yes, we know — we’ve seen Forbidden
Planet”), who at one point gets him into a
photo with the astronaut crew, which gets printed in the home-town paper in
Springfield, Missouri and leaves Roy’s parents even more convinced that he’s an
astronaut. Roy’s parents and their friends decide to pay a surprise visit to
their son in Houston — and in order to impress them Roy mounts a rocket sled and
runs it down its track, then presses the eject button and flies through space
before his drogue parachute opens and he comes back to earth. Alas, this gets
him fired from the Space Center and leads to a tearful mutual confession scene
in which he admits he was only a janitor there — and his dad admits that in
World War I he served only as a librarian at Fort Dix and never fought in
combat or even left the U.S. It’s the one piece of pathos in an otherwise
amusing but curiously unmoving film.
Then a deus ex machina emerges in the form of a Russian spaceship that is
about to be launched in four days, and is distinguished from other spacecraft
in that it’s flown purely by automation — the guy inside literally has nothing
to do — and therefore they don’t have to hire someone who’s trained as a pilot
or who has any military experience at all. The U.S. has a similar spacecraft,
Eclipse, and in order to fly it they pick, you guessed it, washout janitor Roy
Fleming, for the same reason Lenore Aubert’s character in Abbott and
Costello Meet Frankenstein picked Lou
Costello’s brain to transplant into the Monster because he’d be perfectly
docile and easy to control. So Roy Fleming becomes the first person without any
military experience to be shot in space (Charles liked that the film was not, as Sergeant Dead Head and most comedies about space flight were, about an
innocent person being trapped in
a spacecraft when it lifts off), only he screws things up when he gets ordered
to make himself a snack of crackers and peanut butter in space. Alas, under
zero gravity the crackers go flying all around the ship, the peanut butter
emerges in a long black string that looked too much like shit to me to find the
sequence amusing, and Fleming, bumping into things while weightless (actually
Don Knotts was suspended on wires that are all too visible on screen), knocks
himself into the big reel-to-reel tape deck that contains all the information
the guidance computer needs to fly the ship and guide it safely through
re-entry. He tries to piece the tape back together but does so with peanut
butter and cracker crumbs, rendering it useless. Fortunately, in a nice bit of
writing by Frizell and Greenbaum, Fleming remembers how to guide a spacecraft
through re-entry from the script of his carnival ride simulating it back in
Springfield, and he ends up touching down safely — there’s a nice gag when his
capsule lands, not in the water next to the aircraft carrier that’s supposed to
send out a helicopter to pick it up, but on the deck of the carrier itself —
and he ends up an international hero in the arms of the girl he loves, fellow
carnie Ellie Jackson (Joan Freeman) — only in the final scene, even though he’s
been in space, he’s still so
scared of flying in a terrestrial aircraft he and Ellie sneak out of the line
and end up back on the buses.
The Reluctant Astronaut is a decent movie that suffers, as does Sergeant
Dead Head, from the fact that when it was
made there simply weren’t that many people around who could do great physical comedy. The late 1950’s and early 1960’s were a
golden age for stand-up comedians (or, as they had been called in vaudeville
days, “monologuists”): Steve Allen, Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl, Don Adams, Woody
Allen, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge, Bill Cosby. But, as John
McCabe complained in his biography of Laurel and Hardy in 1962, the demises of
the British music halls and American vaudeville had cut off the training ground
for physical comedy — though eventually slapstick would make a comeback as
people who’d trained in improv, and therefore had had to learn to get laughs
with their bodies as well as their mouths, started to emerge: Robin Williams,
Jim Carrey and a lot of the people who graduated to films from Saturday
Night Live. Alas, that sort of talent simply
didn’t exist in the mid-1960’s (though it’s tempting to imagine how The
Reluctant Astronaut might have played with
the young Woody Allen in the lead, just as it’s interesting to imagine the
basic plot of Sergeant Dead Head
with the young Jerry Lewis, who for all his weaknesses would at least have
brought some energy to it!), and Don Knotts did the best he could with the gags
he got but The Reluctant Astronaut
is pleasant and amusing without being as all-out funny. It was directed by
Edward J. Montagne, who had actually begun as a film noir director and had received industry notice with a
cheap independent production from 1950 called The Tattooed Stranger which RKO picked up for distribution, then landed a
lot of directorial assignments on the noir TV series Man Against Crime
before getting sidetracked into comedy, first as a producer on the McHale’s
Navy TV show and then ending up working on
a lot of Don Knotts vehicles: The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, this one and The Shakiest Gun in the West (Knotts’ remake of the Bob Hope-Jane Russell vehicle
The Paleface). Montagne’s career
represents one of the most frustrating transitions out of serious filmmaking,
which he was surprisingly good at, into comedy, which he wasn’t — one has to go
back to Frank R. Strayer, who abandoned a career as a potentially great
thriller and horror director in 1938 to helm the Blondie series of “B” sitcoms at Columbia, to find a career
change as artistically regrettable even though no doubt both Strayer and
Montagne made reasonably comfortable livings making people chuckle instead of
thrilling or scaring them.
