I’ve screwed up my sleep schedule royally of later, this time staying up so I could record the 1955 movie Conquest of Space from the Sci-Fi Channel. It’s the fourth and last of George Pal’s cycle of science-fiction movies in the early 1950’s (following Destination Moon in 1950, When Worlds Collide in 1951 and The War of the Worlds in 1953) — and also by far the least of them in terms of quality. Based on a book by “astronomical artist” Chesley Bonestell and expatriate German rocket scientist Willy Ley (who had been one of the technical advisers on the very first major feature on space travel, Fritz Lang’s 1928 Woman in the Moon), Conquest of Space is gorgeous to look at — Paramount was still using three-strip Technicolor while other studios were abandoning it for cheaper but far inferior in-house processes, and Bonestell’s vivid matte paintings and designs (an art director is credited but it’s clear Bonestell was primarily responsible for the look of this film) give it a beautiful sheen even though there are some bizarre boners in his work (for example, it never occurred to him that a view from the Earth from outer space would show it mostly covered by clouds — which made the first actual photos of Earth from space highly disappointing to me when I saw them because they didn’t look like Bonestell’s paintings!). Alas, it’s really a terrible movie; without the work of a major novelist to draw on (as they’d had with Heinlein in Destination Moon, Wylie in When Worlds Collide and Wells in The War of the Worlds), Pal and his writers fell back on every tired old cliché from World War II movies, from the arrogant commanding officer who dragoons his son into his special operation to the ethnically mixed (all white[1] but from different Euro-American nationalities) crew, to animate this space opus. Add to that a no-name cast (the only actor whose name I recognized was Eric Fleming, who starred in the TV series Rawhide — his sidekick was the then-unknown Clint Eastwood) and what you ended up with was a movie that was technically impeccable and visually beautiful, but dramatically deserved to be on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. — 9/18/97
•••••
Last night’s Mars movie screening at Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/) featured a short
about three astronauts who are sent on the first [hu]manned spaceflight to Mars
but who crash-land and die from lack of oxygen; an episode of My Favorite
Martian that was probably the funniest I’ve
seen (it’s called “Rx for Martin” and deals with the Martian, played by Ray
Walston, falling down stairs, spraining his ankle, ending up in the hospital
and confounding the doctors since a Martian’s vital signs are so different from
an Earthling’s); a rerun of a film shown on the proprietor’s “Vintage Sci-Fi”
program two years earlier called World Without End which he wanted to re-screen because he’d previously
shown it from an old VHS tape with washed-out color and no attempt to letterbox
or pan-and-scan the image (instead the people doing the tape just put up what
was in the middle of the screen, which led to a lot of half-people on either
side) and now there’s a letterboxed DVD with a beautiful transfer that does
justice to the rich, vibrant color scheme of the film (for my previous comments
on World Without End see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/09/world-without-end-allied-artists-1956.html);
and the co-feature, a film from George Pal’s sci-fi unit at Paramount called Conquest
of Space. The Conquest of Space (the book
uses the definite article; the film title does not) began life as a series of
spectacular paintings of astronomical vistas by artist Chesley Bonestell, who
in the 1940’s and 1950’s became known as the mainstream media’s go-to guy for
what the rest of the solar system was likely to look like. My stepfather had a
copy and I recall it as a large-format “coffee-table” book dominated by
Bonestell’s glorious paintings with brief bits of explanatory non-fiction text
by Willy Ley, who’d been one of the German rocket scientists under the Weimar
Republic and later under the Nazis; he was an uncredited technical advisor on
Fritz Lang’s 1928 film Woman on the Moon and, like credited
technical advisor Dr. Hermann Oberth, was recruited by the U.S. after the war
to work on our rocket program.
George Pal was a Hungarian-born puppeteer who drifted into filmmaking after his
original choice for a career, architecture, dried up during the Depression. In
the early 1930’s he’d risen to be the head of the cartoon department at
Berlin’s UFA Studios until the Nazi takeover forced him to flee, first to
Prague and then to Eindhoven, The Netherlands, where he and his wife developed
a series of stop-motion films using animated puppets. Paramount signed Pal to a
producer’s contract and gave him a unit and the necessary equipment to produce
what they called “Puppetoons,” one-reel shorts with animated puppets — the only
one I’ve seen was The Perfume Suite
from 1947, which featured Duke Ellington in live action interacting with a
bunch of animated perfume bottles as Ellington and his orchestra played the
first three movements of the suite that gave the film its title. In 1950 Pal
wanted to branch out into features, so he bought the rights to several stories
Robert A. Heinlein had written about humans’ first trip to the moon (which
Heinlein, a Right-wing Libertarian politically, had envisioned being financed
by private entrepreneurs because the government wouldn’t have the vision to
fund it publicly) and developed them into a script, with Heinlein as one of the
credited screenwriters as well, called Destination Moon. Paramount’s executives turned the project down
because they didn’t think a film about travel to the moon would have an
audience, so Pal took it to the independent Eagle-Lion company (formerly PRC)
and made it there. It was an enormous hit, and by chance the theatre Eagle-Lion
booked it into in New York was two blocks up from Paramount’s office building,
so all the “suits” at Paramount got to watch the long lines of people waiting to pay to see the
film they had turned down.
They got the message and re-signed Pal to make more
science-fiction films for them, and for his next project they gave him the
rights to Philip Wylie’s 1932 novel When Worlds Collide, which they’d bought for Cecil B. DeMille but then
canceled because they didn’t think there’d be enough of an audience for a
science-fiction subject. When Worlds Collide was a hit and Pal’s next science-fiction film, a
1953 adaptation of H. G. Wells’ classic novel The War of the Worlds (ironically another project Paramount had bought decades earlier for
DeMille!), was an even bigger hit. So in 1954 Pal and Byron Haskin, his
director on The War of the Worlds,
re-teamed for a film ostensibly based on the Bonestell-Ley book The
Conquest of Space but actually a screen
original by a writing committee. The film credits three writers with
“adaptation” — Philip Yordan, Barré Lyndon and George Worthing Yates — and
James O’Hanlon for the final script. What they did was basically shoehorn the
multi-ethnic military unit that had been de rigueur in films made about and during World War II and
stick them on a mission to space. The film begins on “The Wheel,” the giant
space station designed and built by Col. Samuel T. Merritt (Walter Brooke) as a
jumping-off point for a trip to the moon. A peculiar-looking spaceship is being
built in space next to “The Wheel” by construction crews based there — like
Arthur C. Clarke on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gene Roddenberry on the original Star Trek, the authors of Conquest of Space had posited that the spaceship would actually be
built in space so it could fly to
wherever it was going without having to contend with passing through earth’s
atmosphere or escaping its gravity. The initial conflict of the film is set up
between Col. Merritt and his son, Captain Barney Merritt (Eric Fleming, one of
the great might-have-beens in cinema history; in the early 1960’s he did a TV
series about cattle drives called Rawhide and got offered the lead in an early “spaghetti Western” called
A Fistful of Dollars, only he turned it
down and the producers instead went with the actor who’d played Fleming’s
sidekick, “Pardner,” on Rawhide,
a man named Clint Eastwood of whom you’ve no doubt heard since).
Though
participation in the space service was supposed to be strictly voluntary, Col.
Merritt signed his son up for him without asking him first, and Capt. Merritt
has asked for a transfer to Muroc Air Force Base (itself a legendary name in
the early space program, as anyone who’s read Tom Wolfe’s book The
Right Stuff or seen the film based on it
will know; it was out in the California desert and was later renamed Edwards,
and it was where Chuck Yeager first set off on the flight that would break the
sound barrier and most of the other experimental X-plane flights took off from
there as well) — only everything changes when the Merritts receive sealed
orders that their spacecraft is not
going to go to the moon after all, but to Mars. (There’s a neat bit of
exposition before the “reveal” in which one of the Merritts asks why the ship
has been equipped with wings, which wouldn’t be needed for flight over the
airless moon but would be helpful
if the ship went somewhere that has an atmosphere.) The Merritts assume command
of a crew that includes Sgt. Imoto (Benson Fong — nearly a decade after World
War II ended they were still
casting Japanese characters with Chinese actors!), André Fodor (Ross Martin, in
his first film) and Jackie “Brooklyn” Siegle (Phil Foster), along with Sgt.
Mahoney (Mickey Shaughnessy), a long-time friend and aide to General Merritt
(his promotion from Colonel was contained in those sealed orders) whose
relationship to him is depicted in surprisingly homoerotic terms for a 1954
movie. (That’s the copyright date, though imdb.com dates it as 1955.) The trip
to Mars goes reasonably well until an antenna on the spacecraft jams, cutting
them off from radio contract with mission control on “The Wheel,” and during
the extra-vehicular activity needed to repair it Fodor is lost in space and
dies. This sends General Merritt bonkers; from a hard-nosed but relatively
rational scientist he suddenly turns into a religious lunatic, raving about the
Bible and how nothing in it gives man permission to explore space, and
ultimately trying to sabotage the project by blowing up the ship once it
reaches Mars. (The fact that the villain is motivated by religious fanaticism
makes this unusual for a 1950’s sci-fi films; usually the religious people were
the good guys and the scientists the bad guys, as in The Thing, The
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and all those
other movies in which the scientists give up their lives in a desperate,
foredoomed attempt to reason with the monster. This reflects the same
institutional religiosity of the period that defined our Cold War enemy as not
just “Communism” but “Godless
Communism,” and in which the words “under God” were stuck into the Pledge of
Allegiance and “In God We Trust” was put on our money.)
So Captain Merritt has
to shoot and kill his own father to save the ship and the rest of the crew, and
Sgt. Mahoney goes ballistic with anger and hurt, threatening to report the
younger Merritt and get him court-martialed for killing the older one. But
thanks to the older Merritt’s sabotage attempt, the crew has virtually no water
to sustain them for the months they will have to remain on Mars until it and
Earth are once again close enough in their orbits for the crew to return home —
until they’re saved when an unexpected snowfall on Mars proves that the Red
Planet has water after all. There
are some weird bits in Conquest of Space — like the sudden cut from the science-fiction stuff to a big
musical production number with an Arabian Nights theme, featuring Rosemary
Clooney as a singing, dancing harem girl, that turns out to be a film screening
on board the “Wheel” (the film is the 1953 Paramount production Here
Comes the Girls) — but mostly it’s pretty
straightforward 1950’s sci-fi. The character conflicts may be pretty simple,
but just the fact that there are
any makes this an unusual movie for the time. One odd and less positive aspect
of Conquest of Space is that
there are surprisingly few special-effects shots, and the ones there are don’t
seem all that interesting: despite some quite illustrious names in the
technical credits (the cinematographer is Lionel Lindon from the original King
Kong and the head of the effects crew is
John P. Fulton, the man who figured out how to make Claude Rains invisible),
there are a few process shots with tell-tale black lines around the forward
images, a sure sign of sloppy process work. Still, I was quite impressed by Conquest
of Space: I’d seen it before on American
Movie Classics back when that was still a movie channel, but this time around
it came off considerably better, generally well produced and with a level of
characterization in its people that, while not especially sophisticated,
certainly set this above a lot of science-fiction films of its time. — 11/18/17
