by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars film screening at Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/) was an
intriguing double bill of two films with the same basic plot, but made 51 years
apart: Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
and The Martian (2015). I’ve
already commented on The Martian
in these pages after Charles and I watched it together on DVD (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-martian-20th-century-fox-tsg.html)
but I’d never seen Robinson Crusoe on Mars and I’d long been curious about it. I first heard of it from Stuart M.
Kaminsky’s book on director Don Siegel, for which he interviewed not only
Siegel but quite a few friends — and one of them was Byron Haskin, who’d worked
with Siegel at Warner Bros. in the late 1930’s (Haskin was director of their
special-effects department while Siegel was in charge of montage, and together
they came up with the incredible scene from the 1939 all-star gangster film The
Roaring Twenties in which, to illustrate
the stock market crash of 1929, ticker-tape machines literally melt on top of
Wall Street), then became a director and specialized in science-fiction films,
including George Pal’s spectacular adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War
of the Worlds (1953) and the immediate
follow-up, Conquest of Space
(1954). Haskin told Kaminsky that he’d made another science-fiction film he
thought was better than The War of the Worlds, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, but the risible title (insisted on by the
distributor, Paramount) had, Haskin felt, driven people away from the box
office instead of attracting them. So I finally got to see Robinson
Crusoe on Mars 35 years after reading its
director’s encomium — and I’m afraid I disagree.
I sometimes say of a film that
fails to realize its potential that there was a better movie in that premise
than the one that actually got made — only in this case the better movie on
that premise actually did get
made, and the proprietor of the Mars movie screenings did Byron Haskin and his
writers, Ib Melchior (the great Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior’s son) and John C. Higgins no
favors by showing The Martian
right after it and letting us see all the things its director, Ridley Scott,
and writers, novelist Andy Weir (who actually wrote it for serial publication
online, and this time around that was very apparent in the number of crises he inserted so he could do the usual
cliffhangers) and adapter/screenwriter Drew Goddard, got right that Haskin,
Melchior Söhn and Higgins got wrong.
Not that Robinson Crusoe on Mars
is a bad movie; it’s just not a great film — and sorry, Byron, I don’t think
it’s better than The War of the Worlds. Robinson Crusoe on Mars
is 110 minutes long — about half an hour longer than the typical science-fiction
film of the time — and I was actually nodding off through much of the first
part as U.S. astronaut Christopher “Kit” Draper (Paul Mantee) gets stranded on
Mars after the ship being commanded by its only other crew member, Col. Dan
McReady (Adam West, two years before his star-making role on the Batman TV series but just as stuffily and self-consciously
“heroic” here), crashes. McReady is killed — though the sheer psychological
weight of Draper’s isolation causes him to have an hallucination that McReady
has returned — and Draper has to figure out ways to survive on the Martian
surface until the year or so it will take for Earth and Mars to be close enough
in space for the next Mars spaceship to launch and send a crew that can rescue
him. The big problems Draper has to solve to survive on Mars are the absence of
oxygen, water, and food. Fortunately, he figures out how to use a combustible
yellow rock he finds on Mars — he explains it contains its own oxygen, like
solid rocket fuel — both for heat and to extract the oxygen so he can breathe.
He also finds a stream of fresh water in which grow an odd sort of native plant
— the only indigenous form of life we see on these writers’ version of Mars —
whose bulbs pop open and reveal a red substance that looks like a miniature hot
dog and which both humans and simians (Draper’s only companion is Mona, who I
assumed was supposed to be a chimpanzee but was identified in the cast list as
“The Woolly Monkey” and who, like Lassie, was cast Transgender: the on-screen monkey
was male even though the animal in the story was supposed to be female) can
consume safely.
Though Byron Haskin fought the studio over the title, the two
stories are close enough (even if only in broad outline) that Draper finds his
Friday and even names him such in honor of Daniel DeFoe’s famous novel — only
Friday is actually a slave from a planet orbiting Ainilam, the middle star of
the three in the “belt” of the constellation Orion. It seems that the people in
charge of this world have sent a work force of slaves to strip-mine Mars, and
once the mine is played out the slaves are simply killed. Friday (Victor Lundin
in the only other significant human role) is an escaped slave who has thick
bracelets on each arm that send back homing signals to his owners. At first
Draper thinks Friday is mute, but eventually he starts speaking in an alien
language (according to imdb.com, Lundin developed his own language for the
character and based it on Mayan) and soon Draper is able to teach him some
basic English and also learn a few of Friday’s own words. Unfortunately, the
aliens who brought Friday and his fellow slaves to Mars send four attack
vehicles (recycled from the Martian spacecraft that flew to Earth in The
War of the Worlds, made by the same
director for the same studio) that home in on Friday’s slave bracelets (which
give a shock to Draper’s arms whenever he tries to remove them) and regularly
bomb where the signals tell them Draper and Friday are. As if that weren’t
enough, Mars is also under attack by meteorites like the one that drove the
U.S. spaceship off course and onto the Martian surface — and in one of the
film’s most spectacular scenes, one such meteorite deposits chips of black ash
all over Our Heroes. (The effects crew coated the actors with honey to get the
flakes to stick to them.) There’s one thing Robinson Crusoe on Mars does quite well: it successfully creates an air of strangeness, convincing us that we’re really on another planet
on which the natural laws of Earth we take for granted simply don’t apply
(though neither this film nor The Martian bothered to do much with the fact that the gravity on Mars is only
about three-fifths what it is on Earth). Death Valley “played” Mars in the
film, and apparently the sky there was so bright that the sky registered white,
not blue, on the Technicolor film being used —which made it easy for
Paramount’s long-time special effects head, Farciot Edouart, to patch in a red sky — though the red sky seemed to have been the
result of some very obvious process work. Indeed, though both Edouart and
former Warners’ effects chief Haskin were involved, the effects in Robinson
Crusoe on Mars were surprisingly lame — the
“spaceship” that transports Draper and McReady to Mars becomes a cartoon every
time it’s obliged to fly, and there are not only some quite obvious process
shots but some clips that are repeated so often you want to say hello to them,
just like in an Ed Wood movie.
Also, the biggest difference plot-wise between Robinson
Crusoe on Mars and The Martian is that Robinson Crusoe on Mars stays on Mars throughout its entire running time.
There aren’t the continual cut-backs between the surviving astronaut on Mars
and the frantic efforts of NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the rest of
America’s scientific infrastructure back on Earth to get him home safely — and
while one could argue that Haskin’s film gains over Scott’s by being more
obsessive over the astronaut’s isolation by not cutting away from him and his struggles, it also
means we get tired of watching
him all alone out there (at least until he encounters Friday) trundling around
the same Death Valley locations that are meant to represent Mars. The two films
also offer an interesting contrast in their lead actors: Paul Mantee is a
considerably darker personality than Matt Damon (and to my mind he’s also
considerably sexier — and both films offer plenty of shirtless views of their
male stars, while The Martian as
a “post-Code” movie shows Damon totally nude, though not alas full-frontal!) and a better actor, but he
really doesn’t have the sort of personal charm Damon was able to use to get us
to like his stranded Mars
protagonist and thereby identify with his struggle. (Gee, a recent movie in
which we feel more of an
emotional connection with the leading character than we did in the one made on
the same premise over a half-century earlier! I guess it had to happen sometime … ) I thought it was a pity Paul Mantee came along
after the film noir cycle had
petered out, since I suspect that would have been the right niche for him if
he’d been about 15 to 20 years older; he’s a darkly romantic “type” who in this
film doesn’t get the chance to play either darkness or romance. I also wondered
why I spent a good deal of Robinson Crusoe on Mars thinking of the Burton Lane-E. Y. Harburg song “How
Are Things in Glocca Morra?” from Finian’s Rainbow — and then I realized it was because the main theme
of Van Cleave’s musical score (his full name was Nathan Van Cleave, but he dropped the first name from his
credit) sounded an awful lot like it!
