by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie screening (http://marsmovieguide.com/) was a
marathon: all 4 ½ hours of a three-part mini-series based on Ray Bradbury’s
1950’s science-fiction classic The Martian Chronicles, produced in Britain by Charles Fries and with some
formidable talent both in front of and behind the cameras. The director was
Michael Anderson, whose résumé includes Around the World in 80 Days, the 1956 version of George Orwell’s 1984, The Shoes of the Fisherman (which I remember seeing on its initial release and
I regard as an underrated film), and The Naked Edge (Gary Cooper’s last movie, made shortly before his
death in 1961). The writer was Richard Matheson, who while hardly in Bradbury’s
league was a capable science-fiction writer in his own right, best known for
his short-story collection Third from the Sun and a lot of the scripts for the original Twilight
Zone. The cast included Rock Hudson as Col.
John Wilder, head of NASA and an astronaut on the fourth manned mission to Mars
(though in the movie it’s the third and Matheson’s script omitted one of
Bradbury’s most chilling tales: Earth astronauts land on Mars and try to
explain who they are and where they’ve come from, and the Martians think
they’re crazy and put them in a mental institution), who’s inflated into a
continuing character and used to tie together the various stories of Bradbury’s
book.
Both Charles and I were somewhat nonplussed by the description of the
story source in the credits as “a novel by Ray Bradbury,” since the book is
actually a thematically but not narratively connected collection of short
stories, some of which were actually published as stand-alones in Street and
Smith pulp magazines. (This is how they turned up adapted as radio scripts in
the Dimension X and X
Minus One radio shows in the early 1950’s:
Street and Smith co-produced these shows and as part of the deal they gave the
shows the rights to adapt any
short story they’d published in their sci-fi pulps.) The Martian
Chronicles was filmed in 1979 and
originally scheduled for airing as a big “event” on NBC — it was two years
after the mega-success of Roots
and the networks were looking for big, prestigious projects that could be
stripped as week-long “events” — but though 1979 is the copyright date it
wasn’t publicly shown until 1980. Part of the reason was that Bradbury went
public with his dissatisfactions with the script, and though the first third of
the program, “The Expeditions,” is a reasonably close adaptation of three of
the original stories, the rest of it veers into a freely associated version of
events in which Bradbury’s stories are stuck like raisins in a cake. (The two
other episodes are called “The Settlers” and “The Martians.”) The plot starts
in 1976, when the real-life Voyager probe first lands on Mars (ironically,
Bradbury’s book had assumed that Mars had a sufficiently temperate climate and
enough oxygen in the air to sustain human life without the humans having to
wear spacesuits, and it was the Voyager and subsequent probes that showed us
that Mars isn’t like that at all: it’s bitterly cold and most of their
atmosphere is carbon dioxide), and then cuts to 1999 for the launching of Zeus,
the first manned mission to Mars.
They encounter a bored middle-aged Martian
couple (called Yll and Ylla in the book) whose female member has had erotic
dreams about Earthlings — despite her husband’s insistence that Martian science
has conclusively proved that there is no life on Earth — and so when some
real-life Earthers actually land on the planet, Yll freaks out and kills them
out of jealousy. (Martians au naturel look pretty much like us except their heads are rounder, more
egg-shaped and lack exterior ears, which makes one wonder how they can hear
each other when they speak. Perhaps they communicate via telepathy, but if
that’s what we were supposed to think the actors playing Martians made the
mistake of moving their lips when they speak: if you wanted to suggest people
who communicate silently they should have had the actors’ lips stay closed and
either pre- or post-recorded the dialogue.) The second expedition encounters
uncannily exact replicas of the home towns on Earth where they grew up — this
episode, called “Mars Is Heaven,” is probably the most famous part of The
Martian Chronicles and the most often
adapted as a stand-alone (including an episode of the later half-hour Ray
Bradbury Presents TV series which I recall
as a considerably more sensitive and effective adaptation than the one here —
in fact, several of the chapters in The Martian Chronicles were adapted for Ray Bradbury Presents and those shows, though with much lower budgets than
this one, seemed better written, staged and acted than this movie) — and, like
the sentient ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, the Earth environments and the long-dead replicas
of the astronauts’ dead relatives have been created by the Martians as
illusions. The idea is that, since Mars can’t repel an Earth invasion with
their weapons — they’ve lived at peace with each other for so long that they’ve
pretty much abandoned the techniques of killing each other (though in later
episodes the Martians do have ray
guns) — the only way they can fight back is through their telepathic mental
powers, using them to create illusions that will lead the Earth people to
abandon their mission and hang out with their dead relatives (actually Martians
shape-shifting to impersonate them) so the Martians can poison them and
hopefully discourage any future expeditions.
The next Earth expedition to Mars
is led by Col. Wilder personally and includes a scientist named Jeff Spencer
(Bernie Casey) — I noted the irony that, after having watched O. J. Simpson in Capricorn
One at the previous month’s screening, this
was the second time we were seeing a show with a professional football player
that had adopted an acting career (though Bernie Casey is a far, far better actor than Simpson ever was and, indeed,
turns in what I thought was the finest performance in the film!). It also puts
an interesting “spin” on the tale to make the character who goes crazy, “goes
native” and starts slaughtering his fellow astronauts to protect the Martian
heritage from human destruction Black! The gimmick here is that between
expeditions two and three the Martians have been exterminated because one of
the astronauts on a previous trip had had chicken pox, and the chicken
pox/shingles virus had escaped and wreaked havoc on the Martians because their
immune system had no defense against it — an interesting “tweak” by Bradbury of
the ending of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The second part of the Martian Chronicles TV series, called “The Settlers,” shows that
Spencer’s prediction that humans would come to Mars en masse and wreck it (the way we’ve wrecked our own planet)
has come true: Mars has become a huge boom town, with all the sleazy
enterprises familiar to us from movies about gold rushes and an equally
unscrupulous group of people pursuing get-rich-quick schemes to tap the mineral
resources of the Red Planet. This part of the movie ends with news of an
imminent nuclear war back on Earth, and virtually the entire Martian colony is
evacuated just in time to be annihilated back home as nuclear weapons on both
sides turn Earth into a lifeless husk. (Just why all the Earth settlers on Mars went home to
virtually certain destruction was a weak point in Bradbury’s book and is even
less well explained in the film.)
The third show, “The Martians,” deals with
the stragglers left on Mars, and one of Bradbury’s tales is dramatized as a
frustrated seduction story with Bernadette Peters as the ultimate cock-tease
(once again this one was better done on the Ray Bradbury Presents TV show than it is here) while the payoff is
probably the part of the show that infuriated Bradbury most: Rock Hudson, his
wife (Gayle Hunnicutt) and their two kids realize they’re essentially the Adam,
Eve and offspring of this tale, and they’ll have to rebuild the human race on
Mars. As part of the break with their old life, Hudson burns all the books and
briefing papers on the expeditions that got humans to Mars in the first place —
and I can’t imagine that the author of Fahrenheit 451 looked kindly on an ostensible adaptation of one of
his other books that ends with a book-burning sequence of which we’re clearly
supposed to approve. One of the
charms of the book The Martian Chronicles is the sheer elegiac beauty of Bradbury’s prose (like F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Bradbury at his best was a writer who beautifully blurred the
distinction between prose and poetry) and its ironic contrast with the story’s
nature as a tale in which the populations and civilizations of two planets are utterly destroyed. That gets lost in the
sappy ending Matheson and Anderson concocted. The film’s cast is O.K., though
Rock Hudson isn’t really an authoritative enough character to bear the dramatic
weight of the story, and when the narrator early on in the film speculates that
for centuries humans have asked, “Is there life on Mars?,” we get the
unfortunate impression that Hudson was probably asking himself, “Are there Gay
bars on Mars?”
