by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The features at last night’s Mars movie screening were two
cheapies from the early 1950’s, Flight to Mars from Monogram and Red Planet Mars from a company I read off the opening credits as “Hillary Productions,
Inc.” but which is listed on the film’s imdb.com page as “Malaby Pictures
Corp.,” releasing through United Artists. Both were clearly part of the cycle
of space-travel films kicked off by George Pal’s production of Destination
Moon in 1950 — it was a huge hit (Pal
produced it for the small Eagle-Lion company, formerly PRC, after his usual
studio, Paramount, turned it down; after its success Paramount re-signed him
and gave him Philip Wylie’s When Worlds Collide, which they’d originally bought for Cecil B. DeMille
in 1932, as his next project) and sparked a number of other studios to rush out
films about space travel. One was a stone ripoff called Rocketship
X-M — based on a story by Kurt Neumann
about a trip to Mars, hurriedly rewritten so it took place on the moon, then re-rewritten when Pal and Eagle-Lion threatened to sue
anyone else who did a moon-flight film, so Neumann returned to his original
story idea and had his astronauts head for the moon but get diverted to Mars.
Neumann was working for a studio even chintzier than Eagle-Lion — Lippert, which
was mostly a reissue label and foreign-film distributor — but they got their
movie into theatres three weeks before Destination Moon and claimed in their ads that theirs was the first
film featuring space travel (which it wasn’t). So the “suits” at Monogram
green-lighted their in-house talent, including director Lesley Selander (who
divided his time between Monogram and Republic and did mostly “B” Westerns for
both), writer Arthur Strawn and a semi-name and no-name cast including
Marguerite Chapman (top-billed even though, like Bette Davis in Bureau
of Missing Persons, the film is already
half an hour old before her character appears), Cameron Mitchell, John Litel
and Morris Ankrum. (Litel’s presence puts everyone else in the cast one degree
of separation from Humphrey Bogart and Ronald Reagan.)
Monogram also put enough
money into the production to shoot it in color — Cinecolor instead of
Technicolor (Destination Moon had
been in color but Rocketship X-M
was in black-and-white) but still welcome — and for the first half-hour or so
it’s a pretty straightforward portrayal of the first manned expedition to Mars.
One novelty is that one of the lead astronauts is a reporter, Steve Abbott
(Cameron Mitchell), who’s there to broadcast live coverage of the flight, first
via radio and then, once the ship is so far from earth it is no longer in radio
contact, via “space cylinders,” which are basically miniature rockets launched
from torpedo tubes that have homing signals that will guide them back to Earth.
The other four astronauts are the mission’s captain, Dr. Jim Barker (Arthur
Franz); Carol Stafford (Virginia Huston), whom Barker took along because she’s
such a great rocket scientist and designed many of the ship’s controls but
who’s also in decidedly unrequited love with Barker; and older scientists Dr.
Lane (John Litel) and Professor Jackson (Richard Gaines), the latter of whom is
the obligatory skeptical grump who declaims about how they’re likely to fail
and die, and even if they reach Mars and get back the results are probably not going to be happy. On the way
nothing much happens except that Steve Abbott finds himself falling for Carol
Stafford (well, with a woman and two young guys aboard a romantic triangle was bound to manifest itself) and Carol has to deliver a lot
of sexist chatter about how she really wants a husband and family instead of a career. The ship also runs
into a couple of meteor showers — shown as red dots that look so much like they
were drawn directly onto film one wonders if Norman McLaren was doing
uncredited special-effects work on the film (the credited effects person was
Jack Cosgrove and imdb.com lists Irving Block and Jack Rabin as well). They
escape the first one unscathed but the second one forces them into some
maneuvers to avoid it, and between that and the previous mysterious
disappearance of some of their fuel they find themselves far off course and
realize that they can land on Mars if they still want to, but it’ll be
touch-and-go whether they’ll have enough fuel to get back. This becomes even
more problematic when the ship crash-lands in the middle of a Martian mountain
range, but its impact triggers an avalanche that buries most of the spacecraft.
When they get out they find themselves greeted by an honor guard from Mars — in
this version Martians look just like Terran humans except they’re wearing
spacesuits (neon-bright colored leftovers from Destination Moon; this film also cribbed the interior set of the
spaceship from Rocketship X-M)
because the surface of Mars is as toxic for Martians as it is for humans. No
problem: the Martians have simply moved themselves underground and developed
extensive technologies, including hydroponic farming, from a seemingly
inexhaustible energy source called “corium.” The Martians — including Ikron
(Morris Ankrum), leader of the Martian Council that governs the place — offer
the Earthlings everything they need to rebuild their ship and return home,
including a supply of corium to replace the ship’s depleted atomic fuel. Only
director Selander then cuts to a meeting of the Martian Council and shows us
that this is a trap: Mars has tried to develop an interplanetary spacecraft of
its own but has failed, so Ikron proposes to let the Earthlings repair their
ship, give them all the time and resources they need to do that, only just when
the ship is about to take off from earth, the Martians will kill the
Earthlings, take over the ship, figure out how it’s constructed and build
enough of a fleet of them they will be able to conquer Earth and take it over. The
reason they want to do this is they’re running out of corium, and without that
key energy source their ability to support themselves on Mars will end — so
they want our planet to colonize and our own atomic-energy resources to replace
the soon-to-be-depleted corium. Though not as blatant in its Cold War
propagandism as Red Planet Mars,
this plot line certainly smacks of anti-Communist hysteria, ridiculing the very
idea of “peaceful coexistence” and reinforcing the ruling ideology in the U.S.
at that time that all movements
advocating world peace were simply fronts for those evil Commies in their
attempts to get us to disarm so they could take over without a fight. There is a decent Martian on the Council, though: Tillamar
(Robert Barrat, considerably heftier and more avuncular than he was in his days
as a stock villain at Warner Bros. in the early 1930’s and rather surprisingly
cast as a good guy here), who wants Mars and Earth to — dare I say it? —
peacefully coexist.
Tillamar’s daughter Alida (Marguerite Chapman) — whose name
can’t help but evoke memories of the pioneering Mars movie from the Soviet
Union in 1924, Aelita: Queen of Mars
(indeed, one imdb.com reviewer who apparently actually read Alexei Tolstoy’s
source novel for Aelita instead
of just watching the film, in which the entire Mars sequence is merely a dream
of the central character, said Flight to Mars is actually a closer adaptation of the “other”
Tolstoy’s novel than Aelita) gets
assigned to help the Earthlings repair their rocket, and in the process she
falls for Dr. Barker and he for her, sending Carol Stafford into some
hissy-fits of what-has-she-got-that-I-don’t jealousy until she ends up seeking
solace in the arms of Steve Abbott. (Maybe if she’d worn a mini-skirt — one of
the weirder conceits of this movie is that the two Martian women it depicts
both have daringly short outfits that make it look like the Martians invented
the mini-skirt 15 years before it became popular on Earth.) Alas, there’s another mini-skirted Martian woman, Terris (Lucille
Barkley), who’s a spy — and Alida overhears her and Ikron plotting and “outs”
them to the Earthlings, telling them they’d better get their spaceship fixed in
a hurry and fly back home before their Martian hosts kill them. They manage
this — though there’s a preposterous scene in which we’re supposed to believe
Steve and Barker defeat an entire Martian army unit just by themselves — and
they take Alida and Tillamar with them; Tillamar apparently thinks that from
Earth he can mobilize a Martian resistance to Ikron’s rule, gain control of the
council and make mutual trade deals with Earth instead of conquering it. (The
new TPP — Trans-Planetary Partnership.) Flight to Mars isn’t much of a movie, and for someone who
specialized in “B” Westerns Selander’s staging of the action scenes (not that
screenwriter Strawn gave him that many of them!) is surprisingly lame, but it’s
decent, inoffensive entertainment, made at an acceptable level of
professionalism (which hadn’t always been true of Monogram in the 1940’s!) and
O.K. for its time and place.
