The two films at last night’s Mars movie screening in Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/) were both made in the 1970’s and were products of the conspiracy theorizing fashionable at the time, which seems to have started with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the totally impossible “explanation” that the U.S. government put forth that it was all the work of Lee Harvey Oswald, a lousy shot with a lousier rifle in a sixth-floor window shooting at a motorcade that was moving away from him. Both these films were based on the common assumption of a lot of people back then that the U.S. had never really landed people on the moon — that the whole thing had been faked in a movie studio by professional filmmakers (at least one version of the conspiracy even named the professional filmmakers who had allegedly faked it: Stanley Kubrick and his crew from 2001: A Space Odyssey, working on that film’s leftover sets) and the dastardly conspiracy was just waiting to be unraveled by an intrepid reporter, detective or free-lance do-gooder (or troublemaker, depending on your point of view) with sufficient luck and determination to figure it out and avoid being assassinated himself for his pains. The first one was The Astronaut (a title that surprisingly has only one other listing on imdb.com), a 1972 production of the TV-movie division of Universal (you can tell from the very dull block-lettered design of the credits) directed by Robert Michael Lewis from a script by Charles Kuenstle, Robert Biheller and Gerald Di Pego.
The conceit of this film is that the U.S. actually sent up
superstar astronaut Col. Brice Randolph (Monte Markham, who apparently was in a
lot of made-for-TV movies at the time but whom I remembered only as the star of
the disastrous and short-lived 1970’s attempt to reboot the Perry
Mason TV series) to Mars and he got to the
planet’s surface while his colleague Higgins (James Sikking) stayed in the part
of the spacecraft that merely orbited Mars without landing on it. Only some
toxin in the Martian atmosphere — either biological or chemical, nobody in the
movie (or the people writing it) ever decided — seeped through Randolph’s
spacesuit and killed him. Kurt Anderson (Jackie Cooper, top-billed), the head
of the U.S. space program, fears that revelation that the first human on Mars
died will lead a budget-conscious President and Congress to zero out the whole
space program, so he puts into action a plan he and the real Randolph cooked up
before the flight in case anything went wrong: they would recruit a double,
Eddie Reese (also Monte Markham), to impersonate him and fake a successful
return of the spacecraft to earth from which Reese would return and take over
Randolph’s identity. Reese learns Randolph’s voice and the key elements of his
past via tapes Randolph made for that purpose before he left, and goes through
a high-tech version of plastic surgery to alter his already strong resemblance
to Randolph to virtual identity. The one person he doesn’t fool is Randolph’s
wife, Gail (Susan Clark), who was expecting the real Randolph’s child when he
blasted off; though she can’t tell the difference physically, she realizes the
new “Randolph” is considerably tenderer and more considerate than the old one.
She finally confronts him and the man who’s moved into her life (and her bed,
though the assumption seems to be that that far along in her pregnancy he
wouldn’t be having sex with her) admits that he is not Randolph.
The two find that they are being
essentially held prisoner because the people running the U.S. space program fear
they’ll escape and tell the world the truth — they’re not even allowed to leave
their home, though at one point Reese wangles them a special pass so they can
go to a nightclub and dance (the band at the club advertises “Music of the
’50’s” but the song we actually hear is “I’ll Remember April,” written by Don
Raye and Gene De Paul in 1942 for the Universal Abbott and Costello movie Ride
’Em, Cowboy and similarly used in 1955 as
the song nightclub patrons are dancing to when the Gill-Man turns up in the sequel
Revenge of the Creature), only
they have to flee in a hurry when a patron recognizes Reese as “Randolph” and
he and Gail realize they’re going to blow their cover if they don’t leave
immediately. As the film progresses Eddie and Gail realize they’re falling in
love with each other for real — Eddie is so much nicer and more considerate
than that stuffed-shirt husband of hers who conveniently died on Mars — and
they make plans to run away together even though they’ll do heaven knows what.
(I suspect the writers ripped off this plot line from the 1937 screwball
classic Nothing Sacred, in which
the woman at the center of a newspaper hoax and the reporter who cooked it up
have to hide out from the world forever.) Only a deus ex machina emerges when the Soviet Union (ya remember the Soviet
Union?) launches their own manned mission
to Mars and Kurt Anderson (ya remember Kurt Anderson?) has a crisis of conscience: let the Soviet
cosmonauts land on Mars and get killed by the same whatsit that knocked off the
real Randolph, or admit the truth before the Soviet spacecraft lands and
thereby spare their cosmonauts at
the risk of a major political embarrassment and the possible end of the U.S.
space program? Fortunately for all concerned, Kurt does the right thing and
goes public with the truth.
The Astronaut is that frustrating sort of movie that has a compelling central
premise but deserved better execution: it doesn’t help that not only Randolph
and Reese but a lot of the males
in the film look similar to each other, and the tackiness of the production on
a Universal TV budget occasionally takes its toll on the film, but it gets
considerably better when Susan Clark appears and turns in a whirlwind of a
performance as the wife. For a while she and Markham as Reese have such bitter
arguments this almost looks like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the science-fiction version, but eventually they
reconcile and Clark adroitly nails the transformation of her attitude from
hatred to love as well as her frustration in this ridiculous situation in which
her husband has been replaced by an impostor but she finds she likes the
impostor a lot better than she liked the original. (This was a gimmick used in
quite a few previous movies about impersonations — like the 1942 MGM “B” Nazi
Agent in which good anti-Nazi refugee
Conrad Veidt replaces evil Nazi agent Conrad Veidt and his cover is blown when
the bad Nazi’s dog, who always hated the bad Veidt, snuggles up to the good
Veidt and lets Veidt pet him, or the 1948 Bette Davis melodrama A
Stolen Life, in which the predatory Davis
steals Glenn Ford from the good Davis, then drowns in a boating accident that
was caused by her trying to kill the good Davis, who emerges and takes the bad
Davis’s place as Ford’s wife — but it still works.) The Astronaut is an indication of how capable Universal’s TV-movie
division was in the early 1970’s, even though the basic premise would seem to
have been good enough to merit a feature film with a decent budget and bigger
names than Monte Markham and Susan Clark in the leads!
