Kansas film collector Wade Williams released all of these Science
Fiction films separately on disc starting in 2000; this
Weird Worlds
Collection repackaging represents little additional effort but
offers an attractive deal: Four titles for the price of one. The stack
of rocket-happy movies includes one classic, two campy space operas and
one imaginative epic from East Germany. The quartet is a reasonable
overview of the outer space exploration movie prior to Stanley Kubrick's
1968
2001: A Space Odyssey, a milestone that changed all the
rules.
First up is George Pal's Technicolor hit from 1950
Destination
Moon, which is generally considered the first film of the 1950s wave
of Science Fiction. Big studios wouldn't touch 'Buck Rogers' film fare
but stood up and took notice when this little Eagle-Lion release broke
box office records. With an almost documentary attention to technical
detail, the film tells the story of a privately funded moon rocket while
offering viewers a primer on the basics of space travel: Weightlessness,
inertia, orbits. Walter Lantz's Woody Woodpecker serves as sort of a
visual aid in one scene. With its intriguing needle-nosed silver rocket
poised on a desert launching pad,
Destination Moon introduced the
world to the notion of space travel as a real possibility.
Some specifics of the Lunar voyage ended up being prophetic. The flight
mechanics of Apollo 11 were similar and the landing required a
last-second change to find a suitable landing site. The moon is claimed
for all mankind in a speech broadcast live, just as happened in 1969.
The source novel for
Destination Moon was written by the prolific
Robert Heinlein, and his harsh Cold War politics are felt when the
rocket's promoters state that America must get to the moon before the
Russians, so as to plant atomic missiles there first. Both a failed
engine test and a legal objection to the launching are blamed as the
work of 'foreign Red saboteurs.'
Non-science fiction audiences have a low tolerance for
Destination
Moon's focus on science facts over drama, and the film is burdened
with weak characters and unfunny comic relief. But it stirred the
imaginations of millions, starting a popular groundswell for John F.
Kennedy's announcement eight years later, that America would make a moon
mission its national crusade.
Destination Moon is a good transfer of a Technicolor print in
reasonable condition but frequently beset with fine scratches and an
occasional splice. Colors are bright and sharp enough to reveal tiny
wires and other special effect shortcuts that were harder to see on old
16mm prints. An engagingly over-hyped trailer stresses the fact that
articles in many mainstream magazines are exploring the possibilities of
a new frontier in outer space.
1953's
Project Moonbase was co-authored by Robert Heinlein and
originally produced as a proposed television series to be called
Ring
Around the Moon. Heinlein and company continue their commitment to
credible space science, but, taking a hint from George Pal's experience,
add a melodramatic plotline about Communist subversion. The resulting
odd mix of scientific authenticity and Cold War paranoia was not widely
released and soon became obscure.
1970. The United States Space Force's latest moon mission is infiltrated
by a foreign power identified only as "the enemy of freedom." After a
struggle with a saboteur, the ship makes an emergency landing just over
the horizon on the dark side of the moon. To communicate with home base,
the spacemen must climb a lunar mountain to point a radio antenna at the
Earth.
The science is exemplary. Spacemen wear skullcap headgear and walk on
the walls and ceiling, just as they do in Kubrick's epic. There are only
a few awkward props, such as a portable communicator that's just an old
telephone receiver with a big antenna attached. On the other hand,
Heinlein's dramatics are a joke. Heinlein gives everyone 'funny' names.
Leading lady Donna Martell is Colonel Briteis (pronounced 'bright eyes')
and an annoying gossip columnist is dubbed Polly Prattles. The foreign
agent is on a suicide mission, but volunteers to help the Americans
after the forced landing. How is the villain's true identity uncovered?
He doesn't know what the Brooklyn Dodgers are.
Actor Hayden Rorke (later of TV's
I Dream of Jeannie)'s general
is supposed to be a good guy but behaves like a complete creep. He
snickers at the notion that publicizing "the science angle" will allow
the Space Force to cloak its real mission, the secret deployment of
nuclear weapons in orbit. Rorke renames the crashed spaceship "Moon Base
One," thereby putting a positive news spin on a mission gone awry.
Although sexual equality in the corps is stressed, Rorke and other top
brass make sexist remarks to Briteis, who, as a female astronaut, is
obliged to wear short-shorts, a tight t-shirt and a push-up bra!
The most outrageous scene is saved for the end, when the President is
revealed to be a woman. The film treats that revelation as a joke, but
not the situation of having an unmarried man and woman sleeping in close
quarters alone on the moon: Briteis and her male astronaut partner are
ordered to submit to a marriage ceremony performed by Television!
The B&W
Project Moonbase is a good transfer of a print in fine
physical shape. Herschel Burke Gilbert's score makes use of a wailing
Theremin. An original trailer is included.
In other far sillier 1950s space films astronauts found civilizations on
the moon, Mars, Venus and a moon of Jupiter. In each case, aliens were
human in form and the Earthmen found plenty of beautiful showgirls to
enroll in kissing lessons. Serious space pictures almost disappeared,
but Zsa Zsa Gabor became
The Queen of Outer Space in CinemaScope
and color. One of the last and most juvenile of these low-budget space
films was
The Phantom Planet.
A 1980 U.S. Air Force space patrol fails to return after colliding with
a rogue planetoid called Raeton. A follow-up rocket crashes as well, and
its lone survivor Frank Chapman (Dean Fredericks) becomes a castaway.
Like Lemuel Gulliver, Frank discovers that Raeton is inhabited by tiny
people only six inches tall. Before he knows what's happening, the
astronaut shrinks to miniature size as well. The little kingdom welcomes
Frank and encourages him to choose a wife, which leads to a jealous
rivalry. As in
This Island Earth, Raeton is fighting a war with
another alien culture called the Solarites. A captive Solarite is played
by young actor Richard Kiel ("Jaws" in the Bond film
The Spy Who
Loved Me). His monster costume is a poor imitation of the Metaluna
Mutant, looking more like a dog-faced giant with light bulbs for eyes.
Producer-writer Fred Gebhart made the previous year's
12 To the
Moon, another maladroit picture with a cast of acting pros. Silent
star Francis X. Bushman is the leader of Raeton, and genre favorite
Coleen Gray is the main love interest. But the soporific script, slow
pace and unimaginative special effects make the film difficult to sit
through. The various planets and space vehicles look like burning bits
of sponge and the shrinking gimmick is silly.
The Phantom Planet is transferred from a very clean print source
with only a bit of damage, again around reel changes. The clear image
and sound only highlight the production's lack of ambition.
The success of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 prompted several
expensive space films to be produced behind the proverbial Iron Curtain.
First Spaceship on Venus is an Americanization of an East
German-Polish space adventure from 1960 called
Der Schweigende Stern
(The Silent Star). In the 95-minute original film a technological
artifact from Venus is found in meteor fragments in Siberia. An
international Dream Team of scientists and space pilots take off in a
gigantic ship called the Cosmokrator to investigate, analyzing the
artifact on the way. After some harrowing adventures on the blasted,
ruined surface of the dead planet, they determine that the Venusians
were planning to attack the Earth but accidentally annihilated
themselves with their own weapons. The cities may be lifeless but vast
machines still operate underground. The brave cosmonauts are threatened
when one of these machines is inadvertently disturbed.
The small distributor Crown International picked up this film and
released it in 1962 co-billed with an import from Japan,
Daikaiju
Baran. Both pictures were heavily altered so as to pass as American
productions. The Japanese film became
Varan the Unbelievable
while the space film got a new life as
First Spaceship on Venus.
Interestingly, the American editorial team that re-cut the space movie
included Hugo Grimaldi and Gordon Zahler, who also worked on
The
Phantom Planet.
First Spaceship on Venus was dubbed into English and more
conventional music tracks were remixed from familiar stock music
libraries -- we even hear a few bars from the score for
The Creature
from the Black Lagoon. The original Agfacolor film was reprinted in
Technicolor, resulting in beautiful release prints.
Crown International also did some heavy pruning on the picture --
seventeen minutes' worth. Several long speeches were removed, including
a lot of political material. The original East German space explorers
conduct an extended debate about the refusal of the United States to
participate in the Venus mission. An 'enlightened' American scientist
defects (in a Russian MIG jet!) to join the rest of the international
cosmonauts.
Grimaldi eliminated this back-story and also a beautiful scene in an
Alpine meadow where the top scientists talk before blasting off into the
heavens. The American re-cut retains the explorers' discovery of
Hiroshima-like shadows of the extinct Venusians burned into the sides of
buildings, but omits accompanying observations about barbaric warmongers
back on Earth. The political snipping goes a bit too far at the end,
when the American version fades abruptly on a crowd greeting the
returning voyagers. In the East German original the shot continues to
feature dozens of well-wishers joining hands in a gesture of
international solidarity. What's so bad about that?
First Spaceship on Venus has remained popular because of its
beautiful and imaginative visuals. The giant 3-spired spaceship (renamed
the CosmoStrator) is so striking that we don't stop to think of its
essential impracticality. Venus is a dark world with crunchy
crystallized earth and clouds of colored gas floating under a black sky.
Some landscapes look like melted forests and others like Hieronymous
Bosch's illustrations of Hell. The astronauts cruise about in little
glass-nosed golf carts, driving slowly past colossal ruins of
unidentifiable structures. The effects are simple but spectacular,
making Venus a weird world indeed.
In the film's action finale a huge lake of black ooze comes to life and
pursues a trio of spacemen and their tank-like mini robot Omega up a
spiral ramp. They finally use a ray gun against the Venusian blob. The
planet's automatic machinery goes haywire, generating negative
gravitation and forcibly pushing the CosmoStrator off the planet. A
brave pilot tries to rescue a comrade left on the surface, but cannot
control his tiny shuttlecraft in minus-ten gravity.
First Spaceship on Venus attracted little attention save for the
appearance of European name Yoko Tani as the ship's medic; she had
starred with Anthony Quinn in the previous year's
The Savage
Innocents by Nicholas Ray. The other international crewmembers are
all played by Eastern Europeans. African Julius Ongewe is perhaps the
first Black astronaut to be depicted in the movies.
Wade Williams' print of
First Spaceship on Venus, letterboxed but
not enhanced, is in basic good shape with only some scratches and minor
damage at reel changes. But transferring a dense Technicolor print to
video results in high contrasts and clogged blacks; the diamond-like
Venusian soil loses its glitter and Mr. Ongewe's face sometimes appears
as a black blot in a bright screen. The original
Der Schweigende
Stern is available in Region One from First Run Features, and is a
recommended purchase even though this four-title set is a bargain on its
own.
For more information about
Weird Worlds, visit
Image Entertainment. To
order
Weird Worlds, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
