Blazing Rockets: Hollywood’s Great Race to the Moon, Part Two

Fifty years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11's Lunar Module "Eagle" on the moon. In part two of "Blazing Rockets," we look at how one 1950s Hollywood producer launched his cinematic moon project in the popular press, and how another decided to ratchet up the space race stakes.

George Pal’s timing was impeccable. His Operation Moon, later to become Destination Moon, was riding a wave of public interest in space, the culmination of nuclear anxieties coupled with V-2 rocket experiments and early space race cheerleading in the form of books like Willy Ley’s and Chesley Bonestell's Conquest of Space (1949). [1]

(Also not to be discounted is the first wave of public interest in flying saucers, precipitated by Kenneth Arnold’s famous 1947 sighting near Mt. Rainier in Washington state. The crest of the wave was a sensational article published in True magazine in January 1950, “Flying Saucers are Real.” Coming from a such an upright, authoritative source -- retired Marine Corps Major aviator Donald A. Keyhoe -- some readers might have been forgiven for thinking that space had already been claimed by the crafty Soviets or mysterious extraterrestrials.) [2]

Such anxious and heady times called for full blown efforts, not half measures. If we were going to conquer space, then we might as well conquer some territory as well. With mammoth multi-stage rockets already on the drawing boards, it seemed that our neighbor the moon, that destination of so many dreams over the centuries, was in reach.

Characteristic of the period was a lavishly illustrated Life magazine story, “Rocket to the Moon,” published in January 1949, while Pal’s Operation Moon was still in the planning stages. The article’s subtitle, “Man May Travel to Earth’s Satellite in 25 Years,” was prophetic, if somewhat conservative (it was just over 20 years later that the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility). Space travel’s burgeoning roots in military technology and atom fever were touched on in the article: “Long a subject of fantasy, travel to the moon is now, as a result of recent scientific developments, not only a possibility but a probability. From tests made with the V-2 rocket engineers believe that a similar rocket, adapted to carrying humans, could make the 238,000 mile trip in about 48 hours.”

The article also addressed the challenges of achieving escape velocity with current chemical-fueled rockets. An illustration dramatically showed the performance gain of atomic power over more conventional fuel mixtures. (Probably not by chance, the Destination Moon rocket that would take off on theater screens the following year was atomic-powered.) Subsequent pages showed beautifully done pen and ink wash illustrations of a very plausible mission for its time.

NASA diagram of the 'real world' moon rocket.

Twenty years of research and development would result in a very different looking Apollo spacecraft and flight plan, incorporating a lunar lander separate from the command craft, but all the necessary components were there in the article, especially a multi-stage booster rocket, a crew of specially selected men “in top physical condition and trained to act as reliable scientific observers,” and a no-time-to-spare EVA plan of picture taking, astronomical observations and rock sample collecting. [3]

Of course, it was a much more accurate prognosticator of the cinematic missions of 1950, with its moonship combining a command center, crew compartment and lander in one occupied by four astronauts. For both Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M, the Life illustrations could have been a storyboard -- particularly the moonwalk against a backdrop of craggy lunar mountains in the former case, and the sleek-looking spaceship with its bunk-style crew compartment in the latter.

With the dawn of a new decade, the synergy between popular magazines and movie productions, particularly Pal’s, became glaringly obvious. As Destination Moon was shooting, the canny producer invited a variety of scientific experts and writers to the set to witness movie history in the making. The resulting wave of articles celebrating the film months before it was released, was pure public relations gold. Articles in Life, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and other publications rhapsodized over the production and its technical wizardry as if it were the final preparations for an actual moonflight.

Once the film was released, Pal exploited the coverage one more time in trailers: “The picture you’ve been reading about in every important national magazine and newspaper… among them, Life, This Week, The New York Times, Popular Science, Seein’ Stars, Popular Mechanics, Parade, The New York Daily News!” The trailer ends with the proclamation of Destination Moon as “The Miracle Picture of All-Time!” Indeed, a miracle for the time in its unprecedented special effects, and a miracle of promotion.

Pal wanted Destination Moon to be as authentic as possible,
right down to depicting the effects of G forces on lift off.

Popular Science’s May 1950 multi-page spread, “How Movies Take You on a Trip to the Moon,” focused on those unprecedented, ingenious effects to simulate zero gravity, spacewalks, and moon walks. It credited art director Ernst Fegte with inventing the “cement mixer” approach to portraying astronauts stomping around the floor, ceiling and walls of the crew compartment in magnetic boots: “If you can’t turn the actors upside down, why not turn the set? The result was a box-like set, representing the interior of the rocket’s cabin, that could revolve like a cement mixer. To show an actor walking on the ceiling, the set was simply rotated until the ceiling became the ‘floor.’ The next step was to rig up a camera in the revolving drum so that it could roll with the action or shoot upside down. What the audience sees is a right-side up set with upside-down actors.” [4]

Other production details included deflating couch cushions to make it appear the actors were sinking into their seats under the G forces of lift off, suspending spacewalking actors with body-length harnesses and wires, and making spacesuits appear to be airtight and pressurized with padding and wire stays.

In its coverage of Destination Moon around the same time period, Life’s writers seemed particularly intrigued by the use of “midgets” (sic) doubling as moon-walking astronauts in the background to provide the illusion of distance. One production still shows a little person actor being carried by a stagehand like a sack of potatoes over the set’s rough lunar terrain. The caption mentions moon-walking actors hoisted on wires to simulate leaps and bounds under the moon’s weaker gravity. (Interestingly, the Life article also picked up on the Cold War aspects of the film, opening with, “Believing that the nation that controls the moon will also control the world, four U.S. patriots prepare to take off in a 150-foot rocket ship based in the Mojave desert.”) [5]

While it was already known by 1950 that there were no
cracks in the lunar surface, they were added to lend
perspective and make the set appear larger.

Popular Mechanics took a different tack and used Destination Moon to frame a May 1950 article about the feasibility (and inevitability) of spaceflight. It quoted a real rocket scientist, Dr. Hsue-Shen Tsien of the California Institute of Technology, about how the technology and know-how was already in place to send a rocket to the moon, and interspersed studio production stills with speculations about atomic powered rockets, hypersonic transatlantic flights, and other high flying applications. It described the flight path of Pal’s fictional moonship as if it were a real mission already on the drafting boards.

And it concluded, “There isn’t much doubt that a trip to the moon and back will actually be made some day; enthusiasts are convinced that a missile will be landed on the moon in the next 10 or 15 years even if a manned space ship isn’t built for the trip by then. The chances are that when the space ship is built that it will be pretty much like the ship that the movie portrays. ‘Destination Moon’ will be released this fall, and George Pal jokingly says that he wants to make the release date as early as possible, otherwise the newsreels may beat him!” [6]

The newsreels didn’t beat Pal’s thunder, but, as mentioned earlier, a rival studio did. In competitive Hollywood, imitation has not only been the sincerest form of flattery, but a means for smaller studios and production companies to feed off the hot property scraps of their larger, wealthier brethren. In this Cold War-era side story, Lippert Pictures was a stand-in for the sneaky Soviets stealing nuclear secrets, and company head Robert Lippert did his best B movie imitation of a pugnacious Commie dictator jealous of the accomplishments of the Free World, and determined to one-up his rivals.

Rocketship X-M’s musical director Albert Glasser was a direct witness to the perfidy, as colorfully related to Tom Weaver:

“Lippert, the boss, called me in one day. Short, fat guy. He said, ‘Look Al, we’re going to do a big one, a science fiction thing called Rocketship X-M, and we’ve got to work very fast. The guy who wrote the script [writer-director Kurt Neumann] tried to peddle it all around town for a couple of years, no one wanted it. Why? It’s science fiction, who gives a shit about science fiction? But now, that big idiot, that asshole George Pal is making one about going to the moon. He’s been making it for a year and a half, and there’s trouble, trouble, trouble -- all of those special shots, the photographic tricks and whatnot. He even took out a five page ad in Life magazine, announcing that Destination Moon is on the way and will be out in about three or four months.’ So, Lippert said, ‘We’re going to knock Rocketship X-M out in three or four weeks. We’ll do it real cheap, and get ahead of him. George Pal is making everyone conscious about moon pictures. We’ll give ‘em moon pictures!’ So he did. We worked day and night, like sons of bitches.” [7]

While Rocketship X-M had been set to land on
the moon, it ended up on Mars instead!

Lippert was as good as his word. Neumann took just 18 days to film the project on a paltry budget of $94,000, giving Lippert bragging rights that he aggressively exploited in advertising. One publicity tagline trumpeted Rocketship X-M as “The screen's FIRST story of man's conquest of space!” (managing a sort of in-your-face tagline twofer, claiming an historic cinematic first as well as alluding to the popular 1949 Willy Ley/Chesley Bonestell book collaboration that had provided such inspiration to Pal).

To add insult to injury, another Lippert tagline blared: “You've Read About It! You've Heard About It! Now SEE it!” While there was indeed some direct publicity of Rocketship X-M leading up to its premiere, Lippert was no doubt aware that the vast bulk of the pre-release publicity was focused on Pal’s bigger-budget effort, and if there was any confusion in moviegoers’ minds, then that was just fine.

In a sense though, there was never any real cinematic race to the moon. And not just because Lippert, concerned about potential legal action, decided to send his crew to Mars instead. Despite superficial similarities, the films were very different projects from the start. Pal, inspired by popular press speculations about spaceflight and its Cold War era implications, wanted to make those speculations as real and authentic as possible on the motion picture screen. To accomplish this, he hired the very visionaries, Robert Heinlein and Chesley Bonestell among them, who had done such yeoman work in the early post-war years, keying the nation into the importance of spaceflight. He went to great effort and expense to get it right.

Lippert, by contrast, was satisfied with simply establishing a veneer of space-age authenticity, the better to piggyback off of Destination Moon’s ubiquitous pre-release publicity. It was all about seizing the moment and making a pile of money by “giving ‘em moon pictures.” Yet, in spite of its hardscrabble, pecuniary origins, Lippert’s knockoff achieved another first, perhaps more important than being the first “hard” science fiction space flight movie in the new decade. It became the first cautionary film of the postwar Atomic era, depicting the world-shattering devastation of a nuclear war (on Mars no less!) at a time when Americans were being assured that such wars were winnable and just another option in the nation’s military arsenal.

The crew of Rocketship X-M wonder how Google Maps
steered them so completely off course...

As Bill Warren observed in his excellent Keep Watching the Skies, “Rocketship XM was probably the first film to expound such a grim warning about our possible future, at least in such graphic terms. It was only five years after the first atomic bombs were detonated, but the idea that we now had the potential to wipe out civilization entirely was already beginning to permeate our mass culture. Shortly after RXM, this idea of atomic devastation became a cliche in films, but it was novel in 1950.” [8]

Each film is so different in its intent, tone and approach, and each is such an interesting artifact of its time, that the temptation is to declare them both winners in their respective categories: optimistic, “we can do it!” quasi-documentary in the case of Destination Moon, and exciting, yet sobering Atom-age cautionary tale in Rocketship X-M’s. Destination Moon in particular was a sizeable hit in its time, making over $5.5 million in box office receipts on its $586,000 investment. Together they helped propel the wave of sci-fi that washed over drive-ins and matinees and came to almost characterize the decade’s Hollywood product. And each has made its mark over the years with TV broadcasts and home video releases.

Notes:

1. Willy Ley & Chesley Bonestell, The Conquest of Space: A Preview of the Greatest Adventure Awaiting Mankind, Viking, 1949
2. Donald E. Keyhoe, "The Flying Saucers are Real," True magazine, January 1950, 11
3. "Rocket to the Moon," Life magazine, January 17, 1949, 67 
4. Andrew R. Boone, "How Movies Take You on a Trip to the Moon," Popular Science, May 1950, 125
5. "Destination Moon," Life magazine, April 25, 1950, 107
6. Thomas E. Stimson, Jr., "Rocket to the Moon: No Longer a Fantastic Dream," Popular Mechanics, May, 1950, 89 
7. Tom Weaver, Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes: Interviews with Actors, Directors, Producers and Writers of the 1940s through 1960s, McFarland, 1991, 100
8. Bill Warren, Keep Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, Vol. 1, 1950-1957, McFarland, 1982, 11

Blazing Rockets: Hollywood’s Great Race to the Moon, Part One

On the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11's liftoff to the moon, Films From Beyond launches a two-part series on another space race that took place nearly twenty years before the historic mission: the race between two producers to premier the first "authentic" trip to the moon on American movie screens. The series will conclude on July 20, the anniversary of the moon landing.

It was all set to launch. The rocket, the centerpiece of the project, was elegant and sleek, reflecting the best educated guesses of scientists, engineers and assorted dreamers as to what kind of ship it would take to carry human beings to the moon and beyond. Technicians had spent countless hours working up the crew compartment, instrument panels, spacesuits and assorted gear needed to get the project off the ground. Others combed over the plan, making sure it all made sense and no details were overlooked. The primary crew -- a combination of veterans and relative newcomers -- had rehearsed tirelessly.

It was documented and promoted in more detail than almost any other project of its type, culminating in an eye-popping four page spread in America’s leading glossy magazine, Life. [1]

That almost became its undoing. A rival group, seeing the plans laid out so lavishly, decided to take advantage of the public interest that had been so carefully cultivated, and rushed a project of their own into production. The result: Lippert Pictures’ Rocketship X-M was the first to lift off on an American movie screen on May 26, 1950, eclipsing George Pal’s carefully crafted Destination Moon ship by almost a month.

Unrecognized by the public at the time, this cinematic space race foreshadowed the real world, white knuckle superpower race that would result in the space shot heard ‘round the world: the Soviet’s launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957. (The runner-up in that race, the U.S.’s Explorer 1 satellite, lifted off the pad on January 31, 1958.)

The real world stakes were of course much higher than those of Hollywood’s. It was a matter of perceived national survival versus gross ticket sales. With memories of the Nazi’s V-2 rocket weapon fresh in the public mind, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that a country that could launch a metal sphere into earth orbit, no matter how small or modest, was well on its way to being able to launch a nuclear bomb across continents to strike at vulnerable cities. It was a major milestone in the race to put men into space, as well as marking a new era of backyard fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills in schools.

The spherical beauty that launched a thousand
spaceships: Sputnik 1.

From the perspective of nuclear age superpower tensions, the rivalry of movie production companies seems paltry indeed. But the output of those companies and their impact on the popular imagination in the decade leading up to Sputnik and the first men into space was not trivial. Moviemakers like Pal took the dreams and plans of such astronautic visionaries as Willy Ley, Hermann Oberth and Robert Heinlen and made them as real to the public as their craft would allow. These movie rocketships weren’t just devices to take characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon on space flights of fantasy. They were based on the best thinking of real scientists and designers, the inheritors of rocketry pioneers Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Above all they helped cement the popular notion of piloted spaceflight as something real, well within current technological means and soon to become a feature of modern life. In the recent past the Nazi rockets had terrorized London with their explosive payloads. Now, even more powerful rockets would carry human beings on peaceful missions to the moon and Mars.

For America at the dawn of the new decade, it was a Dickensian “best of times, worst of times.” The nation, its cities, infrastructure and wealth relatively untouched by the ravages of World War II, established its post-war economic dominance through such instruments as Bretton Woods and the Marshall Plan. The foundations for a new prosperous middle class were laid through revived industry and the G.I. Bill. We had The Bomb, and had proven its terrible power against Japan. We were a new, exuberant empire, but there were nagging problems chipping away at our confidence and security.

We no longer had the atom bomb all to ourselves. The Soviets, our nominal allies of convenience during the war, had successfully tested their first atom bomb in August, 1949. The means by which they joined the club further shook our collective confidence: Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist admitted on January 24, 1950 to passing crucial nuclear research from the Manhattan Project to the Soviets. The next day, U.S. State Department official and accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury.

Soviet spies seemed to be everywhere. In February, freshman Senator Joseph McCarthy took to speaker circuit to declare that the U.S. State Department was filled with subversive communists. It seemed to many that it was just a matter of time before the Cold War turned hot. And sure enough, by the end of June, President Truman had committed U.S. forces to turn back putative communist aggression in Korea.

The bright dawn of the decade and the new American Century saw more than a few dark clouds collecting in the distance. In darkened movie theaters, gritty, pessimistic, even cynical crime melodramas -- movies that French critics would later label “film-noir” -- screened side-by-side with tear-jerkers, musicals and westerns. Films like I Married a Communist (aka The Woman on Pier 13, 1949) and D.O.A. (1949) seemed to capture the mood of a public exhausted by war, giddy with promises of material prosperity, and paranoid about communists and other assorted bogeymen getting ready to take it all away.

On other genre fronts, the creaky old Universal monsters were breathing their last gasps chasing Abbott and Costello around studio lots. And the matinee movie serials that had for a time been a great source of futuristic fun with their spaceships, rayguns, and robots, had all but collapsed in a rusted heap by the beginning of the 1950s.

The growing number of TV sets certainly had its impact, but it was also evident that Gothic vampires, lumbering Frankenstein monsters and serial space opera heroes weren’t going to cut it for teens with some extra change in their pockets. Drive-in theaters popped up like mushrooms across the country, promising thrills and excitement that you couldn't get at home on the cathode ray tube.

Long before Madison Avenue ad men perfected their manipulative arts, the American movie industry dominated the entertainment world by taking the deepest desires and fears of audiences and channeling them into satisfying, self-contained silver screen dreams. Now, In order to tear Americans away from their living rooms and keep them digging into their pockets, movie makers, especially of the B variety, dumped the quaint old Freudian-inspired dreams of Dracula, Frankenstein and the like in favor of thrills and anxieties that were much closer to the surface.

Another impact of television was to reinforce the immediacy and reality of news being generated around the block and around the world. It might be one thing to listen to a description of an A-bomb blast over the console radio. It was another to see it in your living room. Multiplied by millions of living rooms and generously supplemented with images of Senator McCarthy railing against Communists in our own government, the flickering tube helped to lay a blanket of mass anxiety over a society entering a period of unprecedented prosperity.

The nightmare symbol of the 1950s: The mushroom cloud

Naturally, the photogenic atom bomb and its deadly sidekick radiation were everywhere in the popular press as well. Even as the U.S. and the Soviets were furiously working on the next really big thing -- a hydrogen bomb that would make the bombs dropped on Japan look like firecrackers -- the American public was being treated to a parade of stories about how nuclear war might become the new normal.

The genius of movie makers during this time was to grab material from the headlines, rework it, and turn fears into thrills, but at the same time deflect the more depressing details that brought things too close to home and triggered our deepest anxieties. Catharsis in a darkened theater was good; coming home from the theater obsessed with commies, fall-out shelters and other post nuclear survival strategies was not.

Flash Gordon-type fantasy was not up to answering the call of the Atom Age. To capture audiences, science fiction was going to have to be more relevant and reality-bound, while at the same time providing excitement and hope for the future. Sci-fi (as it came to be known) would soon rule theaters and especially drive-ins during the decade. The very best, the films that appealed then and now, set up their thrills with material pulled from the latest headlines, but didn’t confront the communist menace head-on.

All manner of atom-spawned, “what have we wrought?” monsters and mutants filled America’s movie screens throughout the ‘50s. Atomic testing awakened the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). The Japanese soon had their own angry irradiated giant, Godzilla (1954), to deal with. In the New Mexico desert, ground zero of atomic testing, giant ants set about to become the new rulers of the earth (Them!, 1954). Not to be outdone, The Deadly Mantis (1957) and bus-sized grasshoppers (Beginning of the End, 1957) proved that other mutant members of the insect kingdom could just as easily threaten humanity with extinction. Even a single, solitary man could become a giant headache for civilization if he was unlucky enough to get caught in the middle of a nuclear test (The Amazing Colossal Man, 1957).

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms ushered in
an era of atomic monstrosities.

There were a few attempts, especially at the beginning of the decade, to lure moviegoers with sobering, here's-how-it-might-happen depictions of nuclear war and its aftermath (Five, 1951; Invasion, U.S.A., 1952), but these seemed to hit too close to home and were relative box-office duds. More savvy B movie makers managed to sell post-apocalyptic themes by including kid-friendly mutants and/or by setting the action in a safely distant future (Day the World Ended, 1955; World Without End, 1956).

The Bomb wasn’t the sole preoccupation of 1950s sci-fi, but its attendant anxieties helped launch the cinematic space race, which in turn prepared the public for the real one. The space advocates’ Cold War message was hammered home again and again in the popular press: If we, the good ol’ U.S. of A., were to forestall nuclear war and prevent irradiated Commie mutants from taking over, we were going to have to take the highest of high ground and claim it for us … and peace of course. Not so subtly disguised in the high-blown rhetoric was the assumption that the nation that controlled space -- including the ability to deliver judgement from on high in the form of space-based weapons -- could enforce world peace on its own terms.

Like many of the towering figures of the early post-war years who challenged the nation to be first into space, the man who would lead America’s first authentic movie mission to the moon, George Pal, was a European expatriate. (While Lippert Pictures’ crew did indeed beat Pal’s into theaters, they didn’t actually make it to the moon, as we shall see.)

Born in Hungary in 1908, Pal was the son of theatrical parents who traveled constantly. Raised by his grandparents, George eschewed theater life to study architecture, He parlayed the draftsman’s skills he picked up as an architectural student into extra cash selling anatomy drawings to medical students at a nearby school. Upon realizing that Hungary’s less than vigorous construction industry wasn’t in shape to support yet another aspiring architect, the ever-enterprising Pal again used his drawing skills to secure a position at a Budapest motion picture company making titles for silent films.

His work filming theatrical commercials triggered a love for animation that would last a lifetime. Inspired by popular American cartoons like Felix the Cat, he taught himself the esoteric art. In 1931 he moved on to more promising pastures in the form of the mighty German film company UFA, where his self-taught expertise promptly got him promoted to head of the studio’s cartoon department.

However, UFA would not hold on to the restless young man for long. By 1939, when he and his wife secured a visa to the United States, he had operated his own studios and thrived in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands producing short animated films and commercials. With such a reputation, he was quickly snatched up by Paramount. He opened a studio in Hollywood, where production of his “Puppetoons,” featuring wooden stop motion-animated puppets, began in earnest.

Between 1941 and 1947 he made dozens of films for Paramount. Pal’s creations earned him six Academy Award nominations and a special Oscar in 1943 for his contributions to the art. Not surprisingly, animation legend Willis O’Brien (King Kong), and soon-to-be legend Ray Harryhausen (Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles to Earth, etc.) would at one time or another work with Pal during the period.

By 1947, however, Paramount was ready to give the Puppetoons the pink slip. Perhaps like Flash and Buck, the innocence and exuberance of Pals’ animated characters was no longer a good fit for a nuclear-obsessed world seemingly ready to turn the tap from cold war to hot at a moment’s notice. No matter. George Pal was ready to turn his talents to more meaningful, and lucrative, feature films.

It took two long years of pitching ideas (while supporting himself making short educational films), but in 1949 he finally secured financing from Peter Rathvon, who had recently left RKO to form his own company, Eagle Lion Films. Pal inked a deal for two projects. First out of the gate was The Great Rupert (1950), a holiday comedy starring Jimmy Durante, Terry Moore and the title character, a dancing squirrel with a heart of gold. Rupert was a natural first feature for the Puppetoons creator, employing his trademark sentimentality and animation tricks. The second project, initially titled Operation Moon, couldn’t have been more different in style, spirit or scope. [2]

The great science fiction writer Robert Heinlein was fresh off publication of his first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), when the Hollywood bug bit him. A literary agent introduced Heinlein to screenwriter Alford “Rip” Van Ronkel, and the pair developed a very realistic story of the first mission to the moon based on some of the novel’s concepts. Selling the story to conservative movie executives was another matter, echoing the problems Heinlein had encountered in finding a publisher for the book.

Eventually Van Ronkel found a kindred spirit in Pal when the two met at a party hosted by cinematographer Lee Garmes. Pal was intrigued by the script, and subsequent meetings with all three sealed the deal. [3]

The project was a far cry from the animated hijinx of wooden puppets and anthropomorphic squirrels. However laborious and time consuming those films were to make, this was on a whole new level, one aiming for the stratosphere and beyond. The resources needing to be marshaled weren’t far off from actually trying to shoot a rocket into space. But if there was a man to do it, it was the eternal, enterprising optimist, George Pal.

To be continued! In Part Two, Producers George Pal and Robert L. Lippert race to be the first to put a realistic moon trip on American movie screens...

Notes:

1. "Destination Moon," Life magazine, April 25, 1950, 107
2. Gail Morgan Hickman, The Films of George Pal (South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes, 1977)
3. Dwayne A. Day, "Heinlein's ghost (part 1)," The Space Review, April 9, 2007, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/848/1

The X-Man meets the Puppetoons

Now Playing: The Power (1968)

Pros: Features an interesting cast of veteran character actors and B movie regulars; Ambitiously tries to marry the sci-fi and suspense-thriller genres.
Cons: Slow stretches and plot holes dissipate the suspense somewhat.

“Do we humans harbor within us vast mental powers beyond our imagination? Are some of us gifted with psychic abilities far beyond the norm, and if so what does that mean for us as a society? Whether one believes in extra sensory perception, mental powers, or any of the phenomena that go with them, some governments of the world have certainly at some point or another taken notice to entertain the idea. After all, wouldn’t such amazing abilities be useful for warfare or intelligence gathering? Governments around the world have long sought to try and harness the untapped powers of the human mind to mixed results…” (Brent Swancer, “Bizarre Government Experiments and Strange Psychic Powers,” Mysteriousuniverse.org, Nov. 17, 2017)

In his fascinating article for the Mysterious Universe website, Brent Swancer details a kind of international arms race that few Americans are aware of -- the race to harness psychic abilities for national security purposes. In the 1970s, U.S. authorities became concerned about Soviet research into these areas, and thus was born the Stargate Project, which recruited psychics to, among other things, surveil human targets and facilities through “remote viewing.”

Before the unit was shut down in the mid-90s, it also experimented with less benign applications of psychic powers, including the possibility of slowing or even stopping a heartbeat with the mind alone. The project was profiled in a 2004 book by Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was adapted into a movie starring George Clooney in 2009.

Stopping a person’s vital bodily functions through telekinesis is at the heart (pun intended) of producer George Pal’s The Power. Based on the 1959 science fiction novel by Frank M. Robinson, the film opens at a research facility specializing in space medicine (in this case, a government sponsored institute, not the military).

Arthur Nordlund (Michael Rennie) has been sent from Washington to liaise with a group of scientists conducting research into the limits of human endurance. Their research is crucial to ensuring the health and safety astronauts on long space missions. The head of the committee, Prof. Jim Tanner (George Hamilton) takes Nordlund on a tour of the facility, where he sees one volunteer in scuba gear lying at the bottom of a water tank, and another being subjected to intense heat.

Prof. Tanner shows Nordlund his patented body tanning method.

Nordlund attends a meeting of the full committee, which is comprised of experts in all disciplines related to human performance: Dr. Margery Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette) is a geneticist, Prof. Talbot Scott (Earl Holliman) is a biologist, chain-smoking Carl Melnicker (Nehemiah Persoff) is a physicist, and Prof. Norman Van Zandt (Richard Carlson) heads up the institute.

There is a lot of brainpower on the committee, but the members are startled when the token social scientist in the group, anthropologist Henry Hallson (Arthur O’Connell), announces in alarmed tones that, based on anonymous questionnaires and tests he’s given to his fellow committee members, one of the group has an IQ that is “off the charts,” and possesses “a force of intellect far beyond anything known on the earth today.”

When Nordlund asks if that could include paranormal or telekinetic mental powers, Hallson responds in the affirmative. Nordlund proposes a test for the committee to take right then and there, to see if the super-man (or woman) among them will reveal him/herself. Melnicker works up a makeshift pinwheel with a pencil and piece of paper and sets it in the middle of the table. If there is a telekinetic mutant among them, it should be no problem for the person to set the paper spinning through just the force of mind.

After a couple of abortive attempts, the group around the table all stare intently at the pinwheel, and sure enough, the paper begins turning by itself as ominous music swells.

Scientists at America's elite space research institute play Spin the Paper.

The scientists are spooked at the thought that a telekinetic-capable superhuman is walking among them. Things take a much darker turn when Tanner and Lansing discover Hallson dead in the cabin of the institute’s experimental centrifuge. Alerted by Hallson’s wife (Yvonne De Carlo) that he had not come home, the two had gone to the institute looking for the professor, only to discover the centrifuge whirling around at top speed. Mysteriously, the emergency kill switch didn’t work, and by the time they managed to cut power to the entire facility, Hallson was dead, crushed by the tremendous G forces generated by the contraption.

The only clue that Tanner finds among Hallson’s effects is a name, Adam Hart, scribbled on a piece of paper. Tanner immediately becomes a prime suspect in Hallson’s death when his widow inexplicably tells the police she did not call Tanner to check in on her husband. The hot water he’s in gets even hotter when the police inspector (Gary Merrill) informs him that there is no record of his attending any of the universities listed on his resume.

Mystified and alarmed, Tanner decides to do some investigating himself. When he learns that Adam Hart was a childhood friend of Hallson’s, he drives out to the remote desert town that was Hallson’s boyhood home. Things get even weirder when Hallson’s father and other town members give wildly different descriptions of Adam Hart’s physical appearance.

Another boyhood friend of Hallson’s and Hart’s, Bruce (Aldo Ray), tells Tanner that he has something to show him that will reveal much more about the mystery man. When Bruce drives him out to the middle of the desert, Tanner senses that something’s off, and jumps out of the jeep. He seeks shelter in a patch of scrub brush and palm trees, but then quickly realizes he’s smack in the middle of an Air Force gunnery range -- and a squadron of jets is firing live rockets at him. He manages to light some brush on fire to get attention and the pilots abort the exercise.

George Hamilton hopes with all his heart that
his film doesn't bomb at the box office.

When Bruce later admits that Hart had commanded him to kill anyone looking into his past, Tanner gets a healthy appreciation of the extent of the man's powers. Once back home, Tanner not only has to deal with a faceless psychic superman who apparently wants him dead, but also with his paranoid colleagues who think he might be the superpsychic killer.

As a sci-fi-based psychological/suspense thriller, The Power is an interesting product of its time. The idea of a genetic mutant masquerading as a government scientist and playing with normal humans like a cat toying with a mouse, seems emblematic, if in an unconscious way, of an era of mind-expanding psychedelic drugs and distrust of government authorities over the Vietnam war. (A couple of years before, Star Trek had featured a similar “monster” in the form of Charlie X, an orphaned human teenager who had learned fearsome telekinetic powers from the aliens who raised him.)

However, the film struggles somewhat under the weight of its ambitious premise. In the original novel, the protagonist’s investigations gradually uncover the mutant’s backstory and the extent of his powers. The movie’s 108 minute runtime doesn’t afford this luxury, so the viewer has to use his/her imagination to fill in plot holes and inconsistencies. For example, if Hallson’s boyhood friend Adam Hart is the culprit, how can he hide out at institute in plain sight, so to speak, without Hallson recognizing him? (The inability of Adam Hart’s hometown neighbors to agree on what he looked like is perhaps a clue.)

As the cat-and-mouse game begins in earnest, Tanner witnesses all sorts manifestations of the faceless Hart’s powers. At a crosswalk on a busy city street, Tanner watches as the Don’t Walk pedestrian sign suddenly morphs into an ominous message - “Don’t Run.” In another George Pal-esque scene, the weary Tanner stops momentarily at a toy store window, where to his amazement, a squad of tin soldiers become animated, line up, and shoot their toy guns at him. (This was a knowing wink to Pal’s early career as the creator and animator of stop-motion “Puppetoons” -- many of them depicting classic fairy tales -- that he did in the 1940s.)

Attack of the Puppetoons!

The game becomes potentially deadlier as Tanner stumbles aboard a kids’ merry-go-round at a downtown galleria. Before he knows it, the merry-go-round is whipping around at such great speed that Tanner’s facial muscles are pushed back by the G-forces, echoing the deadly centrifuge ride that killed Hallson earlier on. It’s a nice touch, having these seemingly innocent children’s amusements turned into weapons by the remorseless psi-chopath. Another nice touch is the overlay of a beating heart on the soundtrack as Hart hones in on his prey. It’s an eerie reminder that he can stop a human heart with just his mind.

Against the backdrop of these incredible powers, it’s perhaps a stretch when Tanner, on the run and with Lansing and the physicist Melnicker in tow, decides that the safest hiding place is among the teeming crowds of the big city. They crash a salesmen’s convention at a hotel, and additionally, Tanner warns his colleagues not to sleep. A scene in which they nervously keep watch as the clueless conventioneers dance awkwardly at an after hours party goes on way too long, especially for a scene that doesn’t make much sense. From what we (and Tanner) know of Hart, it should be no problem for him to get to the hapless scientists, regardless of whether they're asleep or awake, or in a big crowd or by themselves.

Some of the film’s logical lapses are explained by the twist ending, but not all. However, the end is punctuated by an hallucinatory, psychedelic montage that allows Pal to indulge in more of his beloved stop-motion animation.

"Holy smokes! I turned the tanning bed up way too high!"

Many of the film’s production staff and cast were no strangers to sci-fi. The Power was the next to last feature film produced by Pal, whose resume was brimming with such classics as When Worlds Collide (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), and The Time Machine (1960), among others. Director Byron Haskin had previously helmed War of the Worlds and Conquest of Space (1955) for Pal, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars in 1964.

Richard Carlson was a sci-fi fixture, having appeared in such classics as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1953) and It Came from Outer Space (1953); he had even directed his own sci-fi feature, Riders to the Stars (1954) around the same time as those films.

Earl Holliman had the distinction of appearing in the one of the all-time great sci-fi films, Forbidden Planet (1956), as well as the inaugural episode of The Twilight Zone TV series in 1959. And of course, Michael Rennie will be forever known as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

Veteran character actors Arthur O’Connell, Nehemiah Persoff, Yvonne DeCarlo, Gary Merrill and Aldo Ray are also welcome familiar faces, but the small roles don’t take advantage of their respective talents.

Dr. Lansing suddenly remembers that
she left the oven on at home.

Leads George Hamilton and Suzanne Pleshette do a credible job looking attractive and registering shock and horror at the appropriate points. Even at this relatively early stage of his career, everyone’s favorite Crispy Colonel was exhibiting the beginnings of the preternatural tan that was to become his signature.

One of the biggest “stars” of The Power is the atmospheric musical score by 3-time Oscar winner Miklós Rózsa. The main theme features a cimbalom, a kind of dulcimer that is played by striking strings with light hammers. The result is eerie and otherworldly. I remember getting a little chill hearing it the first time, and it worked its magic again with the latest viewing.

The Power is one of George Pal’s forgotten sci-fi features. It has minimal special effects, relying instead on generating suspense via a mysterious unseen menace. It has slow moments and logic lapses, but it’s worth looking up for its unique story, good cast, and great score.

Where to find it: Purchase the Warner Archive DVD at fine online outlets like Oldies.com.

The Hardest Ticket to Get in the Solar System

In recent weeks I've been reading with bemusement (and a touch of sadness) about the latest entrepreneurial efforts to sell things that heretofore have not been for sale. With the right app and a fat wallet, you can now reserve that precious downtown parking space or cut in line at the hottest restaurant. And of course, if you live in the Cleveland area and have been thinking about Cavaliers season tickets, you can forget about it -- they sold out in a matter of hours after King James' announcement.

It got me thinking about the ultimate hot commodity. What if the world was about to end, and there were just a couple hundred seats on the international space-ark set to take off for the nearest habitable planet? What would you do to get a seat? Would there be an app for that?

So I decided to consult with one of the biggest fans of When Worlds Collide (the book and the movie), who also happens to be a very good friend. Doug Mappin and I have been discussing science fiction (among other things) for over 25 years. Here's his report on how sci-fi visionaries of the 20th century thought this "big ticket" event might go down.

Now Playing: When Worlds Collide (1951)

Pros: Producer George Pal does a creditable job with a modest budget and no-name actors.
Cons: Most of the richness of the original book is inevitably lost; What would Cecil B. DeMille have done with it?

From book to the silver screen: When Worlds Collide

In the southern hemisphere skies Sven Bronson, a South African astronomer, sees something no one has seen before. Something is moving in the darkness where nothing should be moving. After training his telescope into the skies for nights on end, Bronson realizes two wandering worlds have entered our solar system.

Calculations are made and Bronson secretly enlists the aid of others in the scientific community to formulate a plan for how to tell the world’s populace the news that Earth and everyone on it are doomed.

BUT if lucky, not all of humanity need perish. A scant few hundred people may be able to flee Earth for the smaller of the two worlds (named Bronson Beta) that would take Earth’s place in a similar orbit. Bronson Alpha, roughly the size of Uranus, could wipe out the Earth in a glancing blow.

Thus is the premise for the 1932 novel When Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. Immediately after the publication of the novel, Paramount Pictures optioned the story as a project for famed director Cecil B. DeMille. It might have been intriguing to see what the king of film spectacle would have done with the film, but a script could never be agreed upon and the project sat awaiting someone like producer George Pal to tackle it.

Many a book and film has envisioned the end of the world but none quite so absolute as in this work. Where others concocted a way to kill off humanity, this work went all the way. Not only was mankind wiped out en masse but the world was left as rubble—and presumably our moon too (in the novel that detail is clearly spelled out).

I have long admired the authors of the book for having the courage to do it, to end it all and not wimp out. The phrase “the book was better,” applies to this production. For whatever reasons, film producers and their production teams always want to put their stamp on a cinematic version of a novel. Pal’s production is no exception. Needless to say, When Worlds Collide, and its sequel After Worlds Collide are my two all-time favorite novels.

The movie? Not quite as much. This by no means should be construed as an out-and-out criticism of the movie. Both the book and the movie were products of their time. Both have quaint and widely inaccurate viewpoints of how space travel would take place. Where both succeed, especially the novel, is highlighted in how humanity would face utter annihilation… but the book does it much better.

When Worlds Collide (1951), a Paramount Pictures release, was produced by George Pal, directed by Rudolph Maté and with a script by Sydney Boehm the film took off and in most ways succeeded admirably. But first things first. Pal went on to film two other science fiction classics, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960) -- far more successfully, I might add.

Comparisons are in order. The book, in my opinion, is very well done. The book’s strength lies in its characters. Tony Drake, Eve Hendron and Dave Ransdell are the three main characters. Tony and Eve have long time been lovers, almost on the verge of marriage. Ransdell’s appearance complicates matters as he is drawn to Eve and she him—and naturally because of this, Tony harbors feelings of jealousy of Ransdell. As a result, an uneasy triangle exists between the three characters.

Cole Hendron, Eve’s father, is the leader of The League of Last Days and responsible for finding the means to save a small number of people from the impending doom. The other characters celebrate intelligence and bravery.

The display of humanity is the book's strongest suit. The novel conveys the many sides, good and bad, of mankind as our world faces its demise. The film focuses more on establishing how we will get the chosen few off of the planet.

One prurient aspect of the novel, a favorite theme of author Philip Wylie’s, is how society views the relationships between men and women. As set up in the novel, more women than men survive earth’s destruction. When the Hendron camp formulates plans to transplant a small number of humans to the new world, the men and women become less individuals and more breeding stock to perpetuate our species.

The movie takes a smattering of the book’s details for foundation and then changes them slightly. Mere hints are what is left, leaving the viewer those thoughts to ponder. Some things are for the better, some not so much.

The needle-nosed space ark rests at the bottom of its launch ramp.

One change was an absolute necessity. In the book, Tony Drake was a stockbroker. In the movie, Drake was a doctor. Asking an audience to believe that a stockbroker could be transplanted to the new world was just too much to ask. Changing his professions was a wise choice.

Another aspect that was changed was the science, particularly the portrayal of the space ark. In the book, the spaceship was powered by atomic energy and the ship’s physical shape as described, would with what we know today, be as flightworthy as a brick. Again, the science of the time was so undeveloped that in the years since we can see just how wrong the authors got it.

The movie took a more traditional approach and even then… again, knowing what we know today, the ship is not very flightworthy. The odds a spacecraft would be launched by speeding down a long monorail is impractical… but I must admit, it sure looked pretty darned impressive.

The movie’s emphasis on spectacle, 1950s style, was visually appealing but I still prefer the book. Seeing New York City swamped by a deluge was compelling. Watching the Earth open and belching fire and lava conveyed the doom yet to come. The largest part of the film’s small budget was spent on special effects. And for 1951, they were spectacular (for today’s audience a little less so).

"Hey, I'm not cleaning up that mess!"

When mankind descends into savagery and society self-destructs, the novel clearly shows the dichotomy between civilized men of science versus the rest of society becoming little more than animals ruled by greed, lust and fear. In the movie, this is hinted at and barely shown except for depictions of those who lose out on the lottery and are to be left behind.

The movie inexplicably changed one detail from the book. Personally, I find this change unacceptable. In the book, two planets, Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta, were the instrument of Earth’s destruction. However, in the movie the smaller planet was named Zyra and the larger planet was now a star named Bellus. How 1950s can you get?

In the book, Earth’s destruction was described as follows:

“Tony shuddered as he watched. A distance, short on the screen--even as solar measurements are contemplated--separated the two planets. In the chamber of the hurtling Space Ship no one moved. Earth and Bronson Alpha were but a few moments apart. It seemed that even at their august distance they could perceive motion on the planet, as if the continents below them were swimming across the seas, as if the seas were hurling themselves upon the land; and presently they saw great cracks, in the abysses of which were fire, spread along the remote dry land. Into the air were lifted mighty whirls of steam. The nebulous atmosphere of Bronson Alpha touched the air of Earth, and then the very Earth bulged. Its shape altered before their eyes. It became plastic. It was drawn out egg-shaped. The cracks girdled the globe. A great section of the Earth itself lifted up and peeled away, leaping toward Bronson Alpha with an inconceivable force.

The two planets struck.

Decillions of tons of mass colliding in cosmic catastrophe.”

This scene, even after reading the book hundreds of times (I am not lying), still leaves me in tears. In the film, 30 seconds are shown as Earth approaches Bellus and flames engulf the Earth. I hate to say it but the film’s destruction of our home was somewhat lacking, if not a bit anti-climactic. But then again, Pal was working with a very limited budget.

When theatre-goers collide!

Let us not forget that science fiction films in the 1940s and 50s were considered by Hollywood as the embarrassing bastard stepchild. The fact that films like War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World and a scant few others were able to rise above their meager budgets to challenge the usual Hollywood film fare says a lot about those who believed in science fiction as a legitimate form of filmmaking (and literature). It wasn’t always about green bug eyed monsters and silly robots.

For 1950, the movie’s budget was still inadequate for what Pal was trying to convey. To make up for a lack of a budget, he relied on a cast of no names. The film starred Barbara Rush, Peter Hansen, Richard Derr, Larry Keating and John Hoyt. Each of the actors were virtually unknown at the time. Many went on to bigger things: Peter Hansen, Barbara Rush and John Hoyt each became more well known.

"This is the captain speaking. Fasten your seatbelts
and please observe the no-smoking signs."

Personally, I think the acting in the film, while competent, was far from compelling—stiff perhaps, compared to their respective characters in the book. As you read this, you might think I do not like the film. Au contraire mon ami, I love the film. But as I stated, the word almost always trounces the film. Where the film condenses the essence of the plot, the book exudes the experience, the drama, the futility, the full meal, so to speak.

If you have not seen the movie and some time to kill some pleasant weekend, please do so.  Incidentally, Steven Spielberg is contractually obligated to Paramount Pictures to remake this film. In 2005, he announced he would be producing the film. Normally, I do not like remakes, but in this case, I wish he would! The book deserves a more competent and modern approach (and the sequel would make an awesome television show).

If you have not read the book, I strongly urge you to do that too, but a word of warning. Both When Worlds Collide and its sequel After Worlds Collide are dated in their characterization of science, women and minorities—there are no blacks and the villains—woo-ee! Remember now, the two books were written during the time of the uprising of fascism and Nazism, communism and socialism in Europe and Russia. Japan was still misunderstood and mistrusted.

The book is available at Barnes & Noble (sorry, sad to say it is not available as an e-book). The book most recently was published by the University of Nebraska Press. The two books were published in one volume.

Thanks to Brian for asking me to write this issue. I am a long-time fan of science fiction. I read When Worlds Collide for the first time when I was 10 years old. In the years since, I have read it more times than I can count. Brian and I have, since 1988 (or so) been friends and compared notes on this and that, music, science fiction, politics, life, NASA, space science, fandom, family, Star Trek…. and more.

I have a fantastic son who shares my love for science fiction and friendship with Brian and Beth (Brian’s lovely wife). In but a few months, I will celebrate my 20th year In the United States Navy Reserve. I am a former high school U.S. History teacher and am avid collector of books, tropical fish, cats, music, DVDs… heck, I admit it, I’m nuts!

And to seal it off and to drive it all home about how much I love When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide, I am throwing caution to the wind by attempting to write a prequel to the first novel. Wish me luck, this is hard!

-- Doug Mappin

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Where to find the movie:

Oldies.com


"Written in the stars is a message of doom for this, our world!"