John Saxon vs. the Space Vampire: Queen of Blood

Now Playing: Queen of Blood (1966)

Pros: Dark, noirish sci-fi thriller that cleverly breaks from the conventions of the day
Cons: Most of the special effects consist of footage borrowed from an earlier Russian film; The mix of American and Russian-shot footage is not seamless

This post is part of the John Saxon Blogathon hosted by the distinguished and prolific duo of Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews and Barry at Cinematic Catharsis. After you’ve paid your respects to the Queen of Blood, head on over to their blogs for more insights on John Saxon’s multi-faceted acting career.

John Saxon was way too cool for school, and his dark, brooding good looks got him a break in Hollywood that would last for six decades.

Born Carmine Orrico in Brooklyn, NY in 1936, the newly minted actor John Saxon started out his movie career in the mid-’50s playing smoldering teen delinquents for Universal. The period was a high mark for juvenile delinquent movies, and Saxon was so good doing the teen angst thing in films like Running Wild (1955, with Mamie Van Doren), Rock, Pretty Baby (1956) and Summer Love (1958) that he began receiving fan mail by the truckload.

Saxon’s career took a detour when he secured a plum supporting role in John Huston’s Western The Unforgiven (1960; with Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn). For a short time it looked like he might spend the rest of his career riding horses, with The Plunderers (1960) and Posse from Hell (1961) following in quick succession.

While Saxon never became an A-list leading man, the versatile actor avoided being typecast or limited to any particular genre. And in his long career, he had the privilege of appearing in some truly remarkable and influential films.

Not content to hang around Hollywood, like a number of other contemporary actors he traveled to Europe to make films (the fact that he was fluent in Italian and had some proficiency in Spanish helped a lot. Wikipedia.). In Italy, he made The Evil Eye (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much, 1963) with Mario Bava, which most regard as the first Giallo film.

A decade later, Saxon put his karate and judo expertise to good use, appearing with Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly in the mother of all martial arts films, Enter the Dragon (1973). A short while later he appeared in yet another seminal genre film, playing a police detective in Bob Clark’s pioneering slasher Black Christmas (1974).

Saxon's likeness didn't always make it onto the posters, but
he appeared in quite a few fun and influential genre films.

Fast forward another decade, and Saxon played yet another detective in the first of the phenomenally successful A Nightmare on Elm Street movies. The horror genre, always lurking around the corner during Saxon’s long career, gave him his one and only opportunity at directing, when he took over the reins of Death House (1988) after the original director withdrew. (While the reviews for Death House are not good, Saxon is on record as saying the producers and he differed in their vision for the film, and the producers won. IMDb.) 

Saxon’s sci-fi credits are not as numerous, but there are some interesting projects here and there. The actor’s first stab at sci-fi came while he was overseas. In the UK production The Night Caller (aka Blood Beast from Outer Space, 1965) Saxon plays a scientist battling aliens bent on kidnapping earth females for breeding purposes (where have we heard that one before?). Despite the ambitious premise, the low-budget film is very set-bound, with limited special effects.

More interesting is the TV movie Planet Earth (1974) that he made for Gene Roddenberry. The movie was Roddenberry’s second attempt to sell a series about a Buck Rodgers-like protagonist, Dylan Hunt, who wakes up from suspended animation into a very different, post apocalyptic world (Alex Cord played the hero in the first pilot, Genesis II, broadcast the year before). Alas, Planet Earth became yet another in a string of failed pilots for Roddenberry in the ‘70s.

With almost 200 acting credits spanning six decades, chances were good that a genre character actor like Saxon would find himself working for the most prolific of all B-movie producers, Roger Corman. And indeed, the actor appeared in several Corman productions, including what many regard as the best of all the Star Wars imitators, Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).

The Queen is pleased by what she's seen after sitting through a John Saxon movie marathon.

Star Wars upped the ante considerably for cinematic sci-fi, so Roger felt compelled to spend more than ever before -- around $2 million -- loading up his epic space opera with such stars as George Peppard, Robert Vaughn, Richard Thomas, Sybil Danning, and of course Saxon. And contributing to special effects that were a distinct upgrade for a Corman production (and that would be reused in multiple later films), was none other than a young James Cameron! [IMDb]

But back in the Queen of Blood’s day, the mid-60s, it was still possible to make sci-fi on the cheap -- and there was no one better than Roger Corman for squeezing a nickel until it begged for mercy.

Reading Queen of Blood's plot synopsis, with all its sci-fi bells and whistles, you’d think, after having seen one bloated, effects-laden epic after another steamroll their way through the 20-teens and twenties, that you couldn’t possibly pull off something like that for less than millions (even accounting for 1960s dollars).

Indeed, it’s nothing if not ambitious. The film is set in 1990, a year that, from the perspective of the ‘60s space race, was far off but not too far off, with more than enough time to ensure the conquering of the moon and the nearer planets. (Ah, the vagaries of fickle public support for piloted space exploration, and the meager NASA budgets that followed… but I digress.)

In Queen of Blood’s 1990, humanity has established moon bases, and Mars and Venus are next on the agenda to be colonized. The Astro Communications division of the International Institute of Space Technology has received messages from a mysterious, advanced civilization beyond the solar system that they will be sending an ambassador to Earth.

Apparently, Queen of Blood's space program can also afford colossal statues.

The Institute’s senior scientist, Dr. Farraday (Basil Rathbone) assembles all the staff, including astronauts Allan Brenner (Saxon), Laura James (Judi Meredith), Paul Grant (Dennis Hopper) and Tony Barrata (Don Eitner) to reveal the momentous news.

But, as in all things involving B-movie space travel, the best laid plans always go awry. The institute picks up an alien probe that landed in the ocean (what, the so-called advanced aliens couldn’t aim better than that?), and after viewing footage from the aliens’ flight log, determine that the ambassador’s spacecraft has crash-landed on Mars.

Things get frenetic and complicated as Farraday and staff set up shop on their moon base, and a rescue ship, the Oceana, with Laura, Paul and Commander Brockman (Robert Boon) on board, is dispatched for the Red planet. (Wait, no handsome and intrepid Allan Brenner on the pioneering flight? Don’t worry, read on…)

To while away the time between missions, Allan and Dr. Farraday decide
to start their very own podcast.

The Oceana's instruments are damaged by an abrupt solar flare, but the astronauts manage to land near their target, where they find the crashed alien ship, but discover only one human-looking body and no ambassador. With the Oceana questionable and the ambassador still missing, Allan and Tony propose piloting a second ship to Mars with search satellites to help in hunt for the missing alien dignitary.

A-OK, except, as Farraday points out, the second ship doesn’t have the fuel capacity to get them to Mars and back. Thinking quickly, the brash space jockeys propose landing the second ship on the tiny Martian moon Phobos, and from there take a shuttle craft down to the Martian surface, where they’ll hook up with their colleagues and return on the Oceana.

As luck would have it, when Allan and Tony arrive on Phobos, they find yet another crashed ship -- the aliens’ emergency shuttle craft, complete with a very much alive alien dignitary (played by Florence Marly) -- conveniently near where they’ve set down. But then luck turns on them when they realize there’s only room for two on their own shuttle that will take them down to the Oceana, which is their ticket home. And, to add salt to the wound, the Oceana doesn’t have the fuel to pick up any lingering astronauts on Phobos and still make it home.

The daring space jockeys come to the alien Queen's rescue.

Tony gallantly insists that Allan accompany the ambassador (the consequence being that Tony will be marooned on Phobos until a relief ship can be dispatched to rescue him... sure, sure they will.).

Little do the astronauts know that, while the trips to Mars and Phobos were tense and hazardous, the trip back to Earth with their alien guest will be a doozy! At first the crew bend over backwards to keep their guest comfortable. It helps that, while her skin is a subtle shade of green, the alien is quite easy on the eyes in an exotic, outerspacey kind of way. She seems to have an aversion to earth women, glaring at Laura, but she takes quite nicely to dashing Paul, who acts like a smitten schoolboy as he helpfully shows her how to drink through a straw.

"It's called a Big Gulp, your highness, and everyone on Earth is addicted to them."

Commander Brockman takes his scientific curiosity a bit too far when he tries to draw the alien’s blood and she forcefully demurs. Brockman idiotically ventures to guess that she has a low threshold for pain (the consent thing seems to not have occurred to him).

But no worries, the Queen will soon turn the tables and draw blood from the earthmen -- she’s got a thirst, but not for scientific knowledge!

To say the least, that is a lot to cram into a 78 minute sci-fi B movie destined for the drive-in circuit. But this was child’s play for executive producer Roger Corman, who was extremely adept at making meager resources go where no resources had gone before.

Laura and Allan discuss how they're going to break it to the Queen that
they already gave at the office blood drive.

One tactic was to offer directing gigs to talented new and aspiring filmmakers who would jump at the opportunity and be willing to work cheaply. Corman hired Curtis Harrington to write and direct. At this point, Harrington had only one other feature film under his belt -- the dark and moody (and critically well-received) Night Tide (1961, starring Dennis Hopper). But the art house-adjacent Night Tide hadn’t opened many doors in Hollywood, so Harrington was happy for the opportunity even if he didn’t have complete artistic control.

Another tactic was to let skilled artists and technicians on other films do your effects work for you. Harrington, in his memoir Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, relates,

“The film would make use of some spectacular special effects footage from a Russian film to which [Corman] had acquired the American rights. Corman owned many of these films, and it seemed to have been a wise investment. I was to devise my own story that would incorporate scenes of a space station on the moon (from the Russian footage) with scenes of an alien spaceship stranded on one of the moons of Mars (which we would shoot).
  The Soviet film, Mechte Navstrechu [1963], was a fable about the world’s natural fears of the nature of aliens, and the discovery at the end of the film was that the ruler of the aliens simply wants to be friends with us. I turned my film, Queen of Blood, into the exact opposite of this. I devised a tale in which the queen of the aliens …is a vampiric creature who seeks a new food source for her dying planet. The food source, as it turns out, is the human race.” [Curtis Harrington, Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood: The Adventures of an Aesthete in the Movie Business, Drag City Incorporated, 2013, p. 109]

(Alright, be honest, which movie would you rather see -- one about overcoming xenophobia and prejudice to unite with our spiritual brothers and sisters from another galaxy, or one about an evil alien monster in disguise stalking trusting, innocent humans and drinking their blood? I thought so.)

If there were just one or two scenes with the inserted footage, it would be one thing, But Queen of Blood relies extensively on the Soviet film for any sort of long, establishing shots, spaceships taking off, exteriors of moon bases, and weird, alien landscapes. The Mechte Navstrechu footage is dark, soft-focused and beautifully surreal, with reds and greens predominating, making the transition to the brightly lit American-shot interiors jarring.

I don't suppose the Soviet filmmakers ever imagined that their beautiful work would be sold as fodder for an American capitalist exploitation flick.

But as the tone of the film changes from one of triumph at rescuing the alien VIP, to suspicion and then disgust and horror at the monster in the astronauts' midst, Harrington’s scenes get progressively darker, with the ship’s interiors taking on a blood-red hue. Harrington also adds a subtle buzzing to the soundtrack as the alien stealthily moves around the ship, emphasizing that despite her appearance, she has more in common with a queen bee than a human being.

Not only does Harrington upend the tropes of Soviet Socialist filmmaking, he also slyly subverts those of his fellow American B moviemakers. In so many B sci-fi movies leading up to Queen of Blood, scientists were often first responders who discovered and tried to understand the threat, but it was the military that had to step in and take care of it. The granddaddy of such films was The Thing from Another World (1951), in which the tough military guys in bomber jackets shove aside the effete scientists who just want to communicate with the alien visitor, and roast the Thing like a big, humanoid marshmallow.

In Harrington’s contrary film, it’s the nerds in lab coats who win the day, overruling -- you guessed it -- our man of the hour, John Saxon, who, as the very straight-laced, all-American Allan Brenner, is repelled by the enigmatic Queen from the get-go (and very nearly loses his life to her).

Allan reacts in disgust at the sight of the blood-gorged alien Queen... or is it his meager paycheck?

SPOILERS: In spite of all the death and destruction the Queen has caused, the surviving astronauts (with the exception of Allan) are like automatons programmed to execute The Plan: defend and preserve the visitor at all costs for the benefit of scientific knowledge. When the ship returns to port, the scientists swarm around like kids in a candy store, collecting the eggs that the Queen has laid all over the ship (Ugh!). It’s a dark, cynical break with past tropes, and a harbinger of sci-fi to come.

As Harrington puts it in his memoir: “Some years later, it was very flattering to realize that I had created the prototype for a whole series of science-fiction movies dealing with monstrous creatures from outer space, beginning with Ridley Scott’s Alien.” [Harrington, p. 109]

A Space Institute scientist serves up a tray of the Queen's special holiday deviled eggs. (Played by Forry Ackerman, founder of every Monster Kid's favorite mag, Famous Monsters of Filmland.)

Where to find it: Streaming | DVD

Men are from Earth, Women are from Venus: Queen of Outer Space

Now Playing: Queen of Outer Space (1958)

Pros: Shot in glorious Cinemascope; Exotic Zsa Zsa Gabor is campy gold as a Venusian scientist
Cons: Talky, set-bound and slow moving; Recycled props, costumes and plot make it seem hang-dog and threadbare in spite of the lush cinematography

Has it really been a year since the last “So Bad It’s Good” blogathon hosted by Rebecca at Taking Up Room? I’m no astrophysicist, but it seems like time is speeding up as this blue marble we call Earth makes its shaky way around the Sun.

Last year I wrote about some would-be occupiers of Earth, the pop-eyed Killers from Space. The year before that, it was all about the megalomaniacal Brain from Planet Arous that wanted to install itself as Earth’s ruler, as well as sample some of the planet’s sensual pleasures by taking over the bodies of unsuspecting earthmen.

Carrying the theme forward, this time around I decided to upgrade from putative rulers to actual space royalty. Ruling Earth is one thing, but the entirety of outer space is a whole other ball of wax. If anyone is up to the task, it's the stylish and accomplished women of Venus, as depicted in the 1958 B space opera Queen of Outer Space.

But before we get into the details of the Venusian royal court, a bit of background. Queen of Outer Space came out at the height of Cold War mania, occasioned by the Russians’ launch of Sputnik 1 the year before, beating the good ol’ U.S. of A. into space.

In retrospect, it's hard to see what all the fuss was about.

At a time when our rockets kept blowing up on the launch pad, it seemed like the Soviets could do no wrong, and were set to make space a Red domain. But if there was an existential struggle between the so-called free world and scary communism going on, you wouldn’t have known it from watching Hollywood sci-fi. Instead, it was the war between the sexes that achieved escape velocity and was being bitterly fought in outer space.

Incongruously for an era characterized by stay-at-home moms and Father Knows Best paternalism, B movie astronauts kept encountering female-dominated societies in their space explorations (and often the crews of the Earth spaceships included women -- see my post on women astronauts in ‘50s sci-fi.) 

• 1953: In Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, the comedic duo blast off for the red planet, take a detour through New Orleans, then end up on Venus, where the beautiful female inhabitants have banished all males.
• 1953: An expedition to the moon (which includes a female navigator) finds breathable air in a lunar cavern, giant moon spiders, and a menacing group of leotard-clad Cat-Women of the Moon.
• 1954: After a devastating Martian war between the sexes in which the females emerged victorious, Nyah, the Devil Girl from Mars, is dispatched to Earth to collect male specimens to help repopulate her home planet (see my review here).
• 1956: Upon landing on the 13th moon of Jupiter, an expedition discovers the beautiful Fire Maidens of Outer Space, their old male guardian, and a ratty beast-man, the remnants of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
• 1958: It’s deja-vu all over again as yet another Missile to the Moon lands, discovers breathable air, giant spiders, and yes, another tribe of scheming Moon women.

Next to space Amazons, giant spiders were the biggest threat to '50s B movie astronauts.

Queen of Outer Space was the culmination of the ‘50s space Amazon trope, with the added attraction of exotic Zsa Zsa Gabor looking absolutely fabulous in her stylish space outfits.

Publicity for previous films had bragged of casts made up of “Hollywood Cover Girls” (Cat-Women of the Moon) or assorted beauty contest winners, but Queen of Outer Space stood out by having an authentic Hollywood glamor queen heading up the troupe.

Zsa Zsa was a Celebrity with a capital ‘C’ who appeared in films and TV, but was best known for her extravagant social life. By 1958 she had already been married 3 times, but the Hungarian man-eater was only getting started -- she would chew up and spit out 6 more husbands before she was through (!!). 

With images of glamorous Zsa Zsa front-and-center on the poster and various publicity stills for the film, you might think that she was the Queen, but you’d be mistaken. The titular character was actually portrayed by Laurie Mitchell, a beauty queen turned B movie regular who also played an alien femme fatale in Missile to the Moon, released the same year. But even with her royal title, there was no competing with Zsa Zsa, as Mitchell’s character wore a weird bejeweled mask for much of the film (we'll get to that a bit later).

The participants ready themselves for the talent portion of the 'Queen of Outer Space' competition.

Synopsis

In the far off, far out year of 1985, a spaceship is being readied for take-off. The crew, consisting of Captain Neal Patterson (Eric Fleming), Lt. Mike Cruze (Dave Willock) and Lt. Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz), is assigned to take top space scientist Prof. Konrad (Paul Birch) to a remote space station, where some sort of trouble is brewing.

The crew grumble about the boring nature of the mission, but it becomes anything but routine when enroute to the station, they see a laser-like beam slashing through space. As they watch on the viewscreen, the beam hones in on the space station, which blows up in spectacular fashion.

The ship then gets caught up in the mysterious beam, but instead of blowing up, it accelerates to the point where the instruments can’t keep up. They crash land on a planet with breathable air and lush vegetation. From the instrument readings, the Prof. deduces that they’ve landed on Venus.

Frontiers of Science
Capt. Neal Patterson: “You don't just accidentally land on a planet 36 million miles away!”
Prof. Konrad: “It would appear that all things are possible in space.” [IMDb]

The crew and the professor build a camp and take turns keeping watch, but inevitably Mike dozes off and they’re suddenly surrounded by raygun-toting female Venusians who look like they stepped off the set of the original Star Trek show and time traveled back 10 years.

The men are taken to the royal palace where they are introduced to Queen Yllana (Mitchell) and her retinue on the ruling Council. Patterson explains that they were on a peaceful mission, but the Queen seems highly suspicious, and her guards are openly contemptuous of men.

The earthmen are held captive while Yllana and the Council decide their fate. Chief Venusian scientist Talleah (Gabor) is secretly opposed to Yllana’s tyrannical rule, and visits the crew to enlist their aid. She explains that Yllana led a revolt against Venus’ war-like men, killing most and imprisoning the few that could be of some use to the planet’s new female-led regime.

The earthmen argue over who made the wrong turn and got them stuck on a planet populated by beautiful space Amazons.

Yllana was horribly disfigured in the revolt, and as a result became deranged and determined to use her powerful new Beta Disintegrator to rid the universe of hated men. Will Talleah and her band of dissidents successfully team up with the earthmen to prevent the Queen of Outer Space from blowing up Earth itself?

Foundations of Civilization
Prof. Konrad: “Perhaps this is a civilization that exists without sex.”
Lt. Larry Turner: “You call that civilization?”
Prof. Konrad: “Frankly, no.” [IMDb] 

Those of us of a certain age remember a time when sci-fi and fantasy movies were cobbled together quickly and cheaply to fill out drive-in double bills, as opposed to the current crop of would-be blockbusters that cost hundreds of millions and require small armies of CGI programmers and technicians to produce.

Here at Films From Beyond, we appreciate the ingenuity and resourcefulness of filmmakers who lack big budgets to tell their stories. Queen of Outer Space is nothing if not resourceful, like a down-on-her-luck diva proudly sashaying around town in her latest Goodwill fashion finds, daring anyone she meets to say something.

Zsa Zsa is ready for her close-up.

Queen’s hand-me-downs include the spaceship model and other props and sets from the 1956 B sci-fi epic World Without End (see my review here), as well as astronaut costumes recycled from MGM’s classic Forbidden Planet.

The producers also saved some bucks by avoiding location shooting and limiting special effects to the detonation of some smoke bombs and sparkly fireworks. As a result, Queen is mostly a succession of static set pieces with actors standing around delivering expositive dialog, trading quips, and scheming in grand soap opera style.

Queen was filmed in lush color Cinemascope, which is perhaps where most of the budget went -- that, and attending to Ms. Gabor's every need. In an interview with film historian Tom Weaver, Laurie Mitchell explained who the real queen was on the set:

“When it came to Zsa Zsa, she wanted this, she wanted that, she wanted glitter in her costumes -- she wanted certain things which were very, very expensive. An actress she wasn't, but in those days she had some sort of name, and so they wanted her for the picture. She used to yell -- she’d want a certain color hair, she didn’t want the other girls to have the same color hair and so on.” [Tom Weaver, I Talked with a Zombie: Interviews with 23 Veterans of Horror and Sci-Fi Films and Television, McFarland, 2009, p. 198 - 211]

Makeup secrets of the Queen
"Then there were the days when he [makeup artist Emile LaVigne] had to make my face up to look burned, for the scenes where the 'vicked kveen' is unmasked. Putty and black and blue marks and everything, to make it look like my face was eaten up by radiation. Emile, the darling, he should rest in peace, he’d put the makeup on me right on the set.
…
I remember saying that, ‘God forbid’ -- God forbid there should be a person like this. Watching it go on … it could cause nightmares! Emile would say, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get it off,' and every day, he used cold cream, or … whatever he got it off with. Oh God, they took so many pictures. They would be right there with their cameras, every day.” [Ibid.]

We dare you to click on this image and unmask the Queen of Outer Space!

The director and chief Zsa Zsa wrangler was Edward Bernds, a B movie veteran who was more used to handling court jesters than imperious celebrities -- among his 100+ credits are more than a few Three Stooges and Bowery Boys vehicles (he also directed World Without End which supplied Queen with many of its props).

Queen’s script also has a distinguished, if not exactly royal, pedigree. Legendary screenwriter and Academy Award winner Ben Hecht, who was involved in one prestige picture after another in the ‘30s and ‘40s, contributed the original story, “Queen of the Universe,” upon which Charles Beaumont’s script was based.

Beaumont had only a handful of writing credits by this point, but would soon launch himself into a very productive screen and TV writing career, contributing to such series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, as well as adapting such horror classics as The Haunted Palace and The Masque of the Red Death before his untimely death in 1967.

Talleah's motto: Working hard is no excuse for looking frumpy.

Queen of Outer Space is not a shining star on either man’s resume -- it’s talky and stagey and not a lot happens for long stretches. But then, it’s gloriously gaudy with its upscale Cinemascope treatment, and some of the dialog will have you either slapping your forehead, guffawing, or smiling in wry bemusement (or even all three at once).

And finally there’s Zsa Zsa, the Venusian scientist with the heavy accent who looks equally mahvelous cooking up formulas in her lab or flirting with randy earthmen. Zsa Zsa may have been difficult on the set, but it’s a good thing the production stuck with her, because who else could have saved Venus, the Planet of Love, from a demented, man-hating Queen?

Origins of Love
Capt. Neal Patterson: “We may not have a chance to talk later. We may not even live through the day. But, I just want to say, while I have the chance: I love you.”
Talleah: “Loff - I've almost forgotten. But, if it is the varm feeling dat makes my heart sing, ten I too loff you.” [IMDb]

"I loff you too Dah-link!"

That ‘70s Sci-Fi TV Movie #4: The Astronaut

Now Playing: The Astronaut (1972)

Pros: Good, affecting performances by Monte Markham and Susan Clark as two lonely people caught up in a government conspiracy
Cons: The rationale for the conspiracy and its incompetent execution strain credulity

Back in 2019, a YouGov poll commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing found that 20% of respondents believed that it was definitely or probably true that the landing was faked. Such skepticism has existed almost since the moment Neil Armstrong took that “one small step” on the lunar surface, but many were dismayed that 50 years on, the endlessly debunked theory still had traction.

In 1977 the conspiracy theory reached its entertainment apogee with Capricorn One, about NASA officials secretly scrapping a mission to Mars when defects in the spacecraft are discovered, but staging a landing in order to ensure further program funding. When an investigative reporter (Elliott Gould) starts snooping around, and the empty returning capsule burns up in the atmosphere on re-entry, the fake mission’s astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O.J. Simpson) realize they have become a liability the agency will have to deal with in order to keep its secrets.

A full five years before Capricorn One (and while the Apollo program was still sending men to the moon), a TV movie, The Astronaut, featured yet another convoluted government plot to snow the public.

In this one, the heads of the Mars mission at the U.S. Department of Space (renamed perhaps to spare the feelings of real-life NASA administrators) implement a back-up plan when the first man on Mars, Col. Brice Randolph, mysteriously dies during an EVA on the surface (they’re able to cut the video feed before the public can figure out what’s going on).

In order to buy time to find the cause of the astronaut’s death and prevent the President from shutting down the program altogether, the administrators implement a back-up plan: find a double for Randolph, sneak him into the spacecraft when it splashes down with the surviving astronaut, pretend the mission was a success, parade the double around for the benefit of the public, stage a boating accident in which “Randolph” goes permanently missing, and finally, give the double a new face and a new life. (Whew! I think I’d just take the “win” of having successfully landed an astronaut on Mars, acknowledge that there are many dangerous unknowns in spaceflight, and wait for a new president who is more pro-space program. But then, that would make for a very dull movie.)

They find a look-alike, Eddie Reese (Monte Markham), who is a disgraced ex-pilot who ejected from a jet that crashed and killed three people on the ground, and has been wandering from job to job ever since. As the spacecraft with the surviving astronaut heads home, Reese’s face is altered to be identical to Randolph’s (“We have the technology!”), and from tapes, he learns to talk, walk and act like Randolph.

"We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was..."
Oops, wrong TV show!

As if that weren’t enough disbelief to suspend, the mission head honcho Kurt Anderson (Jackie Cooper), delays telling Randolph's wife Gail (Susan Clark) the bad news, as she has recently had a miscarriage and is emotionally vulnerable. So, once the plan is put into effect and the mission is publicly celebrated as a success, Anderson sends Reese/Randolph home to Gail, much to Reese’s extreme discomfort. (!?)

The Astronaut indulges in the old Hollywood fantasy that plastic surgery can create a double so exact that (s)he can fool even people who know them intimately. I’m prepared to accept that you could put one over on the public whose only exposure to the celebrity was through grainy TV broadcasts and newspaper photos (this was 1972 after all), but fooling a wife who knows all her husband’s moles and various other (ahem) idiosyncrasies … I don’t think so.

And then there’s the idea of rushing plan B into action based on the certainty that the program will be toast once the news of Randolph’s death breaks. A couple of times Anderson talks about “buying time” until they can figure out what killed the Colonel, as if the moment it became public knowledge funds would be completely cut off (and as if the senior Congresspeople whose districts benefited from the space program wouldn’t have a say in it). This seems to be a very naive view of how government works.

Mission head Kurt Anderson (Jackie Cooper, left) contemplates saying goodbye
to his pension if word gets out.

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH SOME MILD SPOILERS

Shaky premise or not, the movie builds to a very effective (and affecting) crisis when Gail recovers enough from the loss of her baby to discover that her husband is not her husband. The movie suggests that it’s not so much minute physical differences that betray the imposter (although at one point, while Eddie and Gail are holding hands, Gail remarks that his hands seem somehow smaller… okay people, get your minds out of the gutter!).

Gail tells Eddie that she knew he couldn’t be Randolph, because he's been too kind and gentle with her. It seems the Colonel was, like a good military man and astronaut, all about the work, and to add insult to injury had spent most of the marriage belittling Gail’s hopes and dreams, including her desire for a family.

In an irony of ironies, the space program, like some behemoth fairy godmother, has sent Gail a tender, caring version of her husband at the time of her greatest need. And Reese, who has been shunned by society for a moment of tragic weakness, has found a reason to live in Gail.

Gail (Susan Clark) starts to figure out this man is not her husband.

When the couple inform the higher-ups that Gail is in on the plot, Anderson graciously agrees to let the two disappear together in the boating accident. But complications ensue when Eddie and Gail find out that by going ahead with the plan, lives will be put in danger (and that’s all the spoilers you’re going to get).

Susan Clark is wonderful as a woman who, on the verge of a breakdown, recovers her equanimity and self-respect under the most unusual of circumstances. Trained at the London’s prestigious Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts, Clark secured a contract with Universal Studios in the mid-’60s, eventually playing opposite the likes of Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda in Madigan (1968), and Robert Redford in Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969).

Television dominated in the ‘70s, which saw her in such high profile TV movie roles as Babe (1976; playing the golfing legend “Babe” Zaharias) and the title role of Amelia Earhart the following year. Two years before The Astronaut, she co-starred with Eric Braeden in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), the sci-fi classic about artificial intelligence run-amok (timelier than ever!).

In The Astronaut, Monte Markham has the singular challenge of being an actor playing a disgraced pilot pretending to be an astronaut. Now in his late 80s, Markham has done it all, with multitudinous acting, producing and directing credits. He even started his own production company in the early ‘90s.

Monte’s big break came as the lead in the TV comedy The Second Hundred Years (1967-68) playing a man who is revived after spending decades in accidental suspended animation. After that he parlayed his stolid, “Everyman” presence into dozens upon dozens of movie and TV roles in every genre. And like the Energizer Bunny, he’s still going, with IMDb listing acting credits as recent as this year, and as if that’s not enough, 5 upcoming projects.

"To be Brice Randolph or not to be Brice Randolph, that is the question..."

Where to find it: Streaming (low-res and soft-looking copy, but watchable)

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