HERETICS ON MARS: CONQUEST OF SPACE

George Pal's rocket ride as a producer of science fiction epics encountered severe commercial turbulence with 1955's Conquest of Space. The picture, inspired by the bestselling non-fiction book of the same title by writer Willy Ley and artist Chesley Bonestell (which Arthur C. Clarke once suggested "perhaps did more than any other to inspire a generation of would-be space cadets"), arrested the momentum that Pal had achieved with his 1950 hit Destination Moon and his subsequent special effects extravaganzas When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and the ecological revenge epic The Naked Jungle (1954). Conquest's box office failure foiled his plans to adapt Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's sequel After Worlds Collide, ensuring that the producer would not return to the science fiction genre--triumphantly, as it transpired--for five years with another H.G. Wells adaptation, The Time Machine.

There's no "plot" as such to Ley and Bonestell's book, so screenwriters Phillip Yordan, Barre Lyndon, and George Worthing Yates eventually fashioned, through numerous rewrites, a fairly realistic storyline which borrows heavily from Wernher von Braun's The Mars Project and manages to incorporate both a deadly oedipal conflict and crowd-pleasing, scantily-clad dancing girls borrowed from, of all things, a Bob Hope movie. In what was, at the time of the film's release, the Near Future, a circular space station not terribly dissimilar from the one in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) orbits Earth while, nearby, a rocket is being constructed for lunar exploration. The station's Captain, Samuel T. Merritt (Walter Brooke), must contend with the hazards of his men falling victim to space fatigue, as well as with his homesick son Barney (Eric Fleming), who was married a mere three months before heading for the stars and has put in for a transfer home (which his father categorically denies). After the astronauts' dinner is interrupted by a meteor shower, tossing everyone all over the place, dapper Dr. George Fenton (William Hopper) arrives with orders from the U.S. President that the rocket's new destination is Mars; he also promotes Merritt to a General.

It seems exceedingly odd not to visit the Moon first, but of course producer Pal had already accomplished that feat in 1950. The normally gung-ho General is distressed by this change of plans, even though his dejected son is actually ecstatic at the prospect. Merritt reluctantly agrees to proceed with the mission, selecting four men to accompany him after first informing the candidates "that no one but an idiot would volunteer": Captain Barney and Sergeants Imoto (botanist Benson Fong), atrocious comic relief and alleged electronics whiz Jackie Siegle (Dick Wesson surrogate Phil Foster), whom the General tells point-blank, "I don't think there's a man on the Wheel with less formal education than you possess," and medicine man Andre Fodor (a German-accented Ross Martin in his film debut). Merritt doesn't wish to take his too-adoring friend Sergeant Mahoney (Mickey Shaughnessy) with them because he's "twenty years too old" (although the Sarge is merely three months younger than the General), but the big lug smuggles himself aboard the rocket anyway, and the men are off on their interplanetary voyage.

It's at this point that the picture takes an unexpectedly religious turn, as the General unpacks his King James Bible and ponders the wisdom of the expedition. After Fodor's airline is accidentally severed during a spacewalk and his corpse drifts away, Merritt ratchets up the religiosity, engaging in a philosophical debate with his son as if he's channeling space exploration opponent C.S. Lewis. "The biblical limitations of Man's wanderings are set down as being the four corners of the Earth," he insists. "Not Mars, or Jupiter, or infinity. The question is...what are we--explorers or invaders?" The General submits that the intrusion of man "into the sacred domain of God" constitutes a virtual "act of blasphemy," but Barney doesn't buy it: he sees a divine pattern in the "too perfect to be accidental" coincidence "that at the very time when Man's resources on Earth are reaching an end, Man develops the ability to leave his own world and seek replenishment on other planets," assuring his father that "the universe was put here for Man to conquer." Merritt becomes increasingly skeptical as space fatigue exacerbates his previously-lapsed faith, and finally attempts to sabotage the mission by accelerating the rocket just as it's coming in for its Martian landing. Later, as the other astronauts are exploring the planet, Merritt tries to dump the ship's fuel; when Barney returns, his father fires a pistol at him and the two men struggle, with Barney accidentally killing the General.

Mahoney, who already resents the General's son because he doesn't believe he measures up to the old man, arrives in time to witness Merritt's death, and promises the Captain he'll pay dearly for his actions. Meanwhile, the crew are stuck on Mars as they must wait a year for a launch window. There's no water, and the astronauts' spirits weaken, even though Imoto sows a symbolic seed in the Martian soil. Mahoney pronounces the mission "cursed," while Siegle laments their lack of liquid "on a lousy, dried-up ball in the corner pocket of nowhere." Fortunately for the crew, a decidedly unlikely Christmas snowfall--another too-perfect-to-be-accidental coincidence--provides them with water, and the seed sprouts a flower. There's a climactic earthquake, which the astronauts escape in an emergency liftoff that leaves them bleeding from their ears, mouths, nostrils, and I shudder to think what else. Once they've recovered, Mahoney decides to let bygones be bygones with the knowledge that General Merritt will be remembered historically "for [being] the man who conquered space," rather than a religious fanatic.

The spiritual aspect of the picture places the film squarely in the curious sub-genre of Christian science fiction cinema, a select group which includes such fantastic fare as William A. Wellman's The Next Voice You Hear (1950) and Harry Horner's Red Planet Mars (1952), though Conquest lacks the obsessive anti-Communism of the latter movie. The metaphysics may have been a bit unusual for audiences at the time--indeed, the film's subplot comes, like its meteors, out of nowhere--but it's worth noting that several real-life astronauts have experienced everything from mental breakdowns to mystical awakenings, which, as J.G. Ballard perceived, "[suggests] that more may have been taking place than we realized" in the Apollo program. It's highly improbable that Conquest's Space Corps would place such a zealot in orbit, but the scenarists craft a reasonably absorbing psychological case study nonetheless. Merritt's mental disintegration, in fact, prefigures another sub-genre--that of the Disturbed Astronaut--which found its fullest flowering in William Peter Blatty's cult psychodrama The Ninth Configuration (1980). There's no explicit anti-Christian bias on display here; rather, the General is rendered as well-intentioned but dangerously deluded, and it's strongly implied that Divine Intervention is responsible for the astronauts' unexpectedly Merry Christmas.

A surprisingly pivotal character is that of Sergeant Imoto, who functions as the conscience of the film. Earnestly arguing for the Mars mission by recalling the imperialism of his native land, he admits that Japan's aggression "was bad...but there were reasons....To the Western world at that time, Japan was a fairybook nation [of] little people living in a strange land of rice-paper houses--people who had almost no furniture, who sat on the floor and ate with chopsticks. The quaint houses," he continues, "...were made of paper because there was no other material available. And the winters in Japan are as cold as they are in Boston. And the chopsticks--there was no metal for forks and knives and spoons, but slivers of wood could suffice. So it was with the little people of Japan, little as I am now, because for countless generations we have not been able to produce the food to make us bigger." Imoto predicts that "Japan's yesterday will be the world's tomorrow: too many people and too little land." The Martian expedition is thus a first step towards "provid[ing] the resources the human race will need if they are to survive." When the General, who's plainly affected by this rather dubious speech, assures Imoto that he's "not a little man," it's a sure indication on the filmmakers' part that the West must move on from the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki towards the utopian goal of interstellar exploration--as long, of course, as the United States is in charge of all this resource-gathering expansionism. The multiracial Wheel crew, incidentally, anticipates the cast of Kurt Maetzig's First Spaceship on Venus (1959), David Bradley's 12 to the Moon (1960), and Antonio Margheriti's Assignment Outer Space (1961).

The dumbfounding appearance of the costumed dancers, who cavort on the station's enormous video screen during the astronauts' recreational downtime, temporarily transports Conquest of Space into the realm of the musical--indeed, their pulchritudinous performance is excerpted from Claude Binyon's 1953 comedy Here Come the Girls. The ladies, led by an uncredited Rosemary Clooney, are lovely but ludicrous, though their rendition of "Ali Baba (Be My Baby)" is superior to Woody Woodpecker's contribution to Destination Moon's film-within-a-film. The acting is largely standard for the genre, but Shaughnessy is laughably obnoxious and almost as bad as Foster (who, exactly like Destination's Wesson, "entertains" his fellows with a harmonica). Byron Haskin, who had previously helmed The War of the Worlds and The Naked Jungle for Pal, here directs less vigorously, but there's only so much he can do with the awkward script. He does, however, capture not only the wonder of space travel but the miserable tedium as well of life amongst the stars, which to my knowledge no other film of the time duplicated.

Paramount's 2004 DVD presents Conquest of Space in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and is anamorphically enhanced for widescreen monitors. The eighty-one minute picture contains fourteen chapter stops; unfortunately, there are no extras, not even a blessed trailer. As with many of Haskin's pictures, the Technicolor is vibrant, serving well the palette of cinematographer Lionel Lindon, which also has the unfortunate effect of making the visual effects (by, among others, Ivyl Burks and John P. Fulton) look even more artificial than they must have appeared on theatre screens. Bonestell, for whom a Martian crater was named, provides his usual memorable background art, though he later admitted he never even saw the finished film. Here's that missing trailer.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING: DESTINATION MOON

It was not until the 1950s that science fiction emerged as a prolific film genre. There had been sporadic excursions into the unknown throughout the preceding decades (prominently among them Fritz Lang's Metropolis [1925] and William Cameron Menzie's Things to Come [1936], as well as the Flash Gordon [1936-40] and Buck Rogers [1939] serials), but it was only sixty years ago that production of these features went into overdrive, alchemically blending new, often ominous, technology with the purest pulp fantasy to produce cinematic gold. The romance of machines quickly dominated the motion picture industry, just as rock and roll would soon rule radio, and our collective unconscious would never be quite the same again.

Even at their most cynical, these fantasias reflected the fears and fascinations of their times. There was a subgenre for nearly every theme imaginable, from nuclear paranoia to time twisters, alien invasion to space opera. Like its cousins, this last category combined reds-under-the-beds hysteria with an explicit sense of wonder. As the super powers began reaching for the inner solar system, thematic concerns of totalitarianism and impending disaster would persist until the end of the Cold War, while their mutant offspring, the Special Effects Extravaganza, has outlasted both space and arms races to become the cultural norm.

Although Kurt Neumann's exploitation quickie, Rocketship X-M (1950), beat producer George Pal's same-year Destination Moon to the screen by four months, it is Pal's film which is generally considered to have inaugurated the Hollywood Space Race. Directly inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's fondly-remembered juvenile novel, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)--in which three enterprising teens and a Manhattan Project physicist refit a mail rocket and journey to the moon, where they foil, of all things, a Nazi plot--Destination Moon eliminates the fascist foofaraw to become a hard-science, no-frills affair, which is both the picture's strength and its weakness. Accordingly, it stands out from the more fanciful films that monopolized the field of interstellar travel; Heinlein himself mercifully vetoed "a version of the script which included dude ranches, cowboys, guitars, and hillbilly songs on the Moon, plus a trio of female hepsters singing into a mike."

Airplane manufacturer Jim Barnes (John Archer) and Army General Thayer (Tom Powers) convince a skeptical group of investors to defy the peacetime inaction of the (obviously Communist-infiltrated) U.S. government and fund scientist Charles Cargraves' (Warner Anderson) lunar rocket. "Why go?" one of the moneybags asks Barnes. "We'll know when we get there," he replies matter-of-factly. "We'll tell you when we get back."

To drive their message home, Barnes screens for the men, and audiences everywhere, an amusing Woody Woodpecker short which demonstrates the feasibility, as well as the necessity, of an American moon shot. General Thayer seals the deal with a Red Scare scenario in which a foreign power reaches the moon first and controls Earth with missiles. Silence. Lionel Lindon's camera pans across a sea of identically somber faces. The businessmen cough up the capital.

Of course, there is the inevitable federal intervention, as the space pioneers are forbidden to test their atomic engine in the Mojave Desert. Meanwhile, the Fourth Estate manufactures public protest. "Somebody's out to get us," Barnes declares. (Nameless saboteurs have already exploded an experimental rocket in the film's opening.) The industrialist decides to launch almost immediately; when Cargraves points out that no flight crew has been trained, Barnes counters that the take-off is fully automatic. The intrepid trio add insufferable comic relief Joe Sweeney (Dick Wesson) to their team when his fellow technician falls ill, and depart just before dawn and the arrival of a court injunction.

Numerous factors must be contended with: g-forces, the influence of which causes the astronauts to pull the sort of distorted faces (actually masks) most often seen on hammy guitarists; ghastly noises as their direct flight ship, Luna, breaks the sound barrier; spacesickness; and Sweeney's heinous harmonica interludes. When it is discovered that the radar antenna is frozen solid--Luna cannot land without it--Cargraves, Barnes, and Sweeney embark upon the cinema's first spacewalk, and a magnificent accomplishment it is. Dangerous, too: the scientist drifts off the rocket and has to be rescued by Barnes, who ingeniously operates an oxygen tank to reach him.

Like Apollo 11 in real life, Luna nearly runs out of fuel before it sets down on the moon. Barnes and Cargraves descend to the desolate brown-and-grey landscape while Leith Stevens' music swells, and Cargraves solemnly claims our nearest neighbor: "By the grace of God, in the name of the United States of America, I take possession of this planet on behalf of, and for the benefit of, all mankind." (Neil Armstrong would strike a not terribly dissimilar note nineteen years later.) The astronauts take photographs and perform a mineralogical survey, but their work, regrettably, is all for naught, as Barnes has wasted reaction mass on their touchdown, so the men have to strip the ship to its bare essentials before they can return home. For a while it looks as if one of them (Sweeney volunteers) will have to remain behind, but Barnes eventually figures out a way for all of them to depart, minus their radios, harmonica, and carnival balloon spacesuits. (These colorful outfits were presumably found by explorers from the Red Planet and recycled for Lesley Selander's Flight to Mars [1951]). As Luna hurtles through space, Earth looms onscreen. "This Is The End," the credits inform us, "Of The Beginning."

It was, indeed, especially for Pal, who would carve quite a name for himself in fantastic cinema. His efforts would improve throughout the decade; the sometimes mundane realism of this film was jettisoned in favor of more imaginative releases such as his following feature, When Worlds Collide (1951). However, Destination Moon remains a groundbreaking work; the straightforward script--Heinlein himself was a co-writer with Alford "Rip" Van Ronkel and James O'Hanlon--together with the superb astronomical art of Chesley Bonestell, Ernst Fegte's marvelous sets, Lee Zavitz's deservedly Oscar-winning special effects, and the technical advice of rocket man Hermann Oberth, all combined to take viewers on a surprisingly prescient voyage, and the significance of that expedition endures more than half a century later, despite former character actor Irving Pichel's sometimes workmanlike direction. (He also provides uncredited narration for the Walter Lantz cartoon.)

The moon adventures that immediately followed offered outrageous alternatives to Pal's and Heinlein's clear, courageous vision, and it would only be with Robert Altman's Countdown (1968) that the subject of a lunar landing would again be realistically rendered. In retrospect, the actual U.S. touchdown, although obviously a splendid achievement, was itself curiously anti-climactic. "Science fiction got there first," J.G. Ballard melancholically observed in 1993, "just as it has anticipated so much of our lives, effectively taking all the fun and surprise out of existence." The genre, it appears, has done much of our living for us, while the Inner Space advocated by the British New Wavers of the Sixties remains largely uncharted.

Image's 2000 "5oth Anniversary Edition" DVD is part of the Wade Williams Collection and sports attractive Technicolor (the spacesuits are especially vibrant), as well as an acceptable amount of grain and scratches; reel changes, however, are particularly rough. In worse shape is the film's re-release trailer, which ridiculously raves about "the black, airless void of terror-stricken space." The ninety-one minute fullscreen transfer offers fifteen chapter stops, as well as dust jacket liner notes which are supposedly continued inside the snapper case; my copy of the insert sheet, alas, does not contain them.