1964: ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS

What’s it about?

An errant meteor forces a spaceship orbiting Mars into evasive maneuvers that bring it dangerously close to the red planet’s surface. Unable to pull out of the descent, the crew eject in two separate escape pods, but only one astronaut and one monkey survive the landing. On the surface, the astronaut faces a quick succession of life-or-death challenges: staying warm during the cold Martian nights, replenishing his fast-dwindling air supply, and discovering a source of water and food.

Assisted by a healthy dose of dumb luck, the astronaut manages to solve most of the problems of basic survival. But he soon realizes that his biggest challenge will be reconciling himself to the possibility that he will be stranded forever alone on a dead planet with no companion except the monkey. Just as he is starting to crack under the strain of isolation, he discovers evidence that he may not so entirely alone as he imagined. The sudden arrival of a runaway alien slave provides the astronaut with the companionship he seeks -- but differences in cultures and the return of the alien captors create unexpected problems.




Is it any good?

A movie about an astronaut struggling to survive on the real Mars would be short, grim, and all too predictable. But luckily for ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS, there were very few hard facts known about conditions on the surface of Mars back in 1964. So even though the astronaut and his monkey have things pretty rough, they at least have a fighting chance to survive. Nights are cold, but not instantly deadly. Air is thin, but can be breathed for fifteen minutes at a time. Water and edible plant life are scarce, but not entirely absent.

But even though the first half of the movie is devoted to the question of basic survival, this is not really a movie about a man overcoming a hostile environment on his ingenuity alone. The astronaut does use his brain to solve a few problems, but the deciding factor is really that the bare necessities of life are all available right at hand. Most convenient of all, an apparently very common yellow rock not only burns like coal (providing heat for those freezing nights) but releases life-saving oxygen in the process. Meanwhile, water and food are not necessarily easy to find, but a smarter man would have figured out the key to locating them after just a couple days on the surface.




But for better or for worse, there’s more to the movie than a simple survival story. In the second half, the astronaut discovers that alien visitors use disposable slave labor to extract minerals from Mars. One such slave escapes, joins up with the astronaut, and becomes a sort of “man Friday” for the space age. It’s a little hard to figure out exactly what the movie is trying to say about the Friday character. He looks, dresses, and talks like an American Indian (though his hairstyle is ancient Egyptian) and has practically no alien characteristics despite hailing from a different star system. It briefly seems as though the escaped slave is not going to be satisfied meekly playing the Friday role -- he remains perfectly mute and aloof for days, then refuses to respond to the astronaut’s attempts to teach him English or to give him a new name. But before long he’s caved on all fronts and is speaking broken English and responding to the name Friday.

The survival bits at the beginning of ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS are pretty good, and even the arrival of the modern Friday turns out to be more interesting than expected. But the end of the movie takes a sharp turn towards the silly and the predictable when the aliens come looking for the fugitive slave. (Why? The slaves are disposable anyway -- why care if one survives instead of dying with the rest?) The alien spaceships do a lot of really boring blasting of the Martian surface, and the two friends do some slightly less boring fleeing to the north pole. But up to the last twenty minutes or so, the movie is really pretty interesting. And it’s worth noting that Adam West and his amazing voice have an all-too-brief role early in the picture as well.




What else happened this year?

-- THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON is one of the better movies to feature Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion special effects. Besides awesome alien monsters, it also delivers much of the same humor and excitement that the H.G. Wells novel does.
-- No one really ever needs to see SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, but a snowy December evening could be worse spent. It obviously requires a high tolerance (and preferably affection) for low budget film making, but it has enough weirdness to please. The only missed opportunity is a climactic robot/polar bear fight that is teased but never materializes.
-- HERCULES AGAINST THE MOONMEN delivers both the ancient Greek strongman and several different monstrous bad guys (some, as promised, from the moon). It’s diverting enough as long as you ignore the usual shortcomings.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1964...

This was a weak year for sci-fi flicks -- thus the pathetic list above -- but THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON is really pretty great.