BY HANK REINEKE
Lesley Selander’s Flight
to Mars (1951) was one of the earliest offerings of cinematic science-fiction’s
Silver Age. The film is not one of the
best of that era’s productions, and not even the best of 1951 – that honor
would arguably go to Rudolph Maté’s When World’s Collide due to that
film’s ground-breaking animation of George Pal. But the stage was already set for science-fiction to replace door-creaking
Gothic horror as more dependable, bankable product. Moviegoers of 1945 through 1950 had already
been primed for space-travel and alien-enemy films through such entertaining Republic
serials as The Purple Monster Strikes, King
of the Rocket Men and Flying Disc Man
from Mars. The 1947 crash near
Roswell, New Mexico, also made a lot of folk’s look up to the skies to ponder –
and fear – what might be floating above them in the cosmos. So the time was
right.
There were several delays in the start of the production
of Flight to Mars. In mid-January of 1951, the Hollywood trades reported
that Monogram production was scheduled to commence on 12 February. When that date passed without cameras
rolling, the production start date was pushed forward, amended to 23
March. When March passed by, a third
date was announced (5 April), only to be pushed forward again to 30 April. When these dates passed by as well reports
came in that production of Flight to Mars
was to officially commence on 12 May, 1951 with Walter Mirisch producing.
There was no announcement as of 5 May of who might be
helming Monogram Picture’s very ambitious project. But, at long last, on 19 May 1951, the film
was put on Hollywood’s current in-production schedule with the notice that Lesley
Selander had signed on to direct with Harry Neumann serving as Director of
Photography. Selander was an odd choice to
direct. He was a well-regarded and
dependable figure at Monogram, but his stock-in-trade was knocking out scores
of inexpensive westerns with breakneck rapidity.
The Monogram Pictures Corporation was now under the
umbrella of Allied Artists. The
President of Allied, Steve Broidy, had been promising as early as October of 1951
that both studios would lens no fewer than forty-five feature films in 1951-52,
a half-dozen of those efforts being “high budget†films produced under the
Allied banner. Monogram, as was its
reputation, would knock off its usual run of low-budget westerns, detective
films, Bowery Boys comedies and “fantasy†films – the latter being a generous euphemism
for their string of bargain basement horrors with a dash of science-fiction.
In truth, even Monogram’s threadbare production values
were on the rise, Broidy promising that several of the studio’s planned
features would be shot in Cinecolor, a two-color film process that brought out
a striking and vibrant – if occasionally unnatural in appearance - pallet of
saturated hues. If nothing else, Flight to Mars would appear a relatively
bright and lavish production by Monogram standards. The film’s production’s designs were actually
pretty well-done all things considered. The space-traveling animation, mattes and Mars “location†shooting
effects (California and Nevada’s Death Valley was used as backdrop of the dying
planet) were, at best, disappointing as little would be splashed on-screen in
any memorable fashion. On the other
hand, there was no shortage of skimpily-dressed women milling about.
One gossip North Hollywood gossip columnist teased that
Mirisch and Selander – abetted by the film’s wardrobe department - seemed to have
come to agreement on the “astounding fact that women on Mars do not wear
skirts.†It is true that all of the
women featured on screen were not-so-immodestly dressed. Such space-age fashion, the columnist
determined, might prove testing to the “squinting eyes†and morality standards set
forth by the industry’s Johnson Office. Another news sheet from this same period described the costuming of the
film’s female players as “nothing but hip-length tunics and the scantiest of
scanties.†Piling on, still another news
item described the female Martian outfits as rating “hotter than even an
H-bomb, making Bikini-wearers looking over-dressed!â€
Such prurient ballyhoo, of course, would understandably arouse
– in a matter of speaking – interest to male filmgoers of Saturday matinees. Upon
the film’s release, even the critic of the Los
Angeles Times conceded should reality mirror the Martian “femme beauty†as
seen on-screen in the course of Flight to
Mars, “there’s going to be an awful scramble even among scientists to find
a way to the distant planet.â€
The publicity machine went to work in earnest in July of
1951, noting that while production on Flight
to Mars had recently wrapped (shooting lasted only four to six weeks,
depending on the report), actress Marguerite Chapman had become so intrigued by
art director David Milton’s stage dressing, she commissioned him to re-do her
Beverly Hills apartment in a “Martian manner.†Though Chapman would receive top billing, she was merely part of a genuine
ensemble cast that would include Cameron Mitchell, Arthur Franz, Virginia
Huston and John Litel. Since none of the
above players were box-office names of any particular renown, there wasn’t a
terrible amount of fanfare accompanying the film’s release in November of
1951. The cast was described a
non-distinguished manner in the press as “a rather unknown but able cast of
Thespians.â€
The scenario of the film itself (“The Most Fantastic Expedition Ever Conceived by Man!â€) was not
terribly original. A meteor shower
diverts a group of space-travelers from their mission and forces them to crash
land on Mars. There they meet a group of
white, Anglo-Saxon looking, English-speaking Martians who currently survive
underground thanks to a mineral called Corium. They seem friendly enough at first, even offering to help the Earthlings
rebuild their space craft for a trip home. What they’re not letting on is that their supply of life-supplying
Corium is fast dwindling and thus threatening their existence. So they plan on hijacking the repaired space
craft to launch an invasion of Earth.
The scenario is actually less exciting as it might sound. The premise is OK, but this is a studio-soundstage
bound production with lots of people talking about things and not enough of
action or on-screen intrigue or cool space-matte paintings to balance such
loquaciousness. Still, there was some
enthusiasm amongst studio accountants in 1951 that Flight to Mars might fare pretty well at the box office. So much so that on the very week of the
film’s release, producer Mirisch announced he had once again engaged Flight to Mars screenwriter “Arthur
Straus†[sic] to adapt an original story conjured up by Kenneth Charles.
It’s unclear - but certainly possible - that screenwriter
Arthur Strawn was not so much
misidentified in the news item as he was purposely
misidentified. Strawn, the child of
emigres from Romania, had been blacklisted by the right-wing Red Channels publication in 1950,
suspected of Communist sympathies. His
writing of the screenplay and his association with the film Hiawatha had postponed that particular
film of getting into production. Monogram president Broidy thought it best to shelve the Hiawatha project due to the screenplay’s
alleged Moscow-aligned pacifist taint.
Strawn’s political affiliations shouldn’t have mattered, of
course. But sci-fi cinema historians
have long debated if the creative genesis of Flight to Mars was, at least in part, a thematic mimic of Yakov
Protazanov’s 1924 space-traveling silent-era Soviet flicker Aelita (aka Queen of Mars), a film based on Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita: the Decline of Mars). Flight
to Mars seems to share a few
tenuous ties to this early Soviet film. The most damning and oft invoked of these is the purloining of the name
“Aelita†for Marguerite Chapman’s female lead character. Sci-fi film fans who wish to decide for
themselves how many ideas were lifted, can view the original Soviet film on any
of a number of DVD or DVD-R issues… or simply visit youtube for a peek if only
passingly curious.
In any case, Mirisch’s proposed follow-up to Flight to Mars, Voyage to Venus, was to bring a crew of space-travelers to the
planet second from the sun. That this second
film was never put into production is a shame and a great loss: if for no other
reason that moving the cast to a planet even closer to the sun’s heat would have
likely caused the Venusian women to wear even less clothing…
This Blu-ray of Film Detective’s Flight to Mars, licensed from Wade Williams, has been sourced from
original 35mm elements of the Cinecolor separation negatives and restored with
assistance of the Paramount Pictures archives. The Blu-ray features several bonus supplements. These include two “exclusive†documentaries,
both directed by Daniel Griffith: the
first is Walter Mirisch: from Bomba to
Body Snatchers, a thirteen-minute feature where film historian C. Courtney
Joyner examines the stewardship of Mirisch and Broidy as transformative to the
rise of Monogram and Allied as an industry player. The second is Interstellar Travelogues: Cinema’s First Space Race where famed
space-art illustrator Vincent Di Fate narrates a ten-minute feature on the
earliest bits of cinematic interest in space travel from the influences of early
German rocketry to the novels of Robert Heinlein.
The set also rounds out nicely with a commentary track by
Justin Humphreys, the film historian and author of the recently published The Dr. Phibes Companion: The Morbidly Romantic History of the Classic
Vincent Price Horror Film Series. There’s also a twelve-page booklet that
features the essay Mars at the Movies,
written by journalist/author Don Stradley. While Stradley briefly touches on some aspects of the production of Flight to Mars, the essay mostly offers
a brief history of the role the red planet has figured into film history. In all, a very impressive release that will delight
fans of the genre.
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