IN 1946, THE YEAR THE IRON CURTAIN FELL ON EASTERN EUROPE, UNidentified flying objects were reportedly seen in the skies over Scandinavia. Then, in early July 1947, aliens were sighted in Roswell, New Mexico. The front-page headline of the 8 July 1947 Roswell Daily Record read, “RAAF (Roswell Army Air Field) Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch In Roswell Region.” Was it a flying saucer or, as the army claimed, a weather balloon from which was suspended a hexagonal disk? As for the aliens, they were phantasms, spawned by an overheated imagination. The believers put their credence in the cosmos, not in a government that discredited anything suggesting a world elsewhere and offered an explanation so speculative that it had to be suspect.
Of the more than eight hundred UFO sightings reported in July 1947, the one that generated the greatest amount of publicity involved an Idaho pilot, Kenneth Arnold, who, as he was nearing Mount Rainier in the state of Washington on 24 June 1947, saw nine saucer-shaped objects flying in V formation. The Chicago Daily Tribune (26 June) quoted his description of the objects as “silvery and shiny” and shaped like pie plates. The East Oregonian (25 June) called them saucer-like, thus adding the term “flying saucer” to the vernacular. Three years later, on 7 April 1950, when Arnold appeared on Edward R. Murrow’s radio program Hear It Now, he insisted that he merely said the objects flew in “saucer-like fashion.” By then, however, it was too late to amend the description. Arnold was naturally bitter that the military dismissed his experience as a mirage. Since communism had become a real threat, extra-terrestrials were relegated to the recesses of the collective unconscious.
But there could be a connection. If UFOS existed, as many believed, where were they coming from? Another planet, it would seem—or rather the only planet that had any cachet, Mars, which became part of pop culture after Orson Welles panicked America with his Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds on 30 October 1938. World War II made Mars a low priority, but after Hiroshima, the Red Planet loomed large in the national consciousness. To paraphrase the opening of the popular radio show The Shadow, “Who knows what evil lurks in outer space?” Hollywood knew: aliens.
There will probably never be an end to alien sightings or theories about abductions by extraterrestrials. The government may discredit them, but Hollywood does not. Aliens are potential moneymakers, either in a B movie like It Came from Outer Space or in an epic like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Their existence was a given in Hollywood, regardless of government skepticism.
Fifty years after the Roswell incident, the air force issued a report on 24 June 1997, stating that the so-called aliens spotted in July 1947 were anthropomorphic test dummies. But UFO stalwarts, like conspiracy theorists, would have none of it. The very fact that, after half a century, the air force felt the need to bring the matter to closure implies dissatisfaction with the way the case was handled in 1947, when anyone who saw an “alien” was termed delusional. The next day, The New York Times printed a summary: no aliens and no cover-up, just an experiment. Faced with a conflict between science and popular belief, Hollywood preferred the latter—especially after America entered the UFO age, presented as an offshoot of the Cold War. UFO sightings and extraterrestrial travel were not incompatible with the Red Scare. Had the Soviet Union drawn the Red Planet into its orbit, making it another of its satellites? Or, even more intriguing, is the Deity using aliens to alert complacent earthlings to their possible annihilation?
Flight to Mars (1951) portrayed the planet as anti-democratic and, in fact, totalitarian, despite appearances to the contrary. The film was a Monogram quickie filmed in Cinecolor in about eleven days—and looked it sometimes. On other occasions, the film suggested what a creative director might have done with sets that flattened space, making Mars into a labyrinth of angled walls and narrow stairways.
For purely scientific reasons four scientists and a lone reporter board a rocket ship to Mars, even if doing so means they may not return. The expedition is heralded as a cause célèbre, as if the country were readying itself for a confrontation with the unknown. America seemed to be on war alert. Even the language, a carryover from the pre-Pearl Harbor days, had bellicose overtones. Congress is divided between the isolationists, who want the scientists to remain in their laboratories, and the interventionists, who urge them to proceed. “Interventionist” and “isolationist” had not been used since World War II broke out in September 1939, when the nation was divided between those urging it to join the fight against fascism and others arguing against becoming embroiled in a European war. Such polarization implies that the expedition can either bring about a thaw in the Cold War or cause a deep freeze. The writers can only toss around ideas, having neither time nor budget to develop them. Imagine what could have been done with the senior scientist’s theory that we are all universes unto ourselves. Such dialogue promises a film of a strongly intellectual nature. But unable to deliver, the writers settled for a rocket ship romance, with the reporter wooing a female scientist away from her supposed beau, the chief engineer. This arrangement makes it possible for the latter to find his sole mate, Alita, a lovely Martian (Marguerite Chapman), dressed like a chorus girl in an abbreviated outfit that emphasized her slender body and shapely legs.
Once the rocket ship crash lands on Mars, the plot takes a nosedive into cliché. The team is greeted by a welcoming committee headed by Ikron (Morris Ankrum), council president, whose first words are, “We have been expecting you.” The Martians have not only picked up and deciphered radio broadcasts but, mirabile dictu, have also mastered English. Politically, Mars purports to be a model democracy, with business conducted by a council and motions brought to a vote. But the democratic trappings are a front for a dictatorship, with Ikron holding sway over the majority. Knowing that Mars is facing extinction, Ikron allows the space travelers to repair their rocket ship, which he plans to appropriate in order to conquer Earth.
Flight to Mars is an amalgam of World War II history and 1950s paranoia. Mars is a totalitarian society. Its council members are draped in red, which may be the color of their planet or their political model. Theirs is a sham democracy, with a council dominated by an autocrat. If Mars could be transplanted anywhere, it would be to Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia. In his plan to resettle the Martians on Earth, Ikron sounds like Hitler demanding Lebensraum for his master race. And Stalin would have regarded Mars as another jewel in his iron crown. Today, satellites; tomorrow a planet—and a red one at that.
Like Paris in World War II movies, Mars has an underground, headed by Alita and her father. Its small size is due to budget. Of the six Martians seen in the film, three are resistance members. Audiences expected the explorers to outwit the Martians and return to Earth. They did, with the help of Alita and her father. Then the film ends abruptly with a take off and a fade out. And what did Flight to Mars prove, except that—cinematically—the planet was ripe for the picking?
Red Planet Mars (1952) is one of the few science fiction films of the fifties featuring Soviets as characters sharing America’s determination to communicate with Mars. A California scientist (Peter Graves) is trying to establish contact with Mars. After discovering that the Martians have melted the ice caps to irrigate their planet, he regards Mars as superior to Earth. His wife (Andrea King) feels differently, comparing her husband’s research to “sitting on a volcano.” Meanwhile, the Soviets have conscripted a former Nazi, Franz Calder (Herbert Berghof) to make contact with Mars. At this point, the Christianization of the film begins. Calder operates out of a hideaway in the Andes, in the shadow of the famous statue, Christ the Redeemer of the Andes. As he laughingly informs his Soviet handlers, “You can find me only through finding Christ.”
Mars is the promised land, powered by cosmic energy. Its inhabitants have a three-hundred-year lifespan and enjoy such an abundance of food that rationing is unnecessary. The realization that Mars is the new Eden and Earth is a garden gone to seed results in global chaos, as coalmines and steel mills close and banks default. Mars, believing that humankind has suffered enough, delivers an ultimatum: “Love goodness and hate evil.” Forget the galaxy and follow the star of Bethlehem. The voice emanating from Mars is none other than God’s, the man of Nazareth and the man of Mars being the same. Suddenly, church attendance swells, and miracles abound. The Soviet Union, which “denied God’s word and worshipped false gods,” abjures communism, and the patriarch of the Orthodox Church becomes head of the provisional government.
Just when it seems that a new order has arisen, Calder arrives at the scientist’s laboratory, claiming that the messages were his own transmissions, intended for the gullible. Although the scientist’s wife insists they were from Mars (and thus from God), Calder is unmoved and intends to divulge the truth at a press conference. Rather than see the gospel of Mars dismissed as a hoax, the wife asks for a cigarette, setting off an explosion that immolates the three of them. And in case anyone in the audience believes the messages were fakes, a new one comes through, beginning with the words, “Ye hath done well.” It is incomplete, but the text is Matthew 25:23: “Ye hath done well, good and faithful servant. . . . Enter into the joy of your master.”
For a film purportedly washed in the blood of the lamb, the dénouement was bloody in a different sense. The wife lighting a match is not much different from a suicide bomber pulling a switch. Each action is not so much an act of martyrdom (although in some circles it would be) as a self-immolation that affects others in the vicinity. The wife boasts to Calder that she possesses free will, and she proves it by reducing the three of them to charred bones. Of course, one could argue that that the lighting of a match is morally neutral, but the laboratory setting makes the act at least morally questionable. Was she merely trying to frighten Calder, who panicked when he saw the match? Did the tactic backfire, literally? The biblical text approves her action (“Ye hath done well”), elevating it to a sacrificial act. Since Calder identified with the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost, preferring to reign in hell than serve in heaven, his wish was granted.
In May 1952, when Red Planet Mars was released, the utopian universe conjured up at the end of the film was at odds with what was happening globally. Although Red Planet Mars is set in the future, there was as much a disparity between the world of the early 1950s and the earthly paradise to come as there was between 1950—declared the Holy Year by Pope Pius XII—and the events of that year. On 25 June 1950, while pilgrims were streaming into Rome, some even traversing the entire Appian Way to reach the Eternal City, North Korean armies crossed the thirty-eighth parallel dividing the Soviet-dominated North from the American-controlled South, resulting in the United Nations police action better known as the Korean War. The American military was convinced hostilities would be a short-lived, certainly not on the scale of World War II, and would end in a few months. But China’s entry into the war that October prolonged the conflict, which did not end until July 1953, when it concluded in a stalemate, euphemistically called an armistice.
Anyone other than a cockeyed optimist seeing Red Planet Mars in spring 1952 would have considered it more of a fantasy film than science fiction. Newsreels kept moviegoers up to date about Korea, showing roads clogged with refugees whose country was being devastated by rockets, bombs, and the incendiary of choice—napalm—and men, unshaven and grim-faced, braving the cold that left them frostbitten. Some may have believed that they were fighting for America, as President Truman insisted. Others might have concluded that partitioning the Korean peninsula was an act of expediency, which only fueled the Nationalists’ goal of uniting the two Koreas under the aegis of the Soviet Union, and therefore justified America’s involvement. Either way, the country was mired in what at the time was America’s most unpopular war, soon to be termed “the forgotten war.”
Mars should have been off limits, especially after Red Planet Mars made it clear that it is ruled by God, but that did not stop the four-person crew of Angry Red Planet (1960) from taking off in the name of science. What they discover is a hand-drawn, animated dreamscape bathed in orange (another color associated with Mars), with flesh-eating plants, a long-legged flying creature with a rodent’s face, and a giant amoeba that engulfs its prey and can only be destroyed by electricity, like The Thing. Mars is a fantastic storybook, with illustrations that suddenly spring to life, threatening the intruders who force open its pages.
The expedition ends in death and trauma. One crewmember is consumed by the amoeba. Another dies of heart failure. And the captain incurs an infection that leaves his arm looking as if it had been coated with tar. The sole female requires narcosynthesis to explain what has happened. The only reason the ship is allowed to return to Earth is that a stern but well-meaning voice—God’s, no doubt—comes through the transmitter, warning humans to stay on their own turf. The planet is restricted: Martians Only, No Visitors Allowed. And if one should end up there, he or she would have to be eminently resourceful, like Robinson Crusoe.
The idea of a castaway on Mars was intriguing enough for director Byron Haskin and producer Aubrey Schenck to commission screenwriter John C. Higgins to prepare the final draft of Ib Melchior’s preliminary screenplay for Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). The inspiration was Daniel Defoe’s novel, but with Crusoe as a navy astronaut, whose space ship is forced out of orbit by Mars’s gravitational pull. Melchior’s Crusoe figure had the emblematic name Robin Cruze; his fellow astronaut, the less emblematic one Dan McReady. When a magnetic storm creates shorts in the electrical circuits, Cruze is ejected from his escape hatch and lands safely. McReady’s hatch, however, does not open. The ship crashes, and Cruze finds himself alone in a bleak and barren world with grotesquely shaped rock formations and a menacing array of horned reptiles, ants with pincers, and giant centipedes. He also discovers a companion in Marea, a Martian monkey, who leads him to a source of water. Soon, there is a new arrival, a man from another solar system, Alpha Centauri, six trillion miles from Earth, whom Cruze christens Friday. Melchior had no intention of having the trio languish on Mars. A rescue ship arrives, and they are brought back to Earth, but not before Cruze has the last word: “I am coming home and with me comes a man from another world, Friday, my friend.” Cruze has realized “man’s greatest dream ever since he first looked up into the sky and at the stars and planets and wondered.” But the true epiphany was Cruze’s “contact with a new, a great alien civilization.”
Melchior’s script reads like a novel and is lavishly detailed, including a dictionary of Yagor, Friday’s native tongue. Although Melchior’s was not the kind of screenplay that Haskin and Schenck were after (they specifically wanted a Mars without monsters), it provided Higgins with a blueprint from which he could work. Although “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” sounds like the title of a comic book or a graphic novel, it is a visually mesmerizing, if overlong, story of survival, with a nod to Defoe, and a deep bow to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Alan B. Shepard Jr., who in 1961 became the first American to venture into outer space. Shepard’s voyage in the Freedom 7 spacecraft was only the point of departure. It was as if Higgins were asking, “What if Shepard crash landed on Mars and had to fend for himself?” Higgins also knew that, between 1948 and 1961, the first astronauts were monkeys, few of which survived the flight. Appropriately, Marea became Mona, a monkey in an orange space suit, on board with Commander “Kit” Draper, formerly Robin Cruze, (Paul Mantee) and Colonel Dan McReady (Adam West, who became a household name as Bruce Wayne/Batman in ABC’s popular television series, Batman). With McReady’s death, Mona becomes Draper’s sole companion until the arrival of Friday. Crusoe’s situation was the same in the novel, except that he had more company: a dog, two cats, and a parrot that he taught to speak.
By the 1960s, the survival film, a sub-genre at best, had acquired a set of recognizable conventions, popularized by Cecil B. De Mille’s Four Frightened People (1934), John Farrow’s Five Came Back (1939) (which he remade as Back from Eternity [1956]), and Frank Launder’s The Blue Lagoon (1949). These conventions included resourcefulness (starting a fire, finding drinkable water and edible food, making clothes), omnipresent danger, close calls, an unexpected arrival, and an ingenious escape or a climactic rescue. Thus, Draper discovers that yellow rock can burn like coal, and water can be extracted from quartz crystals. Defoe’s Crusoe was more fortunate. From the wreckage, he was able to salvage tools, ammunition, pistols, clothes, and even liquor, so that he could live “mighty comfortably, my mind entirely composed by resigning to the will of God.” Draper’s habitat is a cave, outside of which he has hung an American flag, which he salutes each morning—a touch Haskin demanded, much to Mantee’s displeasure. But that was part of Haskin’s concept of the material: a tribute to American ingenuity, endurance, and—with the arrival of Friday—tolerance of the Other, with allusions to an American past in which “others” constituted three-fifths of a person. Significantly, Draper cobbles together a makeshift bagpipes, on which he plays “Dixie,” which one would like to think was Haskin’s idea of irony.
Robinson Crusoe on Mars differs from the typical survival film, in which the setting is a jungle or an island. Draper is on a planet devoid of life, where no other human appears until midway through the film, in keeping with Friday’s belated arrival in the novel. Draper’s chief enemy is the hostile environment, made deadlier by UFO attacks from another (unnamed) planet, the film’s equivalent of Defoe’s cannibals. Draper preserves his sanity by talking to himself or Mona. And like Crusoe, who kept a journal, he tape-records his observations for posterity—or so he hopes.
The powdery ridges of California’s Death Valley stood in for Mars, which production designer Al Nozaki replicated in the studio, creating a chain of chalky hills that at times looked glazed. Mars is an anomaly, a desert with slab-like rocks and gorges caused by volcanic eruptions, with a few pools and an underground network of dry canals. It is sinister and awesome, even dreamlike—particularly in Nozaki’s rendering of a hollow of striated rock, a study in stillness masterfully delineated by a hand skilled in the lineaments of silence.
Eventually, another human arrives, whom Draper dubs “Friday,” adding “with apologies to Robinson Crusoe.” Physically, the new arrival conforms to Defoe’s description of Friday: “a comely, handsome fellow, perfectly well made, tall and well-shaped,” with black hair and tawny skin. He is also twenty-six. Although Friday (Victor Lundin) looks twenty-six, he claims to have lived for seventy-eight years, sixty-two of them as a slave. Since the film began production in 1963, Friday would have been born in 1864 or 1865. Apparently, news of the Emancipation Proclamation had not reached outer space.
At this point, the political subtext, perhaps originally intended to be open-ended, becomes increasingly specific. Draper learns that Friday had been enslaved by a super planet that used its captives to mine Mars’s natural resources. Like the others, Friday has been fitted with an electromagnetic manacle enabling his enslavers to track his whereabouts, an interplanetary version of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Slave labor has always existed, but certainly viewers were not reminded of ancient Greece or Egypt in this context—maybe Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but more likely, owing the bits of Americana woven into the film, they were reminded of the slave-holding and segregationist South.
By the time Robinson Crusoe on Mars was released in early summer 1964, the country had witnessed the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that left four girls dead. Fire hoses had been turned on civil rights demonstrators, who also had dogs sicced on them. And blacks had been denied admission at the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi. It was the era of freedom marches and freedom riders, climaxing in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a new order, which he described in his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963. But it was an order that was imperiled three months later, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Since Draper had already Americanized Mars, it is difficult to think of the enslaving planet as anything other than an intergalactic metaphor for an America that may have shed the vestiges of its slave-holding past, but had not escaped its segregationist present. But further speculation is discouraged by the arrival of the rescue ship.
To expunge the stigma of racism, Higgins, taking his cue from the novel, in which Crusoe instructs Friday in Christian doctrine, has Draper and Friday discourse on God, with each possessing his own concept of a supreme being. Draper is very much a believer. After surviving an attack from UFOs that leaves him covered with soot-like pellets, he recites the Twenty-Third Psalm. The religious elements in the film are no doubt sincere, but they are embedded in a script that raises issues more political than spiritual. That Draper and Friday accept a divinely ordered universe is not controversial; enslavement of one race by another is.