TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: ADVENTURES IN SPACE Thursday, October 7,2010
| TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: ADVENTURES IN SPACE Thursday, October 7,2010 8:00pm Forbidden Planet (1956) The basic premise of Forbidden Planet would serve as the blueprint for a slew of sci-fi films and TV shows in its wake such as the television series, Star Trek. The film opens with the approach of Cruiser C-57D toward Altira IV, a planet with a strange history. It seems an exploration ship vanished there twenty years earlier. The cruiser's crew (commanded by Leslie Nielsen) discovers that only two people are left from the previous expedition: the scientist Morbius (two-time Oscar nominee Walter Pidgeon) and his beautiful daughter Altaira (Anne Francis). These two have built a home above the remains of an ancient civilization (one of the benefits of which is their servant Robby the Robot). However, Morbius surprisingly refuses to return to Earth, a decision that becomes all the more mysterious when an invisible force attacks the ship. Forbidden Planet was initially conceived as a much different - and decidedly cheaper - film. The producer/writer/special effects team of Allen Adler and Irving Block ran a popular optical effects company, working on numerous schlock films but also classics like The Night of the Hunter (1955). They came up with the idea for something called Fatal Planet as a potential project for one of the B-movie studios. Instead they pitched it to the high-rollers at MGM, a process that required the duo to act out the story, including an impersonation of the invisible monster, for the benefit of the investors. To everybody's surprise, the studio decided to make this their first science fiction film and budgeted the film at $1 million, later expanding it to almost double that amount. For the script they enlisted novelist Cyril Hume, a descendant of philosopher David Hume whose main claim to film was writing screenplays for the popular Tarzan series (He also worked on the first version of Ransom (1956) and Nicholas Ray's classic melodrama, Bigger Than Life, 1956). Luckily, Hume's script for Forbidden Planet brings unusual depth to what might have been yet another tacky science fiction film. It also has its down side: MGM insisted Hume add several "humorous" scenes revolving around the ship's cook, Cookie (played by Earl Holliman). It's Hollywood executive decisions like this that lead some viewers to agree with literary historian James Kincaid's famous essay, "Who Is Relieved by Comic Relief?" Interestingly enough, a scene where the cook's constant comments about the scarcity of women on the planet are answered by Robby bringing him a female chimp was never filmed. Forbidden Planet was made inside MGM studios (except for a handful of shots) and used a 10,000 foot circular painting as a backdrop. One oddity about Forbidden Planet is that the film we see today is more or less an unfinished rough cut. What happened is that experimental composers Louis and Bebe Barron had been asked to supply the music for the film. (They'd previously only scored a few avant-garde shorts.) It would turn out to be a landmark score, utilizing only generated sounds (no conventional instruments like violins or pianos) and paved the way for both new forms of film scoring and for a more open approach to music. But the studio was a bit uneasy about the eerie score so they arranged a sneak preview to see how audiences would react. The response was so positive that MGM decided to release the film as it was, not even letting the editor tighten up the pacing or rework some rough patches. Robby the Robot was such a hit that he was used again the following year for The Invisible Boy (1957) but then vanished from the screen until a cameo in 1984's Gremlins (where he reuses some dialogue from Forbidden Planet). The 6-foot, 11-inch creation required a person inside to man the controls as well as some outside electronic manipulation, none of which kept Robby from occasionally toppling over (One popular rumor reported that Robby was a drunk). The robot's voice was supplied by Marvin Miller who did vocal chores on projects ranging from MASH to Electra Woman and Dyna Girl though he also did acting in front of the camera (he was the guy giving out checks on the TV show The Millionaire). Miller even won two Grammies for audio versions of Dr. Seuss stories. The mysterious marauding monster was the creation of Disney animators, one of the few times they have ever worked on an outside film. But it's the unique look of the surreal landscapes of Altira IV to the detailed spaceship to the design of the strange underground civilization that earned the film an Academy Award nomination for Best Special Effects (the award went that year to The Ten Commandments). If you're a hardcore Forbidden Planet fan, here are some more fun trivia facts. For example, actor Harry Harvey Jr., who plays Randall in the film, also appeared in the exploitation classic Reefer Madness (1936) and ended his career with an uncredited role as a slave in Spartacus (1960). James Drury (future star of the TV series, The Virginian, 1962) and James Best (Shock Corridor, 1963) also turn up in supporting roles. Also, you might notice a sudden jump in a scene toward the end of the film that looks like something was cut: It was but not by TCM. The filmmakers wanted to speed things up and just clipped out a few seconds thinking nobody would ever care.
by Lang Thompson Thursday, October 7,2010 10:00 PM The story is simple and direct, one of the great virtues of the compact, suspenseful film. In deep space, the large tug Nostromo is returning to Earth carrying a cargo of mineral ore, its small crew in hypersleep chambers. Along the way, they are awakened by the ship's computer, "Mother," when it intercepts a nonhuman transmission from a planetoid, which they are required to investigate by lawful agreement among corporate interests operating in space. The crew consists of the captain, Dallas (Tom Skerritt), second-in-command Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), science officer Ash (Ian Holm), Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), Kane (John Hurt), Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), Parker (Yaphet Kotto), and Jones, a cat. A small team descends to the planet to discover a massive alien ship. The pilot of the craft is dead and the team discovers a chamber full of what appear to be eggs. Leaning over to investigate, Kane is attacked by a life form that springs from an egg, penetrates his helmet, and latches onto his face. The team evacuates Kane to the Nostromo for treatment, not realizing that they have allowed a fearsome Alien creature to play out its life cycle aboard their ship. Alien had its beginnings when a major film project fell apart in France. Writer Dan O'Bannon had been working on designs for a big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, to be directed by Alexandro Jodorowsky. The film never got off the ground and O'Bannon soon found himself sleeping on the couch of fellow writer Ron Shusett in Hollywood. O'Bannon dusted off an old script and with Shusett's help, wrote the story for Alien. One of the artists who was brought on to the ill-fated Dune project as a designer was a surrealist Swiss painter named H. R. Giger. O'Bannon later wrote, "...then we had to figure out the monster. Well, I hadn't been able to get Hans Rudi Giger off my mind since I left France. His paintings had a profound effect on me. I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work. And so I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster." O'Bannon envisioned the film resulting from his script to be a low-budget but efficient little thriller. He enlisted an illustrator friend, Ron Cobb, to do some preliminary paintings and drawings for the project and proceeded to shop the script around to studios. Many showed interest, but a production company called Brandywine (made up of producer Gordon Carroll and producer/ directors David Giler and Walter Hill) won out. Brandywine had a production agreement with Twentieth Century Fox, who set up a budget of eight million dollars, a much bigger budget than O'Bannon ever intended. Walter Hill would have helmed the movie but had to drop out due to another project. The producers instead hired Ridley Scott, who had helmed many high-profile commercials in England, but had only directed one prior feature, the critically-praised box-office disappointment The Duellists (1977). Walter Hill did a final rewrite on the script, which was shown to Scott, who later said, "I read it in forty minutes...and bang! The script was simple and direct; it was the reason why I did the film." Design work on Alien proceeded; Chris Foss was brought in to do more concepts on spaceships, but work on the monster itself had yet to begin. O'Bannon finally brought in a book of H. R. Giger's paintings called Necronomicon to show to the director. "I looked down and saw this stunning picture," Scott later said. "I have never been so sure of something in all my life. And I said to Dan, 'Well, either my problems are over or they've just begun.'" Giger was hired for preproduction design work and given a studio space in which to work (the film would be shot largely at Shepperton Studios in England); he also promptly asked for an assortment of animal bones for his work materials. Giger painted a number of large canvases and using the bones as a base, he sculpted his ideas with Styrofoam. He had freedom to depict the life cycle of the Alien, and the stages called for different-looking creatures, dubbed by the crew the Face Hugger, the Chest Burster, and the Big Alien. To portray the main creature, the filmmakers hired a six-foot-ten, 26-year old Nigerian named Bolaji Badejo, a design student in England. Giger made a cast of his body, and "as I do with all my work, I made the creature look biomechanical. Starting with the plaster core, I worked with Plasticine, rubber, bones, ribbed tubes, and different mechanical stuff like wires. The whole costume is translucent; the head is fiberglass." Scott was determined that the creature would look properly "alien" onscreen, so he opted to show it primarily in close-up views in quick cuts. Only once is the creature seen full-view. The filmmakers of Alien, and Giger in particular, influenced the look and feel of science fiction films for several years to come. As Brooks Landon wrote in Cinefantastique from a 1988 vantage point, "[Alien] immersed us in a systematically alien environment, an entire implicit ecology, confronting us with a spaceship at once so vast and so strange looking that it subverted our comfortable distinctions between biology and machinery, our expectations of mechanical forms with implicitly clear functions, and with a creature that threatened us from without and from within." For better or worse, the dark, menacing, and erotic biomechanical combination of "circuitry and slime" became the default sensibility in films such as Saturn 3 (1980), Scared to Death (1981), Galaxy of Terror (1981), Lifeforce (1985), and the 1986 version of Invaders from Mars, among many others. In the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin called Alien "preposterously scary and surpassingly well-done" and wrote that "not a frame... is flat or casual or perfunctory." Champlin also praised the production design and effects, concluding that "the effects are more persuasively out of this world than any I can remember. The sense of otherness – the sense that this planet, this thing, this alien wreck of a ship derive from no previous models – is very strong. What good is a fantasy that isn't fantastic? Eerie, this one is." On the other hand, Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, does not feel the film is different looking; he writes, "Alien is an extremely small, rather decent movie of its modest kind, set inside a large, extremely fancy physical production... It's an old-fashioned scare movie about something that is not only implacably evil but prone to jumping out at you when (the movie hopes) you least expect it. There was once a time when this sort of thing was set in an old dark house, on a moor, in a thunderstorm. Being trendy, Mr. Scott and his associates have sent it up in space." Even though Alien was a violent, bloody film with a hard "R" rating, Twentieth Century Fox did not hesitate to license the film out for a number of commercial products and toys. (At the time, Fox's Star Wars had been in almost perpetual release for two years and was still enjoying huge merchandising sales). There were Alien books, records, shirts, iron-ons, puzzles, games, bubble-gum cards, a "Blaster Target Set," and most notoriously, a large 18-inch Alien Action Figure. The Alien Action Figure boasted "mechanically operated jaws" (as in the movie, a teeth-bearing tongue extended from the mouth) and "spring loaded arms to crush its victims!" Although commonplace today, this was the first kid's toy marketed from an R-rated film, and it garnered some controversy at the time. Alien was a natural for a sequel, and seven years later Fox released Aliens (1986), written and directed by James Cameron. This film wisely did not try to duplicate the deliberate horror-suspense mood of Ridley Scott's effort; instead, Cameron presented a non-stop action picture and cleverly expanded on the Alien life cycle. Producer: Gordon Carroll, David Giler, Walter Hill by John M. Miller SOURCES: Thursday, October 7,2010 12:15 AM In Countdown, a trio of astronauts - Chiz, Rick and Lee - are subjected to rigorous training and simulated space flights in preparation for a future Moon expedition. When it is learned that the Soviet Union already has a mission orbiting the moon with plans to land on the surface, NASA officials race against time to land their own man on the lunar surface first. At first, Chiz, an Air Force colonel, is selected to pilot the Pilgrim I to the moon. The President, however, feels that the mission should not appear to be a military endeavor and requests that Lee, a civilian, guide the expedition. Bitterly disappointed at the turn of events, Chiz, acting as Lee's trainer, pushes his protégé to the limits of his endurance in training, putting his life at risk in one situation. The intense preparations pay off, however, once the Pilgrim I is launched and Lee encounters genuine life-threatening problems during his flight to Mars. Prior to being assigned Countdown Altman was at a low point in his career. He had recently given up his rights to produce and direct Petulia (1968) in exchange for his involvement in a prime-time television series entitled Nightwatch. Unfortunately, the network cancelled Nightwatch after pressure from Lucille Ball who demanded the same time slot for her company's new series, Mission Impossible. Altman's loss was compounded by the fact that Petulia ended up on most critics' top ten lists for 1968 with Richard Lester basking in the acclaim. Meanwhile, Altman had no new prospects though he was determined not to return to television work and was dead set on breaking into the film industry one way or another. Thanks to his association with William Conrad (from previous Warner and Universal Studios work) and James Lydon (from Kraft Suspense Theatre), Altman was offered the opportunity to direct Countdown by the two former actors who were now presiding over Warner Bros.' B-picture unit. Although Altman's account of the making of Countdown differs substantially from Conrad and Lydon's, the final result is unmistakably the work of the same man who would go on to direct M*A*S*H* (1970) and Nashville (1975). According to the director in Altman on Altman (edited by David Thompson), "There was a book I tried to buy called The Pilgrim Project by Hank Searls, which I thought was terrific. It was about sending a guy to the Moon on Gemini, and then he had to wait there until they could develop Apollo to come and pick him up. It was all about beating the Russians. It was owned by someone else; then Warner Brothers got it, and they had a low-budget film programmer. They offered it to me, and I took it without hesitation. That was Countdown. I thought it was a pretty good little film. I tried to show astronauts as human beings with problems, and I had scenes with over-lapping dialogue, in which I made sure that every word wasn't being heard. There was quite a bit of excitement over my work at the studio." Countdown also benefited from the outstanding ensemble cast which included Robert Duvall and James Caan in the key roles of Chiz and Lee, respectively, and several actors from Altman's television days such as Barbara Baxley, Charles Aidman, Joanna Moore, Ted Knight, Steve Ihnat and Michael Murphy. Equally important was the fact that NASA cooperated with the production and members of Altman's "production teams visited NASA sites and conferred with scientific and technological personnel. Art director Jack Poplin did an estimable job designing mock replicates of the Apollo capsule, Mission controls, and Gemini simulators, as well as a lunar-landing module years before its actual use. At Altman's insistence, there were to be no process shots, no miniatures. Using sound stages 14, 15, and 17 at Warner Brothers, Poplin devised a credible rendering of outer space and the moon's surface. The moon landing scene was simulated in the Mojave Desert. There is also one all-out party sequence set at Altman's then-Mandeville Canyon digs." (from Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff by Patrick McGilligan). At the end of Countdown's production, the relationship between Altman and Warner Brothers suddenly broke down. According to Altman, he was undermined by the legendary studio head. "When I was finishing the film, Jack Warner, who had been in Europe, came back, although when he came on the set I wasn't there," the director recalled. "Then over the weekend he watched the dailies. On Sunday I got a call at home - I was going to start editing the next day - and it was Bill Conrad...He told me, 'Don't come to the studio, they won't let you through the gates.' I said, 'What do you mean?' 'Well, Jack Warner saw your dailies and he said, "That fool has actors talking at the same time."' And I had to drive up to the gate, and there was a cardboard box with all this stuff from my desk, which the guard handed to me. I was not allowed in the studio. And they cut the picture for kids...Actually, being fired from Countdown was great for me, because each time something like that happens, you get a battle scar and you know how to protect yourself in that situation again." Altman also accused Warner Bros. of tampering with the conclusion of Countdown: "They rewrote the ending we shot. I left it ambiguous - the guy was probably going to die on the moon. When he landed there, he was supposed to find a shelter with a beacon on it. But he only had so much life support, and he landed prematurely and hadn't seen the beacon." If Countdown had actually ended here as Altman suggested, the film would probably have gone down in history as the most anti-climactic space race drama ever made. As it is, the conclusion is more hopeful and less ambiguous than Altman intended but it is still far from a conventional ending for a commercial feature. Counter to Altman's version of his Countdown experience, producer Lydon insists that Altman was never fired by Warner and that the studio mogul approved Altman's final cut despite his concerns about the "muddiness" of the overlapping dialogue. "Studio records indicate that, one way or another, Lydon and Conrad were in fact reconciled to Altman's footage," wrote Patrick McGilligan in his biography of Altman. "Only one additional day of filming was clocked, well after Altman had finished directing, by a substitute director, Conrad himself. Duvall was the only star on the set for a day set aside for cutaways to smooth out transitions." Lydon emphasized to McGilligan that "The final cut of Countdown was the taste and judgment of Bill Conrad and me - according to our contract with Altman. The changes we made were technical only...I believe now as I did then that it's the best film Altman ever made - except for M*A*S*H* - and I'm still a fan." When Countdown was finally ready for distribution, Warner Bros. made the mistake of placing it on a double feature with the infamously bad John Wayne Vietnam war saga, The Green Berets. It went virtually unnoticed as most critics were too busy attacking Wayne's right wing film polemic so Countdown was pulled from the double bill and released as a single feature a year later. It didn't perform any better at the box office but it did garner a few positive reviews. Variety called it "a model example of what can be achieved on a relatively modest budget...far superior to cheap exploitation product." For Altman fans, it's certainly worth a look and its importance is best summed up by Geoff Andrew in his TimeOut review: "Slightly soapy in parts, but overall it's an intelligent and taut little film, interesting for the way it foreshadows not only the actual look of the Apollo capsules but also Altman's later style: the lack of interest in 'plot', the overlapping dialogue, and the imaginative use of the 'scope frame are all there, if in embryonic form." Producer: William Conrad by Jeff Stafford SOURCES:
It was in this spirit that the United States began its race to the moon, a race against not only the sheer technological challenges involved, but more pointedly against the USSR, whose own space program had seen enormous progress and who, unthinkably to any patriotic American, might reach Luna before us. From satellites, to monkey missions, to manned orbital flights, and finally to the Apollo project, the American space program was a lofty inspiration to a nation in the midst of conflict, both at home and abroad. It was a source of excitement, too, especially to flight-happy author Martin Caidin (1927 – 1997), who had a sterling reputation as a writer of over 150 extremely well-researched and scrupulously accurate military, scientific and hardware-based novels and histories, including many WW II-based (some written in collaboration with former Japanese officers), and many more just on the edge of science fiction. His novel Marooned from 1964 was the gripping tale of three orbiting U.S. astronauts aboard spacecraft Ironman 1 who are stranded in space without any hope of rescue. Initial Hollywood interest in the novel came from director Frank Capra –- bitten by the space bug after making a short documentary for the 1964 NY World's Fair -- who struggled to envision a movie that could meet Columbia Picture's budgetary constraints. He couldn't, and gave up trying in mid-1966. By that time the U.S. Apollo space program was on it way, but suffered a horrifying setback when the three astronauts who were to have flown on Apollo 1 – Grissom, White and Chaffee – were killed when their capsule burned up during a launch pad test. America now realized with grim certainty that the space program, until then mostly a positive story for the U.S., contained unforeseen dangers which could befall its brave astronauts. Martin Caidin's novel looked more relevant than ever. Columbia Pictures' former head of production -- now independent producer -- Mike Frankovich (son of broad-mawed comedian Joe E. Brown), who had put the kibosh on Frank Capra's earlier Marooned plans, stepped up to produce, with Frank Capra, Jr. as associate producer. Veteran helmer John Sturges was brought in as director. Sturges started his film career at RKO Studios in the art department, and soon moved into editing, a skill which served him well when America entered WW II. During his time in the Air Force, Captain Sturges, who earned a fistful of military commendations during his service in battle locations such as Africa, Italy and Britain, also earned a solid reputation editing and directing over forty training films and documentaries. After the war, Sturges joined Columbia Pictures as a director in their low-budget unit, churning out serviceable programmers on a twelve-day schedule. In 1950, hoping for bigger budgets to work with, he moved on to MGM and other studios, achieving his biggest successes with taut, and vigorous movies, many of them Westerns, such as Escape from Fort Bravo (1953), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), and The Magnificent Seven (1960). Sturges' 1963 The Great Escape was even more popular, and the offbeat western Hour of the Gun (1967) was certainly one of his best. But it was his America-meets-USSR-under-the-ice Arctic submarine thriller Ice Station Zebra (1968) which was the closest – in terms of its military/technological milieu – to his new assignment, Marooned. Gregory Peck, who won the role of space agency head Charles Keith in the film, had been cast as the lead in Ice Station Zebra when it was in development at Columbia, but pre-production troubles killed the project and it later moved over to MGM, where Rock Hudson stepped into the lead when Peck had previous commitments. Columbia offered him the lead in Marooned, where he would be joined by a cast of solid performers, most of whom were familiar faces, at least to TV viewers. David Janssen, who had just concluded his spectacularly successful four season run in 1967 as wrongly accused Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive, was brought in to play renegade pilot Ted Dougherty. Richard Crenna, best known as Luke from The Real McCoys (1957 – 1963), had just scored a screen hit in Wait Until Dark (1967) and was cast as head astronaut Pruett. His two astro-comrades are played by Gene Hackman and James Franciscus, who had the lead role in the high-school-set TV drama Mr. Novak (1963 – 1968) and was a steady presence in many TV and movie roles. Hackman, near the beginning of his now-towering screen career, also came from a predominantly-TV background to burst into prominence in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), but his movie career was already well on its way. Astronaut Crenna's wife was the always-interesting Lee Grant, who got her start in NY theater and live TV, and eventually became an Academy Award winner for Shampoo (1975), and an acclaimed director of movies and TV. Gene Hackman's better half back on earth was Mariette Hartley, whose promising debut in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) led to a career primarily in TV guest roles and commercials (including her Polaroid stint with James Garner), and who later won an Emmy for being Mrs. Incredible Hulk. Nancy Kovack played the wife of James Franciscus; most of her credits were on TV but she had a few prominent movie roles in titles like Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Elvis' Frankie and Johnny (1966). Far more important to Marooned than its cast was the authenticity the filmmakers hoped to bring to the project. With the actual space program being broadcast on television on a regular basis, the average American had a pretty good idea of what rocket launches were supposed to look like, and it was crucial that Marooned live up to those expectations. Taking this mandate seriously, they enlisted the help of NASA for design plans and were able to use actual Apollo hardware supplied by North American Aviation, one of the primary contractors for the program. In a bid for precision, the capsule interior set was actually built inside the capsule exterior, portions of which could be removed for filming set-ups. Crenna, Hackman and Franciscus sat in real NASA astronaut crew chairs in an authentically cramped mock crew cabin. The actual orbiting Skylab concept was in the early planning stages at the time of Marooned, and that early simplistic design, without decks or interior up or down orientation, was used for the orbiting lab in the film. The service module was also an accurate representation, though it was built shorter than the real thing because it would only be filmed from certain angles; they did, however, film from all angles and it ended up looking slightly wrong. (At Academy Award time though, the Special Effects got an Oscar®, winning out over Krakatoa: East of Java with its earthquake/tidal wave simulations. Marooned also received nominations for Cinematography and Sound.) The NASA space program intersected with Marooned on more than just the design front. Marooned's production timetable coincided with several important Apollo missions, including Apollo 7 in October of 1968, the first manned flight of an Apollo spacecraft. Production was halted and everyone on set watched in rapt attention on December 12, 1968, as Apollo 8, the first manned voyage to orbit the moon, launched from Cape Canaveral. Apollo's rapid and regular schedule was breathtaking, with March 1969 bringing the first launch of the Lunar Excursion Module of Apollo 9, which in May 1969 went around the moon in the Apollo 10 mission. More exciting than any movie, of course, was the July 21, 1969 landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon's surface, a little over four months before Marooned's release. Nothing that Hollywood could ever cobble together would even come close to the budget, cast, crew or majesty of that particular milestone. With Marooned on target for a late fall release, the producers decided, in another choice supporting realism, to jettison a traditional musical score in favor of a selection of varying electronic tones, beeps and hums to accompany each particular space vehicle on screen. It may have been just a tad too much authenticity. When Marooned was released in December 1969, the taut, admirable and intelligent production nevertheless was met with a lackluster reception. The absence of musical cues to help along the drama, the dialogue filled with intricate technical jargon and astronaut shop-talk, and the long, slow and painfully precise outer space extravehicular maneuvers combined to slow down the pace and ultimately strain audience –- and critical –- interest. Some faulted Marooned for the contrivance of its last-minute astronaut rescue, and by the Russians, no less, and others felt that the movie was too tedious –- though indisputably genuine -- for its own good. The cast received generally good reviews, especially Gregory Peck and Lee Grant for her farewell scene with astronaut husband Crenna, but ultimately Marooned was a box-office disappointment and didn't make back its budget. NASA, however, was pleased with the production and gave it an official commendation, and some say that Marooned's climax, the American-Russian spacecraft link-up, inspired the real-life Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. Perhaps the movie's legacy lay more as blueprint than as entertainment; Marooned's three stranded fictional astronauts presaged April 1970's Apollo 13 near-disaster as an oxygen explosion left three very real astronauts far out in space, nearly...marooned. Producer: Frank Capra, Jr., M.J. Frankovich
From the Earth to the Moon features Joseph Cotton as a post-Civil War mad scientist who invents a source of infinite energy called Power X, a fuel he believes can propel a manned rocket to the moon and back. (Parallels to modern atomic weapons are also drawn strongly.) George Sanders plays a rival scientist and Debra Paget plays Sanders's daughter, who stows away on the rocket without too much trouble. The movie suffered creatively from the demise of its original releasing company, RKO. (Warner Bros. handled the release instead.) This led to the film's budget being greatly slashed during production. The effects department suffered the greatest hit, and scenes on the moon were eliminated from the script. What remains once the rocket blasts off is a disappointingly verbose chamber drama aboard the rocket with little in the way of special effects. All that leaves is the cast as probably the most interesting reason to take a look at From the Earth to the Moon. Cotton and Sanders are always worth watching, but also present are popular character actors Carl Esmond and Henry Daniell, both of whom excelled as suave, sinister villains in their careers. Among his many roles, the British Daniell played perhaps the best Prof. Moriarty to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes in The Woman in Green (1945). Esmond, an Austrian, appeared in everything from Sergeant York (1941) to Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947), and he died just a few months ago in December 2004, at age 102. Morris Ankrum, who here plays Pres. Ulysses S. Grant, is fondly remembered for his many 1950s sci-fi films in which he usually played gruff military men, policemen or other officials. From the Earth to the Moon had been made into movies prior to 1958 and it would be again. A famous Georges Melies short loosely based on the book appeared in 1902, and further screen versions appeared in 1914, 1967, and 1986 (a French TV movie). The title was also used for a 1998 HBO mini-series hosted by Tom Hanks. Electronic sound effects lifted from Forbidden Planet (1956) were used as part of the score. Producer: Benedict Bogeaus by Jeremy Arnold Carl Ray Louk "FRIENDSHIP NEVER ENDS" SG-1996 "LET LOVE LEAD THE WAY" SG-2000 "THE PHOENIX SHALL RISE" SD "EVEN A MAN WHO IS PURE IN HEART AND SAYS HIS PRAYERS BY NIGHT, MAY BECOME A WOLF WHEN THE WOLFBANE BLOOMS AND THE AUTUMN MOON IS BRIGHT." LT-1941 "FLESH OF MY FLESH; BLOOD OF MY BLOOD; KIN OF MY KIN WHEN SAY COME TO YOU, YOU SHALL CROSS LAND OR SEA TO DO MY BIDDING!" CVTD-1895 "FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE, FOR HATE SAKE I SPIT MY LAST BREATH AT THEE" CA-1895 "I HAVE BEEN, AND ALWAYS SHALL BE YOUR FRIEND" Spock "TRICK OR TREAT, TRICK OR TREAT CANDY IS DANDY BUT MURDER, OH MURDER, IS SO SWEET" CRL-2003 "EYE OF NEWT, AND TOE OF FROG, WOOL OF BAT, AND TONGUE OF DOG ADDER'S FORK, BLIND-WORM'S STING, LIZARD'S LEG, AND OWLET'S WING. FOR A CHARM OF POWERFUL TROUBLE, LIKE A HELL-BROTH BOIL AND BABBLE. DOUBLE, DOUBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE, FIRE BURN, AND CALDRON BUBBLE" WS MySpace.com: www.myspace.com/carlraylouk http://www.myspace.com/carlraylouk Yahoo Group: Yahoo! Groups : LouksHauntedGraveyardhttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/LouksHauntedGraveyard/ Yahoo Group: Yahoo! Groups : TheWorldAccordingtoCarlRayLouk http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheWorldAccordingtoCarlRayLouk/ |
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