Flight to Mars (1951)

As described in detail in my book, as a direct consequence of Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M being smash hits in 1950, the following year 1951 gave birth to among others The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Lost Continent, The Man from Planet X, The Thing from Another World, When Worlds Collide, and Flight to Mars. 

It is Flight to Mars, the second voyage-to-Mars movie of the modern era (Rocketship X-M being the first) that concerns us now. 

Two views of the damaged earth ship undergoing repairs on Mars. Both images are entirely wondrous matte paintings by Irving Block, except at the very bottom where there are several live-action people soft-matted into the paintings (courtesy Wade Williams Distribution).

 

 

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Marguerite Chapman as Alita.

Summary: The first spaceship to Mars crash lands on the Red Planet and the five- member crew (Commander Jim Barker, newsman Steve Abbott, and scientists Carol Stafford, Dr. Lane, and Prof. Jackson) is met by a contingent of humanoid Martians from a vast and futuristic underground civilization. The crew is welcomed and allowed free access to the entire city, the better to speedily rebuild their rocket for the return to earth. A beautiful woman Martian scientist, Alita, is assigned to help, but she is drawn to one of the earthlings. Unfortunately, the high Martian Council is scheming to use the completed spaceship as the first in a flotilla of ships with which they will attack earth, as Mars is quickly being depleted of the essential life-sustaining element Corium. The Council intends to kill the earth crew, but fortuitously the earthlings are warned by Alita and her engineer father. Unknown to the Council, rocket repairs are completed faster than anticipated, and, with infuriated Martians chasing them, the earthlings take off for home in a nick of time—with Alita and a council-member coming along—she to marry Jim Barker, and he to be a Martian ambassador to Earth.
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The Monogram Cinecolor film (produced by Walter Mirisch early in a career that would give the world The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, and West Side Story) started (on DVD and my first time viewing the film as an adult) and I was pleasantly surprised that the main title sequence was unexpectedly satisfying—not tremendously so, but clearly well thought out with the words “Flight to Mars” originating in the center of a star much as you’d find on a Christmas card and rushing forward as though from infinity in bright red letters, partially outlined in white, to fill the screen with the distinctive 3D blue perspective lines remaining, which give the title a sense of weight and importance.

(courtesy Wade Williams Distribution).

The film's beginning includes colorful matte paintings of the Mars-bound rocket still on its launching pad that are exceptionally beautiful, and the several model shots of the rocket blasting off and hurtling through space are an order of magnitude better than one would expect of an extremely low budget movie. 

 

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Unfortunately the shipboard drama is pedestrian, filled with pointless time-filling colloquial banter, an unrequited shipboard romance, the pre-feminism continual denigration of women, and, not one, but two swarms of hurtling meteors.

(courtesy Wade Williams Distribution)

However, as soon as the rocket crashlands on Mars (due to a smashed landing gear), suddenly I was transported into a world of wonder that was totally unexpected and captivating (complete with Mars presciently having a red sky). Perhaps because my only earlier experiences with the film were on a small black and white TV, I was not expecting the glorious saturated colors, the elegantly painted backdrops and breathtakingly rich matte paintings, as well as the clever otherworldly sets, all designed to bolster a colorful story.

No sooner do the astronauts debark their craft than their path intersects with a situation that many take umbrage with. Mark Thomas McGee (in You Won’t Believe Your Eyes! co-authored with R.J. Robertson) and Bill Warren (in Keep Watching the Skies!) describe the problem:

MCGEE: "I was ten years old when I saw Flight to Mars. It was a Saturday matinee and the theater was packed with kids. We all wondered what would the Martians look like. BOOOOOOOOOO! The Martian leader appeared, wearing one of the colorful space suits from Destination Moon, and it was just Morris Ankrum. No makeup, no nothin’. The disappointment was overwhelming and every kid in that audience gave vent."

WARREN: "When I first saw Flight to Mars at the age of nine ... I couldn’t have been more disappointed when the Martians appeared. They are simply human beings, actors wearing the old Destination Moon pressure suits."

The Martian spacesuits in Flight to Mars (right) were the very suits worn by the crew of the previous year’s Destination Moon (left), even down to the diagonal zippers. Only the helmets were changed (both photos courtesy Wade Williams Distribution). Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller;copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

 

 

 

 

I admit that the first sight of the human Martians wearing what sure looked like the exact same four colorful spacesuits from Destination Moon was a tad disillusioning, but I quickly bounced back and determined to check for myself. Well, the suits in Flight to Mars are in fact the same suits (see figure above) that were made for Destination Moon with the exception that the actors in Destination Moon wore padding under their suits to approximate their appearance in a vacuum, and the helmets of the Martians have been painted to match the brightly colored suits.

Yet, accepting the Martians as humans on faith really does provide rewards that are boundless. Without that notion of humanness firmly in place it would have been impossible to justify the numerous dazzlingly gorgeous young women with perfect posture purposely gliding around the halls of the underground cities in high heels and micro-mini skirts. This humanness also makes plausible Jim Barker and Alita eloping and rocketing to earth (where, one wonders, how she will bear up under earth’s significantly greater gravity, 62 percent greater than Mars’).

Left to right: Marguerite Chapman; Lucille Barkley, also see lobby card

below; Virginia Huston (courtesy Wade Williams Distribution). Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller;
copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

Left: A lobby card. Right: A half-sheet poster (courtesy Wade Williams Distribution).

Principal actresses are Marguerite Chapman as Alita, (probably a nod to the Queen of Mars in the 1924 USSR silent film Aelita), Lucille Barkley as the two-faced villainess Terris, and Virginia Huston as earth scientist Carol Stafford, who is doing on Mars as the Martians do.

With regard to special visual effects, Flight to Mars, was especially blessed with two of the most versatile, clever, and talented effects artists then in the business, Irving Block and Jack Rabin. According to genre film authority Tom Weaver in his informative essay accompanyin   the Flight to Mars DVD, “Block and Rabin built a sleek model spaceship, equipping it with fuel that ignited to produce the rocket propulsion effect. This model was suspended and manipulated in front of a large transparency backdrop of outer space and the Moon. Block also painted the landscape of valleys and snow-capped mountains that is glimpsed through the spaceship’s porthole before the Martian

crash.... 

The underground city

(courtesy Wade Williams Distribution).

The underground city, as viewed at a distance in one scene, was part set and part matte shot. It was enhanced by both cartoon animation (representing a row of moving jet cars) and a live-action rocket vehicle pulled on strings up through the foreground.”

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Now recall from a few paragraphs back that Bill Warren and Mark Thomas McGee expressed their sense of betrayal as children when the Martians appeared and turned out to be ordinary humans in Destination Moon spacesuits. However, those were only instances. Other 10-year-old-boys had other reactions. Case in point, exhibitor and restorer of classic films Wade Williams shares his own experience seeing Flight to Mars for the first time (adapted from his website: www.wadewilliamscollection.com):

Williams: "In the fall of 1951, when I was nine-years-old, I saw a new movie that would change the course of my life forever. The film was called Flight to Mars and it opened my mind to new ideas, new frontiers and the promise of a new and exciting future. I promptly traded in my Hoppy outfit, Roy Rogers six shooters and Gene Autry comics for space helmets, rocket ships and ray guns."

Williams was affected by the film to the degree that, as reported in Starlog magazine number 15, he became:

Starlog: "one of the most dedicated and successful cinematic sleuths ... who makes it his business to save genre films, often just in a nick of time. One of his latest acquisitions is the rarely seen, much talked about Flight to Mars, a 1951 Cinecolor feature which Williams describes as 'close to extinct in theatrical form.'”

One-sheet poster (courtesy Wade Williams Distribution).

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In my view, seeing the film afresh as an adult (rather than on a 10-inch black and white mid-1950s TV set), it is largely a delight due to costuming, casting, craftsmanship, production design, special visual effects, and a certain earnestness. I enjoyed this film far more than, say, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds. The colorful nice Image/Corinth/The Wade Williams Collection DVD of Flight to Mars is readily available.

Here is a nice Flight to Mars trailer (YouTube).

Flight to Mars (1951)

USA. Monogram Pictures Corporation. Cinecolor. 1.37:1. 71m.

CREDITS: Director Lesley Selander. Producer Walter Mirisch. Associate Producer Richard Heermance. Screenplay Arthur Strawn. Score Marlin Skiles. Director of Photography Harry Neumann. Production Designer Edward S. Haworth. Editor Richard Heermance. Color Consultants Wilton R. Holm, Clifford D. Shank. Special Photographic Effects Jack Cosgrove, Jack Rabin (uncredited), Irving Block (uncredited).

CAST: Alita Marguerite Chapman. Steve Abbott Cameron Mitchell. Dr. Jim Barker Arthur Franz. Carol Stafford Virginia Huston. Dr. Lane John Litel. Ikron Morris Ankrum. Prof. Jackson Richard Gaines. Terris Lucille Barkley. Tillamar Robert H. Barratt.

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