Conquest of Space (1955) Part 2 of 4

I saw this movie circa 1957, two years after its opening, at a Saturday "kiddie matinee". I think it is safe to say that no film before or since affected me quite as much as Conquest of Space in terms of pumping up my sense of wonder, making my spine literally tingle, and pushing my feelings of awe and grandeur clear out of the box. I was floored by this movie. It's visual style and production design was nothing less than astonishing. Viewed today with an open mind, it's impossible to deny that the Paramount Pictures film crew and production design staff went the extra mile building the models and sets.  No other picture of the era came close to showing us what space hardware might actually look like.

Today, when I look back critically on this movie, I see now what exactly affected me so dramatically. It was the design of the movie. The way it looked enchanted me to a stratospheric degree. All the special effects were indeed special to me—the panoply of stars and nebular gases sparkling across the galaxy, the breathtaking Technicolor pallet, the exteriors of the model spacecraft and space station, the futuristic interior sets, the images of Mars hanging in space, and the awesomely realistic surface of the Red Planet all enchanted me.

The visual impact of the movie was the responsibility and end-product of the cinema professionals who worked as a team, director Byron Haskin; director of photography Lionel Lindon; space artist Chesley Bonestell; special effects technicians John P. Fulton, Irmin Roberts, Paul Lerpae, Ivyl Burks, and Jan Domela; process photography technician Farciot Edouart; and art directors Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillan Johnson. 

The director Byron Haskin was handpicked by producer Geoge Pal. This was the third film they collaborated on, the first two being The War of the Worlds and The Naked Jungle. Haskin was once head of the special effects department at Warner Bros. and his knowledge of effects photography was encyclopedic, making him the perfect director of an effects heavy production such as Conquest of Space. Later he would direct the photographically innovative and much admired Robinson Crusoe on Mars. 

 Conquest of Space importantly incorporated concepts from Wernher von Braun's 1952 nonfiction book The Mars Project, as well as material that he co-authored from the April 30, 1954, issue of Collier's magazine that would later in 1956 be incorporated into the Viking Press book The Exploration of Mars by Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, and Chesley Bonestell. All of these books mainly feature text that is straight popular science with no fictional characters or story line (such elements being added by the screen writers). In addition, according to director Byron Haskin, "We had Wernher von Braun on the set all the time...as a technical advisor.”

The visual style and impact that so affected me started from the first frame of film. Back in those days, the screens actually had curtains in front of them. When the lights went down and the movie started, you could see the Paramount mountain logo at the same time the curtain was drawn. Then, with the first frame of the film I was drawn into a 2-minute sensory experience that made my spine tingle. Many things happened at the same time. I catalog them here knowing that there is little chance that the reader can appreciate the full grandeur of this bit of film-making.

While the Paramount logo appears for five seconds and while it is dissolving into the first frame of the picture, the majestic score of Nathan Van Cleave begins with a crash of cymbals and a rising fanfare of expressive horns. The first frames of film show the spectacle of a blanket of stars and nebula not like any starscape I had seen before or since (no, not even Forbidden Planet, 2001, or Star Wars). Space has never been so black, nor the stars so scintillating. The scattered and crystalline disk of the Milky Way, glowing across the entire VistaVision-shaped screen, is a blend of purples and blues and blacks that stunned me, so I felt that I was looking into infinite space. Toward the top of the frame, small in the distance and drifting slowly in front of the stars, is the white circular von Braun-inspired space station that is at the heart of the story. It is at once spinning and orbiting the earth whose blue disk fills the bottom quarter of the screen. Also in the distance but somewhat to the left and closer to the camera is a white spaceship with broad wings and globular fuel tanks. As these images appear, Van Cleave’s score becomes quiet and eerie with the music gently rising and falling in pitch and blending with a subtly ethereal chorus, all underscoring the impossibility of seeing these images. At the exact moment these frames begin, a man’s deeply sonorous voice narrates emphatically:

“This is a story of tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, when men have built a station in space, constructed in the form of a great wheel—

[Dissolve into a closer view of the station and ship in the same relative configuration.]

—and set a thousand miles out from the earth, fixed by gravity, and turning about the world every two hours, serving a double purpose: an observation post in the heavens, and a place where a spaceship can be assembled—

[Dissolve into a closeup of the space ship (stage left) with the space station turning in the distance (stage right).]

—and then launched to explore other planets, and the vast universe itself, in the last and greatest adventure of mankind—a plunge toward the—

[At this point the narrator abruptly stops speaking; the silence is almost tactile, and the picture quick- dissolves into a closeup of the rocket motors blasting, filling the screen with sparks and pushing the ship out of the screen to the left. Another quick-dissolve as the rocket soars across the middle of the screen away from the camera so that in an instant its size diminishes by half and then it disappears, dissolving into the stars just as the bright sparkling yellow and outlined film title sails into view appearing as though from infinity and quickly filling the screen while the narrator breaks his seemingly long silence and speaks emphatically, all the while the score soaring majestically with lots of horns and percussion.]

—CONQUEST OF SPACE!”

[Now the opening credits roll superimposed over those amazing stars using the same yellow font as the title and the music quickly changes from quietly eerie to fully martial. The card “Directed by Byron Haskin” dissolves into another outstanding view of the ship and turning station hanging in space, and then we dissolve into the interior of the station.]

All this takes exactly two minutes and was only the beginning of this breathtakingly visual motion picture.


  
While unfortunately not complete, cutting off the very 
beginning and ending of the sequence, this YouTube 
video showing the title sequence does give an impression
of what I tried to convey in words in the description above.


This story about a trip to Mars has many moments of spine-tingling wonder. The depiction of the surface of Mars was dramatic and cinematically wondrous in 1955 and wildly impressed me. At the time, though, Chesley Bonestell, whose painted backdrop for the crash-landing on the Mars surface had been rejected as looking too much like Arizona, grumbled when he saw that the prop people had scattered lumps of coal and melted glass over the red sawdust that passed as red soil. Why did you do that, he asked? He was told that it was done to make the surface more unearthly (anecdote from The Films of George Pal by Gail Morgan Hickman). Nonetheless, Bonestell was at that time considered to be the expert in the visual interpretation of the planets, especially Mars. As a result, the Martian skies of Conquest of Space are every bit as crystalline blue as Bonestell was prone to include in his own Martian paintings (see inset).

Note the lumps of coal and melted glass that were used to make the surface of Mars "more unearthly." Also note, that in 1955, the best guess for the color of Mars' sky was as crystalline blue as earth's best skies.

Since this is a George Pal film, the special visual effects were nearly as good as they could get for their time. I say “nearly” because the finest effects technician in the field, Gordon Jennings, died while finishing Pal’s The War of the Worlds two years earlier. The new head of the Paramount effects department became John Fulton, renowned former head of the Universal International effects department. Jennings’ death could not have been more ill-timed. Fulton took on a massively full plate. Not only was he responsible for the effects on Conquest of Space and other films, he was also deeply into the effects for the most intimidating picture of the era, Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of The Ten Commandments.

Indeed, Roy Kinnard in his Fantastic Films article “A New Look at an Old Classic: Conquest of Space” states, “[T]he special visual effects in Conquest ... are outstanding especially for their time, and they are the well-tailored work of one of Hollywood’s most gifted craftsmen, John P. Fulton. Besides the massive, graceful spacecraft shown in this film, it was Fulton who was responsible for parting the Red Sea in the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments.... It is true that the blue screen mattes in Conquest are crude [from our perspective] (a ‘matte fringe’ of unwanted blue line is often seen surrounding spaceships and actors), but this is hardly a technical flaw unique to this picture. Many productions of the 50s had difficulty with blue screen work, even multi-million dollar spectaculars like [1959's] Ben-Hur.”

Not to mention the sacred The Ten Commandments itself!

Blue screen was used extensively in The Ten Commandments, and the blue line fringes are always quite evident throughout the movie. In fact, Fulton’s remarkable and iconic parting of the Red Sea sequence is a great hodgepodge of intersecting blue fringe lines (see below).

Above is an image from DeMilles' The Ten Commandments showing the Red Sea parting. Below is a scene from Conquest of Space showing the round space station hanging in space above the earth. Both shots required a huge amount of effort from Paramount's visual special effects technicians using the state-of-the-art blue screen matting technology of the mid-1950s. Despite matting that is not precisely perfect, both shots provide utterly awesome experiences for audiences that would otherwise be absolutely impossible to witness.

   To be continued in Part 3

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