Conquest of Space (1955) Part 3 of 4

The spaceship arriving at Mars.

Genre film authority Roy Kinnard has said in Fantastic Films magazine, June 1979, “In examining the plethora of 1950s science fiction movies which deal with the theme of mans’ journeying to other worlds in order to advance his own knowledge, George Pal’s production of Conquest of Space stands head and shoulders above the others.... [I]n a ... genre overburdened with cheap and shoddy productions that are all too deserving of scorn, Conquest of Space rises above the tide of mediocrity....”

In my previous two posts about Conquest of Space, I had nothing but wonderful things to say about it.

Yet the film bombed at the box office. This third post will cast a light on that failure, and offer alternative suggestions to the standard ones as to why the film failed,

As explained in post# 1, producer George Pal idea wanted to follow up his 1950 hit Destination Moon with an epic three-part exploration of the solar system to be called Trio in Space. Gail Morgan Hickman, in his book The Films of George Pal, apprises us that the proposed film “focused on a revolving space station in orbit around the earth, from which voyages to Mars, Venus, and Jupiter would be launched.”  

Long-time vintage film exhibitor and conservationist Wade Williams says, “[Conquest of Space] is a beautiful film, in gorgeous Technicolor, wonderfully designed and has many light moments. On a big theatre screen it is thrilling and simply beautiful. It was not [an artistic] failure. It was as beautiful as Destination Moon and had Hollywood drama. It was Destination Moon Part 2 and Pal [probably] would have made it earlier but he grabbed When Worlds Collide because it was a spaceship property that Paramount already owned (as Cecil B. DeMille had planned to make it a decade earlier and much work had already gone into it.).”

Astounding promoting Destination Moon (1950)

Astounding promoting Conquest of Space (1955)

Paramount executives felt they knew better than Pal (despite his major successes of Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, and The War of the Worlds, as well as Houdini and The Naked Jungle) and gutted the initial concept of three stories and narrowed it to one. Various writers were brought on board and eventually a subplot was added of the mission commander going insane. Whether this studio tampering affected the box office destiny of the film is up for discussion. The film did extremely poorly at the box office and directly led to Pal’s relationship with Paramount ending gloomily—and unjustifiably, as I will assert below. It may be that Pal was being made the scapegoat for management’s own failures.

The film’s box-office failure is most likely due to the public simply having had enough of rocketship/space-type adventure pictures, which in 1950 were novel but by 1955 had become utterly commonplace. From the announcement of Destination Moon up to the release of Conquest of Space, the public had been treated to at least Rocketship X-M, Flight to Mars, Lost Continent, When Worlds Collide, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, Cat-Women of the Moon, Project Moonbase, Spaceways, and Riders to the Stars.

But that is not nearly all.   By the time Conquest of Space was released in the U.S. in April 1955, TV viewers had been deluged in the intervening five years with the series Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949–1955), Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1955), Space Patrol (1950–1955), Buck Rogers (1950–1951), Tom Corbett: Space Cadet (1950–1955), Rocky Jones: Space Ranger (1954), Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers (1953–1954), and Flash Gordon (1954–1955). Indeed, so commonplace had rocketship TV shows become, according to Gary Westfahl in his The Spacesuit Film, “By 1955, all these [TV] science fiction series were cancelled.... Younger viewers, it seems, had tired of science fiction and preferred westerns.”

But that is still not all.

Just a month before Conquest of Space’s release, the popular show Walt Disney’s Disneyland had launched the first of its projected “Tomorrowland” segments with “Man in Space,” an hour-long, Disney-esque exploration of space that (1) covered much of the exact same territory as Conquest of Space, (2) that featured prominent viewer-friendly explanations of space travel by the prominent scientists and engineers, Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and Heinz Haber, (3) mentioned the phrase “the conquest of space” more than a few times, and (4) that had an audience of approximately 42 million viewers (https://history.msfc.nasa.gov). ("Man in Space" was discussed in some detail earlier in this blog.)

This is a 1.5-minute YouTube taste of the first show, "Man in Space"
featuring Walt Disney as host and Werhner von Braun.
© Walt Disney Productions

All this before Paramount released Conquest of Space with uninspired documentary-sounding ads that trumpeted “SEE HOW IT WILL HAPPEN IN YOUR LIFETIME!” and that listed no actors at all—not one—let alone any stars or popular actors—and not one hint that Mars was in the movie at all!

Wade Williams says all of the above in far fewer words: “[Conquest of Space] was released too late in the cycle.”

The posters for 1950’s Rocketship X-M used the expression

“conquest of space” emblazoned prominently.

Title card.

“Been there, done that” was no doubt the prevailing mood when Conquest of Space appeared. Frankly “it wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist” to see the writing on the wall. Looked at this way, development and production of Conquest of Space was a giant BUSINESS MISTAKE. The movie should never have been made (despite its existence enriching my life considerably). Heck, even the posters for 1950’s Rocketship X-M used the expression “conquest of space” emblazoned prominently. How this poster text in itself escaped the attention of George Pal and the executives at Paramount Pictures is a mystery. Where were the cost/benefit analysts when talk began about yet another rocket movie, one that competed with eight popular TV space shows, and one that would be in expensive Technicolor and filled with lavish expensive special visual effects?

Conquest of Space was doomed long before its release, ironically mainly by the fabulous interest in “all things space” that had been generated by its own kith-and-kin predecessor, Destination Moon.

By the time Conquest of Space was released, audiences were bored with outer space movies. To quench its newly found “sense of wonder fix,” the public’s tastes had already shifted from rocket adventures to monsters of one sort or another—e.g., giant insects, mutants, werewolves, colossal men and women.

Giant mutant ants!

Colossal women!

Renowned Academy Award winner Dennis Muren offers a memory of 1955 in his foreword to Tom DeMichael’s Modern Sci-Fi films FAQ:  “[M]y pal Bruce and I hurried into the Hawaii Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard to see a new color movie, Conquest of Space. We were eight years old.... “Reeling” by on the giant screen, we saw a giant circular space station in orbit one hundred miles up, seemingly in orbit above me over Hollywood. Wow! And that was just the beginning. Awesome rocket ships of various shapes flew about.... Finally, the movie ended with a skillful landing and joyful liftoff from the desolate red surface of Mars....”

 

The production design of Conquest of Space (top) was closely modeled on the technical concepts of Wernher von Braun and space paintings of Chesley Bonestell originally printed in Collier’s magazine and reprinted in the 1952 Viking Press book Across the Space Frontier (bottom) and not from the 1949 book The Conquest of Space as is generally, and naturally, but incorrectly, assumed. (Paramount Pictures; endpapers of Across the Space Frontier from the author’s collection)

Below: This is a fine and fun trailer of the mid-1950s for a re-release of Conquest of Space. When the expected preview has run it's course, it segues into new addition footage that claims that Conquest of Space in fact shows shows the future because many of its predictions  (e.g., artificial satellites) had already come true.  We are told that the events of the movie will become reality by the year 2000.

  

 

See Part 4 to get a glimpse of how Conquest of Space may have seriously influenced the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

 

Conquest of Space (1955)

USA. Paramount Pictures. Technicolor. 1:85:1. 81m.

CREDITS: Director Byron Haskin. Producer George Pal. Associate Producer Frank Freeman, Jr. Script James O’Hanlon. Adaptation Philip Yordan, Barré Lyndon, and George Worthington Yates. Based on the book by Chesley Bonestell and Willy Ley. Score Van Cleave. Director of Photography Lionel Lindon. Assistant Director Daniel McCauley. Technical Advisor Wernher Von Braun (uncredited). Technicolor Color Consultant Richard Mueller. Art Directors Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillan Johnson. Set Decorators Sam Comer, Frank McKelvy. Editor Everett Douglas. Sound Recording Harold Lewis, Gene Garvin. Astronomical Art Chesley Bonestell. Process Photography Farciot Edouart. Special Photographic Effects John P. Fulton, Irmin Roberts, Paul Lerpae, Ivyl Burks, Jan Domela.

 

CAST: Samuel T. Merritt Walter Brooke. Barney Merritt Eric Fleming. Mahoney Mickey Shaughnessy. Jackie Siegle Phil Foster. Roy Cooper William Redfield. Dr. George Fenton William Hopper. Imoto Benson Fong. Andre Fodor Ross Martin.

 

 

 The spaceship taking off for Mars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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