Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Without CGI, Director Haskin inserted this red sky using the sky as a natural bluescreen.

“When the full measure of Hollywood’s artistic achievements is taken, it may be that all those boring blockbusters ... will be bypassed in favor of the taut B-production action films and the imaginative science fiction features ... Robinson Crusoe on Mars, that true rarity, a ... masterpiece brings these thoughts to mind. A triumph of technique, it has superb special-effects and strong performances by its space age hero, his man Friday and an irresistible monkey name Mona.... The film’s overall design and the careful composition of each scene make it a work of art.”

—Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

While screenwriter and director Ib Melchior (for more about Melchior, please see The Angry Red Planet (1960) and his mini-biography, now in the book and later to be included in this blog) was visiting California’s Death Valley in the early 1960s, he was so impressed with the harsh red desert terrain, towering cliffs, dunes, and salt pinnacles, that he realized that Death Valley was an excellent analogue for the surface of Mars. His idea was to write and direct a “three-and-a-half-hour motion picture with an intermission, a sort of Space Age Ben-Hur, a major production effort,” as he explains in his filmic autobiography, Six Cult Films from the Sixties. 

Ib Melchior is a superstar in my book. He co-wrote The Angry Red Planet and directed it. He conceived Robinson Crusoe on Mars and co-wrote it. His mind was at the heart of both these seminal Mars pictures. Top: This rare The Angry Red Planet (1959) poster emphasize the mysterious three-eyed Martian. Bottom: The Robinson Crusoe on Mars one-sheet poster the ray gun is a bit of creative license (from the author’s collection).

 

At the END of this blog post I include a fun story about how my wife and I met Ib and his wife and of the special lunch we enjoyed at Walt Disney's table!

But after the film company Schenk-Zabel purchased the script and entered into a production deal with Paramount Pictures, the script was pruned down from its original three-and-a-half- hours to a standard length. Melchior obviously wanted to be involved with the rewrite, but he was immersed in the production of The Time Travelers, the film he considered his personal best. John C. Higgins, a writer of genre films from 1935, was hired to do the script cutting.  It was then that legendary director Byron Haskin came on board as the director; his film would be a scientifically plausible Mars. Haskin had once been head of the Warner Bros special effects department and had since directed two other classic and spectacular Mars movies, both with producer George Pal, 1953’s The War of the Worlds and 1955’s Conquest of Space.

Up until the development of photo-realistic computer-generated imagery (CGI) in the early 1990s Robinson Crusoe on Mars was without doubt the very best adventure movie set on Mars—not only as a successful drama, but specifically in its representation of Mars. In 1976, twelve years after this movie was released, the two Viking laboratories landed on the planet and beamed back photos eerily similar to Robinson Crusoe on Mars, in particular with regard to the color of the sky. In his earlier Mars film Conquest of Space Haskin followed the lead of space artist and production designer Chesley Bonestell and provided a blue sky. In this new movie, however, he chose to make the sky reds and pinks, which is in fact the color of the Martian sky. And it is with regard to the sky in Robinson Crusoe on Mars that a small miracle happened, at least in my mind.

 

One of several half-sheet poster designs.

.
The entire decade of the 1970s, I worked at a network affiliate TV station in San Francisco. Part of the ambiance of the station, and something I picked up by pure osmosis was the whole idea of blue screen technology. The very first scenes in Groundhog Day show this technology in action in which Bill Murray is seen pushing around the clouds and arrows that make up his TV weather report. In truth, he is standing in front of a blue screen, and all the blue is replaced optically with the separately created animation of weather patterns. This is a technique long used by Hollywood. (Today the blue screens have mainly been replaced with green screens.) When Haskin and his team gathered in Death Valley to begin filming, he made a supremely clever discovery. The pure brilliant blue skies visible over the mountains and desert were a perfect natural blue screen, and he used this fortuitous discovery to insert the film’s red skies, one of the high- points of the movie.

Genius matte artist Albert Whitlock (uncredited) turned sound stages into glorious Mars-scapes. Here are two of many.

.
Haskin told his interviewer, Joe Adamson, “Robinson Crusoe on Mars was so obviously a director’s tour de force, that there was nobody to interfere and tell me how to shoot.... I can’t think of any other film I’ve made, unless it was The War of the Worlds, where I had such complete autonomy ... that I had as much genuine pleasure and fulfillment from as Robinson Crusoe on Mars. It was as fulfilling as cinematography had ever been. Every- thing I set out to do, I accomplished as well as one possibly could.

“We made exploratory trips into Death Valley, and I conceived a key to credible verisimilitude.... I would abandon shots from the valleys, make them from up on the ridges. Death Valley had been seen in hundreds of westerns, but they were all shot from the bottoms of the canyons, because that’s where horses could gallop through. On the top of these weird looking ridges of marshmallow sands, the vista was something else. It looked like another planet—certainly not Death Valley. Additionally, I conceived maing the blue skies red.... It was wintertime, and the skies were deep blue. They formed a perfect traveling matte.”

 

 This widescreen film opens with a wonderful title sequence. The Mars probe whisks by (skip-framed, where only every other frame is printed) the camera, and the camera follows it, revealing the planet Mars hanging in space, where the title Robinson Crusoe on Mars appears superimposed on the planet in red letters accompanied by Nathan Van Cleave’s haunting yet stirring score (his second for a Mars exploration film, the first being Conquest of Space nearly a decade earlier). Following a mishap that kills his fellow astronaut, Kit Draper finds himself alone—stranded on Mars with only a woolly monkey named Mona or companionship. In due course he solves all the various oxygen, food, water, and warmth problems that arise. 

From Dirk Wickenden: “For Robinson 
Crusoe on Mars, composer Van Cleave 
composed a quest-like theme for haunting 
electronics, strings and slowly 
beaten timpani that makes its appearance 
in the score whenever Chris Draper 
(Paul Mantee) trudges over the dusty, 
rocky surface of Mars.”

He discovers an alien craft and a mine where slaves are being used to excavate minerals. As he secretly watches, one of the slaves escapes. Draper brings the slave to the cave that he calls home. Draper names the man Friday, teaches him English, and they become friends. They are exploring near the planet’s north pole and encounter all kinds of spectacular ice barriers, avalanches, and dangerous cliffs, but the aliens are able to track Friday and begin to shoot death rays toward our two explorers. A meteor slams into the icecap, causing the ice to melt, and finally a rescue mission from Earth arrives.

This film was nowhere to be found on any sort of home video until it was released on Laserdisc in 1994 as part of the Criterion Collection, which made available classic movies as cutting edge restorations in their original aspect ratios. The Criterion Collection was among the first video companies that used the cutting edge technology available in the Laserdisc format to provide a wealth of extras, such as branching, commentaries, articles, and so forth. The release of Robinson Crusoe on Mars in this cutting edge, elaborate format was a very special event, indeed. The liner notes of the disc included this statement:

This is the 1994 Criterion laserdisc release of Robinson 
Crusoe on Mars. Prior to this, the movie sadly only 
lived in the memories of its admirers. This was a 
deluxe release that preserved the movie’s 2.35:1 aspect 
ratio and provided generous special features 
(from the author’s collection).

“Saul J. Turell, President of Janus Films, particularly wanted to see three wonderful underappreciated films in the Criterion Collection: Scaramouche, Hear Comes Mr. Jordan, and Robinson Crusoe and Mars. The first two have long been part of the collection so it is with great pleasure that we now present Robinson Crusoe on Mars for the first time on laserdisc in an exclusive digital transfer in its original widescreen format with a supplement that explores the making of the movie.”

The Mars that was presented in the film, though pushing the logical envelope in several places, was much closer to the real deal (as mentioned with respect to the 1976 Viking landers above) as we discovered through so many successful Mars probes, beginning with Mariner 4 in 1965.

 
I have never seen it mentioned that the all-important editor of Robinson Crusoe on Mars was Terry Morse, the same Terry Morse who was tasked by Joseph E. Levine a decade earlier to transform Toho’s Japanese Gojira into a picture suitable for American audiences. By using clever angles and carefully matched clothing and backgrounds, Morse shot new footage that expertly surrounded American actor Raymond Burr with Asian-American character actors and crowds of extras so that the new shots could be seamlessly edited into the corresponding Japanese scenes, launching upon the world Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

 

Ib Melchior (1917–2015)

 

The year was 2013, and my wife and I were attending the wedding in Los Angeles of one of my wife’s friends and business associates. The reception afterward was extremely loud with the band playing and all the cocktail chatter combining to make me uncomfortable. We sought out an untenanted corner and I sat on a chair and rested. Before long, I saw an older man in a wheelchair being pushed in our direction by an equally older woman. In a couple of minutes, the couple had joined us but conversation was utterly impossible because of the volume of the ambient noise. In a few minutes the man leaned over in his wheelchair and indicated he wanted to talk to me. I placed my right ear next to his mouth and his words were inaudible, I mouthed, “I can’t hear you.”

 

He tried again, and this time I heard the word “Melchior.” Hearing these three syllables was a joy to me just then because I was in the middle of writing a novel dealing with the three wise men and the Star of Bethlehem, and Melchior was the traditional name of one of the wise men. (The joy came from some sense of serendipity that I was on the right track.) He indicated he wanted to speak again, and this time I heard “Ib Melchior.” At first the addition of the prefix meant nothing to me, but suddenly it hit me (like a brick) that Ib Melchior was the man’s name and his name was one I was very familiar with. I yelled back, “The Angry Red Planet.... Robinson Crusoe on Mars!” He smiled and nodded. I was amazed; here I was minding my own business at this wedding and the next thing I knew I was conversing with the director of The Angry Red Planet and the co-writer of both The Angry Red Planet and Robinson Crusoe on Mars, two of my favorite Mars movies! Real conversation was impossible just then and the two wives quickly put their heads together and hatched a plan for us to get together.

 

One thing led to another and soon my wife and I and Ib and his wife Cleo, a land- scape architect and set designer, were enjoying a great lunch at The Tam O’ Shanter restaurant, which, once upon a time, was Walt Disney’s favorite restaurant in Burbank. It happened to be down the street from the new studio he built with the profits garnered from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In fact, we all sat at “Walt’s table,” as the back corner table is affectionately remembered.

 

Ib and Cleo. I'm not sure of the source of this pix.

Ib entertained us with some anecdotes from his native Denmark and with produc- tion stories of the six “cult” science fiction movies he wrote and/or directed in the six- ties: The Angry Red Planet, The Time Travelers, Reptilicus, Journey to the Seventh Planet, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and Planet of Vampires—most especially The Time Travelers, which he viewed as his finest film. He helped us understand his rocky relationship with Sid Pink, his creative partner on three of these films. (In 1952, Pink, with radio personality Arch Obler, had made cinematic history by producing the first 3D color feature, Bwana Devil, a true story about a pair of man-eating lions marauding a bridge-construction site in British East Africa at the turn of the 20th Century, the same story that was filmed again 44 years later as The Ghost and the Darkness.) Hearing the highlights and low points of his career in the film industry, we began to understand how frustrating, on one hand, and how rewarding and exhilarating, on the other, such a career amongst Hollywood power brokers could be.

 

In the “frustrating column” can be listed his well-documented contention that the hit Irwin Allen TV series Lost in Space had begun with Ib’s space-age Swiss Family Robinson treatment that had made the rounds in Hollywood, though he was never given any credit nor was he compensated. This Swiss Family Robinson idea had originated from the same respect for the iconic classics from which Robinson Crusoe on Mars had sprung. Ultimately, the producers of the 1998 feature film version of Lost in Space recognized his fundamental contribution and hired him as that film’s Special Advisor.

 

The “exhilarating column” includes his directing and co-writing 1964’s very well- received and thought-provoking special-effects feast The Time Travelers, and also his collaboration with American International Pictures’ co-founder Samuel Z. Arkoff and the great Italian director Mario Bava on Planet of Vampires. A much-prized letter from Arkoff reads in part, “As you will note, Bava’s comments about your abilities are ... laudatory.” As will be mentioned often in this book, Planet of Vampires is one of three classic science fiction movies that heavily influenced the creation of Ridley Scott’s Alien, the other two being Queen of Blood and It! The Terror from Beyond Space.

 

The four of us had a great time. I hauled out my Robinson Crusoe on Mars discs and poster from my bag and asked Ib to sign them. He was 95. Sadly, early in 2015 he passed away at the age of 97, with Cleo preceding him by a few months. THOMAS KENT MILLER

 

 

USA. Paramount Pictures, Devonshire Pictures, Schenck-Zabel Productions. Technicolor. 2.35:1. 110m.

CREW: Director Byron Haskin. Producer Aubrey Schenck. Executive Producer Edwin F. Zabel. Script Ib Melchior, John Higgins. Story Daniel Defoe. Score Nathan Van Cleave. Director of Photography Winton C. Hoch. Editor Terry Morse. Art Directors Arthur Lonergan, Hal Pereira. Production Designer Al Nozaki (uncredited). Assistant Director Arthur Jacobson. Sound Harold Lewis, John Wilkinson. Special Effects Butler-Glouner, Inc. Process Photography Farciot Edouart. Matte Artist Albert Whitlock (uncredited). Technical Advisor Edward V. Ashburn. Technicolor Color Consultant Richard Mueller.

CAST: Cmdr. Christopher Draper Paul Mantee. Friday Victor Lundin. Col. Dan McReady Adam West. Mona The Woolly Monkey.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.