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Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: 8 Sep 2012 08:29:00
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]
DVD9 Custom | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 16:9 | Cover | 7,30 Gb
Audio: English AC3 1.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish (added)
Genre: Adventure, Sci-fi

Special effects wunderkind and genre master Byron Haskin (The War of the Worlds, The Outer Limits) won a place in the hearts of fantasy film lovers everywhere with this gorgeously designed journey into the unknown. Robinson Crusoe on Mars tells the story of U.S. astronaut Commander “Kit” Draper (Paul Mantee), who must fight for survival when his spaceship crash-lands on the barren waste of Mars, a pet monkey his only companion. But is he actually alone? Shot in vast Techniscope and blazing color, this is an imaginative and beloved marvel of classic science fiction.

IMDB
Criterion
DVDbeaver

Because it is the closet planet to Earth, Mars has always held a special attraction to both scientists and science-fiction writers. The “red planet” is so close and yet so far, and it has long captured the imaginations of those who would dare to ruminate on what lies beyond our own atmosphere. From Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who peered through his telescope in the 1870s and discovered channels that others mistook as purposefully constructed canals on the planet’s surface, to H.G. Wells, who forever connected Mars with alien invasion by making it the home planet of the attackers in his 1898 opus The War of the Worlds, to Marvin the Martian, the determined but diminutive helmet-headed adversary of Bugs Bunny, Mars has loomed large in both the scientific and pop culture imaginations.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]

Not surprisingly, then, Mars has appeared frequently in the movies, starting as early as Thomas Edison’s 1910 short film A Trip to Mars, which imagined the planet as being home to scary trees and giant aliens. Most early scenarios borrowed from H.G. Wells’s nightmare scenario, which saw Mars as home to various invaders and conquerors who had to be repelled by the resolute human race. Starting in the late 1950s, when the space race was heating up between the United States and the Soviet Union and the idea of not only sending human beings into space, but landing them on distant planets, was gaining genuine scientific credence, movies began to take the red planet more seriously, even if little was actually known about it.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]

In this respect, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which borrows the basic plot from Daniel Defoe’s classic 1719 novel, is one of the more fascinating movies of its era because it dares to take its science seriously (bear in mind that it was released the same year as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians). It was one of a number of increasingly serious-minded sci-fi movies whose low budgets and minimal resources didn’t stop them from exploring the potentials of outer space as new terrain for human drama, arguably paving the way for Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Of course, viewed today there are elements of it that are undeniably hokey, but given the extent of knowledge we had in the mid-1960s about both interplanetary space travel and what the surface of a distant planet might be like, it is surprisingly plausible.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]

The story concerns a two-man mission, Mars Gravity Probe I, which gets caught in the red planet’s gravitational pull. Both astronauts are forced to eject and land on the surface, but only Cmdr. Christopher “Kit” Draper (Paul Mantee, a veteran of numerous TV series) and the mission’s pet monkey, Mona, survive (the astronaut who dies is played by Batman himself, Adam West). As Robinson Crusoe did in Defoe’s novel, Kit must struggle to stay alive in his new environment. Of course, being stranded on a distant planet rather than a deserted island poses significant new challenges, including how to breathe. The film imagines that Mars has a thin atmosphere with just enough oxygen to sustain Kit for about 15 minutes at a time before he needs a “booster” of pure oxygen. He eventually solves the problem by discovering that yellow, coal-like rocks on the surface produce oxygen when they’re burned. Likewise he discovers sources of food and water, which means he is physically self-sufficient, even if the tedium of being alone with only a monkey to converse with begins to weigh on him.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]

For the first half, Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a fascinating tale of survival in extraordinary circumstances. Director Byron Haskin, who had started his career as the head of the visual effects department at Warner Bros. in the 1930s, already had significant experience in science fiction, having directed The War of the Worlds (1953), Conquest of Space (1955), and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). He was intent on making Robinson Crusoe on Mars as realistic as possible, which is why the more fantastical elements of the original screenplay by Ib Melchior (The Angry Red Planet), which included numerous Martian creatures, were jettisoned in favor of a more plausible and scientifically defensible survival tale.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]

Although shot on a relatively meager budget, the film has an epic sweep to it, partially because it was shot in CinemaScope, whose wide frame is well suited to capturing the extensive and daunting terrain of the Martian landscape, played here by California’s Death Valley. The long stretches of desert and jagged ridges, as well as the astoundingly strange Devil’s Golf Course create a fully credible alien environment, which is enhanced by special effects that turn the sky into a daunting canvas of red and orange. Mars is imagined as an inhospitable place where portions of the landscape are constantly burning and random balls of fire wander among the rocks, which we now know to be completely phony, but works within the parameters of the story.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]

The film suffers somewhat in its final third when Kit comes across a fleet of alien spacecraft that seem to have flown in from Haskin’s own film version of The War of the Worlds. Drawing on the myth of the Mars canals, the film imagines that these visitors from another planet are mining the surface of Mars with the use of slave labor, one of whom escapes (Victor Lundin) and becomes Kit’s ally (naming him “Friday” is the film’s only self-conscious reference to Defoe’s source novel). I would not be the first to note that Friday looks like he wandered in from the set of a bad sword-and-sandals epic or that the two-dimensional alien spacecraft that zip in and out of the sky look like paper cut-outs, but that is part of the bargain when it comes to low-budget ’60s sci-fi. Even if these arguably campy elements disrupt what was otherwise an effective story of survival, Robinson Crusoe on Mars is still one of the more fascinating films of its era and a crucial brick in the pathway to making science fiction respectable.
QNetwork
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) [The Criterion Collection #404]

Special Features:
- Restored high-definition digital transfer (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
- Audio commentary featuring screenwriter Ib Melchior, actors Paul Mantee and Victor Lundin, production designer Al Nozaki, Oscar-winning special effects designer and Robinson Crusoe on Mars historian Robert Skotak, and excerpts from a 1979 audio interview with director Byron Haskin
- Destination Mars, a video featurette by filmmaker and space historian Michael Lennick detailing the science behind the film
- Music video for Lundin’s song “Robinson Crusoe on Mars”
- Stills gallery
- Theatrical trailer
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by Lennick as well as Melchior’s “Brief Yargorian Vocabulary” (a glossary of original alien dialect) and a list of facts about Mars, both from his original screenplay

Many Thanks to Original uploader.

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