Lately I’ve been putting my library card to use and tracking down some older films for which I either don’t want to risk a blind purchase or can’t find anywhere else. Most of these are well-known titles that I’ve just never gotten around to seeing before – for instance, I recently watched Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, a nifty noir thriller with Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and more cigarettes than you’ve ever seen outside of a hijacked Winston truck. That was definitely a good choice. Unfortunately, however, I sometimes end up with something a bit more… regrettable.
From the Obscure (For Good Reason) File comes the 1954 science fiction flick Conquest of Space. I probably would’ve loved this thing when I was kid. Back then, my primary criteria for a good movie was that it somehow involve spaceships, and this one certainly does that. In fact, Conquest of Space is a member of a unique sub-genre that I’ve heard referred to as “rocketship movies.” Primarily artifacts of the 1950s, rocketship movies inevitably featured square-jawed American heroes, evil villains (who were more than likely Godless Commies) and sleek, cigar-shaped craft fitted out with graceful, backswept fins and needle-shaped antennae at the nose. This particular sub-genre died out when men started traveling into space for real and our cinematic vision of that particular enterprise became much less fanciful. However, its better examples still hold charms for the modern viewer: the simple, clean-lined aesthetics of the early (imaginary) Space Age and an energetic, can-do enthusiasm, an undying belief in the American Ability To Get the Job Done that now seems impossibly naive to our post-modern, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-idealistic, post-everything world.
When I selected CoS, I was hoping for one of these uncomplicated, gee-whiz pictures that I so enjoyed when I was younger. In addition, this one had an interesting pedigree: it was produced by the George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin, the same team that had made The War of the Worlds only a year before, and the film’s visual style was based on the work of legendary space illustrator Chesley Bonnestell. So what went wrong? As with so many other failed films, blame the script…
The action begins in that far-flung year of 1980 (or so it would seem, since many of the characters apparently saw action in Korea but are still young enough to be flying rocketships). A sparkling white space station with the unimaginative yet descriptive name of “The Wheel” turns about its axis in Earth orbit, the pinnacle of human technology. Alongside it floats the nearly-completed Spaceship One, which looks like the real-world flying wing that the Air Force was experimenting with around the same time this film was released (see the aforementioned War of the Worlds for footage of this odd beast in action). Fans of Bonnestell’s work will thrill at this establishing shot, literally one of his paintings brought to life; this is the future we should have had instead of the one who got, a future based on a pulp-magazine aesthetic instead of nasty old efficiency.
Our primary heroes are General Merritt (Walter Brooke), the man in charge of the Wheel and the driving force behind its construction, and Merritt’s son, a lowly Captain played by Eric Fleming. (Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of these actors; the most recognizable guy in the film is still to come.) As the action begins, the younger Merritt is getting ready to rotate home to Earth and he can’t wait to get off The Wheel and back to his young wife. (This being the future by way of the 1950s, The Wheel is strictly a monosex environment; the only female types in the film appear on the big-screen TV in the station’s lounge, accompanied by the requisite wolf-whistles and he-man whooping-and-hollering.) Father and son debate the limits of the son’s vision – apparently, Dad doesn’t understand why the boy is getting a little stir-crazy after being locked up in a giant bicycle tire with a bunch of manly-men for a year.
Following the father-son debate and the bonding-moment cigarettes that follow, we are introduced to the rest of our crew, the roughneck enlisted men who have actually built Spaceship One. This group is supposedly representative of the international community, a pretty novel idea in the 1950s. We get Ross Martin of the original Wild, Wild West TV series as a German, and frequent Kung Fu guest star Benson Fong as the token Asian. However, these guys really are just the usual war movie stereotypes, and as American in their behavior as John Wayne. We got the Irish sergeant that saved the general’s life in Korea and is bound and determined to keep on doing it. We got the Brooklyn-born guy of Italian descent who talks with his hands and don’t understand nuttin’ dat dem crazy officers are up to. We got a wet-behind-the-ears kid who is guaranteed to crack up and get sent back to Earth. Yawn.
We first see this construction crew floating around in spacesuits, then coming back to The Wheel, lighting up their cool, refreshing Smokes of The Future, and eating dinner – in pill form, naturally, because that’s what astronauts are going to eat in The Future, you know. (Oddly enough, the regular station crew gets to eat regular 1950s meat-and-potato-style food off of what looks like GI-issue cafeteria trays, but those poor schmucks building the ship? They get pills…) We also hear them making a lot of painful jokes and debating about whether or not they’re going to be the ones to fly the ship they’ve just built on its first mission. Sure enough, right after they finish their dinner, a supply rocket from Earth arrives carrying a guy in a suit with the orders for Spaceship’s first mission – not a shakedown cruise to the Moon, like everybody had assumed but a full-blown run for Mars!
Now, I usually go pretty easy on these vintage sci-fi’ers in the believability department, especially on the ones made before we even had a space program, but this one really stretched the limits of my disbelief suspensors. Did people in the ’50s honestly believe that a ship built to go a relatively short distance could be reassigned to go much, much farther with so little fuss? Wouldn’t the guys building the thing have a little better idea of what it was going to be used for? And why are they all so reluctant to actually go anywhere in the ship that they built? Don’t they trust their own skills as shipwrights?
That last question represents the first of many problems I would develop with this film, namely the pessimism expressed by so many of the characters. This movie is probably unique to its genre and time period as being the only one where the Americans aren’t gung-ho to take over the universe. The only one who seems really interested in going into space is the Japanese guy. All the others think it’s crazy, or too dangerous, or, in the case of the General once he’s actually on his way, an affront to God, one of those Things That Man Wasn’t Meant To Do. So what the hell are they doing on the mission anyway? Wouldn’t the “Supreme Space Command” send at least a few guys who really believe in the mission and want to be there?
The second problem I had with this flick is that the characters are inconsistent as hell. One second, Merritt Jr. is begging to go home and give the wife a little pickle tickle, the next he’s panting to go to Mars (this I could buy, actually – a sudden opportunity to be part of history might change a guy’s mind). The evolution of the father character is just as abrupt, and even more inexplicable. One second, Gen. Merritt is the visionary who spearheaded the construction of Earth’s first space station, the next he’s a religious nut that wants to destroy the rocket before God gets pissed. Why the sudden change? Who knows? He loses a man once the flight is underway, but surely a military man with wartime action wouldn’t crack up over a single casualty. Perhaps it has something to do with whatever he keeps in his medicine chest back on the station, which he surreptitiously drinks when he’s sure he’s alone and which goes totally unexplained by the film.
And then there’s the third problem: the Brooklyn-Italian guy, played by Phil Foster, who is best known as Penny Marshall’s dad on Laverne and Shirley. That’s right, kids, we got Frank DeFazio In Space! In the twenty some-odd years between this film and his TV series, Foster never varied his acting style one bit. Which means that his character here responds to every situation with the same sneer, shrug and dismissive wave of the hands that DeFazio used on that pesky Shirley Feeny girl every week in the ’70s. I think Foster’s character was supposed to be the Average Joe that working men in the audience could identify with, but really he was a palooka, the worst possible guy with whom you could be locked up in a spacecraft. When he and Ross Martin are outside the ship in their spacesuits and a swarm of flaming meteor dust comes flashing past and you just know one of these dudes is going to get drilled, guess which one I was hoping to see catch a chunk of fast-moving space rock in the face? Guess which actually gets it? That’s right… we’re stuck with Foster all the way to the last frame of film. I couldn’t decide if Foster’s character was an offensive ethnic stereotype or what Dr. Freex of The Bad Movie Report calls the Odious Comic Relief (OCR), that is, a character who is supposed to be funny but mostly just annoys. I decided early on that if I was stuck with him on a trip to Mars, one of us would be visiting the airlock without a suit long before we got to the point where all of NASA’s robots go missing.
Inconsistent characters with bad attitudes aside, Conquest of Space does have some nice visuals that mostly hold up well, even if they are rather quaint to the modern eye, and there are a handful of good character scenes. Surprisingly for a film of this vintage, all the best moments focus on Benson Fong’s Imoto character – he delivers a stirring speech on why the Japanese went to war against America (though, of course, he must say how stupid and regretful that action was) and why, in The Future, they will go to space. Later, he generates the most genuine emotion in the film when he reverently plants some seeds he’s brought from Earth in the red Martian soil and sprinkles them with water. He knows that it’s a long shot, that the seeds probably won’t sprout in this alien soil, but he’s a true pioneer – he’s got to try. If only the rest of the movie shared the noble spirit of these two scenes, it might actually be remembered today.
Bottom Line: probably wouldn’t be bad (a) for a MST3K-style party, (b) if it’s 3 AM and the only other viewing alternative is that Windsor-Pilates infomercial that you’ve already seen a dozen times, (c) if you’re really into Chesley Bonnestell’s sleek, idealized spacecraft, or (d) you always secretly harbored a crush on Laverne’s dad. Otherwise, surf on…