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The beauty of this lies in Byron Haskin's vision of the red planet as a transparent study of Death Valley, filmed by Winton C. Hoch like early drafts for Zabriskie Point. The stranded astronaut (Paul Mantee) feels "a bit like Columbus" before the alien landscape, with only a woolly monkey by his side he sets out to rediscover and tame air, water, fire. Mars is a jagged desert bursting with fireballs, its caves are slanted with psychedelic crystals and its skies veer from blazing crimson to orange to yellow. (Elements from the polar caps, the aurora borealis and even the Emerald City are incorporated in detailed composite arrangements.) Oxygen out of heated rocks and pepperoni out of oasis reeds and "Dixie" out of makeshift bagpipes, still the hardest test for Neo-Crusoe is solitude, his own voice is no compensation ("Mr. Echo, go to hell"). The dream in which he is visited by his late co-pilot (Adam West) is triggered by indigestion and concluded much like Buñuel ended his sequence of island delirium, with a simple reverse track to a desolate wide shot. The marauding space vessels from War of the Worlds reappear with darting speed out of a nightmare, Friday (Victor Lundin) is a runaway slave in pyramid-builder regalia who graduates from servant to comrade after saving the earthling's life during a storm of blackened cereal flakes. "What's the matter? No scientific curiosity?" Sprinkled with analog ingenuity and laidback surrealism, this was largely dismissed as an outdated chunk of sci-fi when it's actually a prophetic fantasy and a crucial link between The Ten Commandments (the undulating flame in the grotto crevasse) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (matted-in panoramas of interplanetary excavation). Herzog in Fata Morgana is certainly an admirer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |