‘Cosmonauts and dreamers say that apple trees will be in flower on Mars.’
The first manned mission to Mars is just weeks away when strange signals are received from the planet Centuria, promising first contact with an alien civilisation. A space craft is detected entering the galaxy, but then crashes on Mars. The scheduled exploration flight becomes a rescue mission…
Serious Science Fiction speculation from the Eastern Bloc is always welcome, although this intergalactic effort from directors Mikhail Karzhukov and Otar Koberidze (who also appears as Cosmonaut Batallo) is rather more undistinguished than most. The film opens with our old friend VoiceOver Man, who gives us the usual song and dance about the immensity of the universe over the usual models of planets and stars. Then we switch abruptly to footage of chiselled young men water-skiing, diving and yachting. It’s a strange and sudden shift, but VoiceOver Man is quick to explain. These are the pioneers of the new frontier; cosmonauts in training, who inhabit the special scientific community behind the Mars expedition.
We focus on dreamer Andrei (Boris Borisenko) and his true love Tanya (Larisa Gordeichik), who is impatient for him to show her his new invention; a tiny ‘crystalphone’ which he uses to broadcast a song to the universe. Never mind that it’s a terrible dirge, it catches the ear of alien woman Etanyia (T. Pochepa) on Centuria and prompts her to come visit (maybe she’s a fan of heroic Soviet vocalising!?) But her jaunt ends in disaster and, back on Earth, there’s a difference of opinion in how to deal with the situation. Crusty old Dr Laungton (Nitolay Volkov) is suspicious of the alien’s motives, and advocates a ‘hands off’ approach, but the younger Cosmonauts shout him down and Gordeichik and Borisenko become part of a rescue team, along with Koberidze and the humourless Commander (Petter Kard).
So we’re Mars-bound on spacecraft the ‘Ocean’ for a mission of mercy. And here’s where we encounter one of the film’s major flaws. We are given no backstory on any of our main characters and no effort is made to get us invested in them. Even the love story between Gordeichik and Borisenko is placed so completely in the background as to be invisible, although it does surface again in the film’s final minutes. As a result, the film lacks any dramatic tension, and becomes admirable only for its technical achievements. These include some interesting, if dated, production design and spacecraft miniatures and SFX which are very good for the era when the film was made.
The ‘Drive-In’ had made a triumphant comeback…
The film’s ending is also unfortunate. It uses footage we’ve seen earlier and could justifiably be described as rather a large cop-out. It’s a pity too, as Gordeichik begins to shine in the final act, providing some of the genuine human drama that has been lacking throughout. There’s also an awful lot of VoiceOver Man throughout the proceedings, and his role is part of the original release, rather than being added on with an English dub track by an interfering US distributor.
Given the expository commentary, the abrupt non-climax and a brief running time of 64 minutes, it’s tempting to classify this as an unfinished project, perhaps plagued by financial problems and stitched together as best as could be managed. If it were an American film, I wouldn’t hesitate to suggest that, but I have no idea how films were funded in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Although, even if the project were state supported, it’s unlikely that the filmmakers were given endless resources.
The SFX did make it to Western screens, being bought up by producer Roger Corman to feature heavily in ‘Queen of Blood’ (1966). This vampire/alien mash-up starred an elderly Basil Rathbone in one of his last roles, along with young guns John Saxon and Dennis Hopper! Karzhukov and Koberidze received a writing credit for the film, even though beyond the central concept of rescuing an alien woman from her disabled spaceship, the two stories have almost nothing in common. It wasn’t the first time that Corman had cannibalised Karzhukov’s work either, he’d put the SFX from ‘The Sky Calls’ (1958) front and centre in patchwork job ‘Battle Beyond The Sun’ (1960), an early directorial credit for Francis Ford Coppola.
A disappointing effort. It has decent SFX, but little else to engage an audience.
Mark David Welsh 