If you like old sci-fi movies, you have to learn to endure a certain amount of disappointment. If you choose to watch a film entitled Attack of the Crab Monsters you're obviously not expecting Citizen Kane - or even Citizen Smith. But it's not the outright bad movies that test your fortitude so much as the mediocre ones. Most postwar Hollywood science fiction was just plain forgettable stuff - poorly-scripted, woodenly acted, directed by numbers and lacking in any vital spark of idea or imagery.
This is particularly true of movies produced from the mid-Fifites onward, when the drive-in movie boom was well under way and most of the best ideas had been used and plagiarised to death. Most of the best old-time sci-fi comes from the early Fifties, most of the real dreck surfaces from about 1957 onwards. And certainly if you're looking for something a bit different, a little experimental, the early part of that most of atomic of decades is the best place to start.
Which brings me to Red Planet Mars, a film that seems to subvert just about every convention of Hollywood science fiction, while at the same being profoundly serious and in many ways rather entertaining. I had no idea what to expect when I started watching it recently. But the title led me to believe that I'd be getting either Martians visiting Earth or Earthmen visiting Mars, with a fair bit of conflict and scientific double-talk. Instead I got what I suppose must be seen as a piece of Cold War propaganda.
What's different about Red Planet Mars? Firstly, it's entirely earthbound. Secondly, we never get to see a Martian. Thirdly, the script tackles the Cold War head on instead of via the usual metaphors about alien invaders and such like. And Fourthly, a distinctly odd sub-plot and grande finale left me wondering what the heck it was really all about.
Warning - honking great spoilers ahead
The story begins in the carefully-unspecified near future. The scene is an observatory where a bunch of astronomers are obtaining the best ever photos of the Red Planet. They discover to their amazement that the Martians have just melted their polar ice cap and channelled the run-off water through a mighty system of canals. This is of course a view of Mars that was obsolete even then. Percival Lowell's idea of an advanced, canal-building civilization was never accepted among astronomers and had been debunked by the Thirties. But that's a minor point in a work of fiction.
The important point is that the photos are viewed by a husband and wife team of radio engineers, the Cronyns, played by Peter Graves (who later starred in Mission Impossible) and Andrea King. They have been beaming simple messages at Mars using an advanced transmitter incorporating captured Nazi hardware. So far all the Martians have done is re-transmit the signals sent to them (and it's explained in proper scientific terms why these are not simple echoes). But Chris Cronyn thinks a breakthrough is coming. His wife Linda is less optimistic - she fears contacting the Martians might make an already fraught global situation even worse.
Meanwhile (there's always a meanwhile) in the Andes, renegade Nazi scientist Franz Calder (Herbert Berghof) has built a powerful transmitter thanks to support from the Soviets. He persuades his Kremlin paymasters to abandon any thought of contacting Mars itself because, he points out, the Cronyns will be able to listen in to any messages. Instead, why not eavesdrop on the Americans and learn everything they do? Thus will the Western imperialists be thwarted.
All of which is academic unless the Cronyns can get a reply. Enter the older of their two typically cute sons, who suggests sending pi - or at least, the first few digits in the never-ending irrational number. So the Cronyns send 3.1415... Sure enough, after a pause for the signals to get there and back, plus some Martian thinking time, the reply is 3.14159. A basis for coded communications is established.
US Navy codebreaker Admiral Carey and his team are assigned to decipher the Martian messages and the president - rather improbably - refuses to have their findings classified as top secret. Instead the replies are simply released to the press. This is where the plot creaks very badly for the first time, and it gets worse. The Martians answer questions about conditions on their planet by describing a seeming Utopia. Everyone lives for 300 years, there's abundant 'cosmic' energy, and a square mile of land feeds a thousand people. Well, Martians. The result of this information is the near total collapse of the West's economy.
Why? You may well ask. The stock market folds because it's somehow expected that Martian knowhow will become available almost instantly and render coal, oil and existing agricultural methods obsolete. This makes no sense, and the idiocy is capped by claims that the economy can't sustain pensioners living for centuries in retirement. Bear in mind that at no point do the Martians transmit any information about their actual technology, merely sweeping claims about the wonderful stuff it can do. Yet this is enough to cause a run on the banks and a major Depression.
This is of course delightful to the lads in the Kremlin, who don't have to worry about pork belly futures. The Soviet premier (Stalin apparently died a while back) toys with idea of conquering the West. The American president rather belatedly orders future Martian messages to be kept secret, and rejects his generals' advice to attack the Soviets in a pre-emptive war. It would, he asserts, be immoral to start a war. They don't make fictional presidents like they used to.
But then another message is decoded. It's the response to the question: How come you Martians haven't blown yourselves up yet? The reply is explicitly religious in character, with a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, no less. It seems that Mars has had a visit from Jesus, and indeed he may still be knocking about up there and running the show. Certainly the message, and those that follow, are steeped in sentiments of the 'God is love, peace be with you all' variety.
This leads to a wave of religiosity in the West, and - courtesy of the Voice of America - a sudden upsurge in Orthodox belief in the Soviet Union. At first the thugs in the Kremlin assume they'll simply be able to machine gun the workers and peasants into obedience, but soon things spiral out of control and before you can say Solzhenitsyn, the Orthodox Patriarch is running a provisional government and the Soviet Union is no more. In a rather perfunctory aside the nice president explains that the Martians' message isn't just for Christians, but incorporates the core values of all faiths. Again, the plot creaks, but it's still powerful stuff.
Blimey. You'd think that would be enough, but no - there's a crazy twisteroo. The Cronyns are puzzling as to why Mars has been silent for a few days when renegade Nazi scientist Calder - who we think was killed in an avalanche earlier and may well have forgotten - turns up at their lab. He is seriously cheesed off at having his revolutionary 'hydrogen valve' appropriated by the Americans and would like his share of the glory, please. But there's more. He whips out his notebook, showing that he has logged all the Cronyns messages - and claims that he, not the Martians, sent all the replies! That's why Mars fell silent - his transmitter was swept away. It was all a tremendous hoax! But why?
Calder, in full gloating villain mode, explains that he took his revenge on the powers that destroyed his beloved Third Reich by first undermining the West's economy, then scuppering the Soviets' ideology. Now all he has to do is reveal the truth and watch the world he despises go up in flames. He even quotes a suitable bit of Milton, like a Class A baddie. However, Linda Cronyn points out that the replies Calder says he gave aren't consistent with the ones Admiral Carey's team decoded.
Is Calder in fact totally bonkers as only a film Nazi can be, or are the saintly Martians the biggest hoax in history? Well, with Calder no longer signalling, any reply to the Cronyns' latest message must be authentic. The time-lag for radio waves, a bit of authentic science, here provides a nice bit of dramatic tension. But just in case he is telling the truth, our heroes decide to blow the place up (Calder's hydrogen valve coming in very handy as a plot device) and so let the world continue to thrive in peace and harmony, albeit thanks to a far from noble lie. Well...
When the credits roll, it's not THE END that appears on the screen, but the plonkingly resonant words THE BEGINNING. It's that kind of film - a sort of B-plus movie. For the first time Hollywood tackled the idea that simply receiving messages from extraterrestrial intelligence might be enough to throw our world into turmoil. No need for death rays and monsters - mere knowledge can be more than enough to frighten and derange humanity. While beating the Cold War drum and shunning spectacle makes Red Planet Mars an oddity that doesn't quite work as convincing drama, it's one of the most interesting failures of science fiction cinema.
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