This blog was begun Saturday night April 11 and completed the following evening :
Tonight's movie was "The Phantom Planet"(1961), chosen this time not because of a Youtube recommendation but because I'd struck out beforehand, while trying to watch "The Mad Monster" starring the ever-reliable George Zucco. That movie had a promising start but the sound kept dropping out. I don't know if it was the uploader's fault or just a bad print (the picture was a little blurry, too), but after about ten minutes I had to bail out, and I didn't wanna go through another long search process so I went for the first thing that looked passable. And though it looked for a time like "Phantom Planet" might be little more than an extended "Star Trek episode, in the end it turned out to be very entertaining indeed, complete with a Rubber-Suited Monster and an excellent one at that. Boy, have we come to appreciate our RSMs of late. :) :)
It is sometime in the future and an American space agency now has a base on the Moon, from which they conduct forays into the Solar System and beyond. One of their rockets has disappeared while on a mission to inspect a Mysterious Asteroid that doesn't show up on radar. The moon base can see it on their video screens, but it keeps changing size and position. How can this be? One crew has vanished in an effort to find out, and now a second rocket - piloted by Captain Frank Chapman (Dean Fredericks) - is sent up to try and find them, and to explore the asteroid too, if possible.
On the way, Chapman loses his navigator in a way that Kubrick might've admired (and maybe he saw this flick), so when he lands on the asteroid, he is alone. Low on air, he stumbles from the rocket and collapses. His helmet is jarred open and, breathing in the strange new atmosphere, he shrinks!
Chapman is then carried away by a group of men wearing what looks like hospital pajamas. They aren't orderlies, however, but inhabitants of the Planet Rheton, which is what they call their little asteroid. The Rhetonians are led by an older gentleman named Sessom (the legendary Francis X. Bushman of "Ben Hur" fame). Sessom immediately puts Chapman on trial for resisting arrest (a bogus charge, I say), and though he is found guilty he isn't jailed. This is because Sessom has a daughter named Liara (Colleen Gray) that he's trying to marry off. He hopes she will show interest in the manly Captain. If all of this sounds a little kooky, it is, but here is where the Star Trek plotline is going to take effect. You see, Sessom has an assistant named Harron (Tony Dexter) who has prior interest in Liara. He is manly too, and is insulted that Sessom and Liara have never considered him as her mate. Doubling his anger is the clear fact that Liara does indeed have the hots for Captain Chapman, which is plain for all to see. Now, Chapman doesn't wanna get married, to Liara or anyone else (and there's another pretty girl who's eyeing him). He just wants to get back to his rocket ship and fly home to the Moon, but that's not gonna happen because he's only about four inches tall, a fact he does not yet realise. For his part, Harron the assistant is still incensed over being dissed by Liara, so he challeges Chapman to a duel that is not unlike the one that pitted Kirk against Spock for the hand of T'Pring in the "Amok Time" episode of Star Trek. All that's missing in the "Phantom Planet" duel is the unforgettable music, but again, I wonder if this scene had any influence on a later sci-fi master, in this case Gene Roddenberry.
The duel takes place, with Chapman easily overpowering Harron, but he doesn't kill him. By showing mercy, Chapman hopes to be allowed to leave. It is then that Sessom breaks the bad news to him, that he is in fact now shrimp-sized due to the ingestion of Rheton's atmosphere and intensified gravity. Lengthy discussions will ensue about how this works, and Sessom will explain that Rhetonian scientists have learned how to manipulate this ultra-strong gravitational pull to shrink the planet, when necessary, to the point of invisibility, so as to dodge all invaders. Chapman is impressed : "Ahh, so that's why you didn't show up on our radar". Meanwhile, Harron has now turned friendly to Chapman, who had the chance to kill him but didn't. Chapman also insists he was never trying to steal Harron's girl, reiterating that all he wants to do is leave. Harron has a plan to help him, which besides getting Chapman back to the Moon will also leave Harron as the only eligible bachelor for Liara, so it's a win/win for both men. They have to keep their plan a secret from Sessom, who by no means is willing to let Chapman depart.....but wait!
Here come the Solarites, the Rhetonians' mortal enemies! The Solarites are the only interstellar civilisation that is immune to the effects of Rheton's "Universal Gravity Machine", being that they come from the Sun and their spaceships are made out of flaming plasma. You'll have to work out the physics on that one for yourself, but the current beef has to do with the fact that Sessom is holding a Solarite in prison. This will be Richard Kiel (of James Bond and Gilligan's Island fame), and as the Solarite in question, he will be wearing a Rubber Suit that ranks up there with the best we've seen. And with his appearance, what had been a vaguely interesting plot with the production values of a tv show will now be transformed into a full-blown Space Extravaganza with B-Movie overtones, including bitchin special effects (of the Solarites' attack) and Fearsome Fight Scenes, as Herron and Chapman work together to fend off the 7 foot Kiel, who looks even taller with his Solarite head. The final note of conflict will involve Chapman's attempt to save the Other Pretty Girl who was eyeing him early in the movie. She is deaf, and her storyline will lead to another scene that bears a strong resemblance to one from "Star Trek", where Spock had to decide between staying with Mariette Hartley in a cave, or returning home with Kirk and Bones. So again, I wonder if Roddenberry saw this movie.
If you're willing to hang in there, "The Phantom Planet" has a solid payoff. The going is a little slow beforehand, but it's mostly the plaster-of-paris set design that weighs things down. The movie starts off with some quality hardware in Chapman's rocket, and above average effects during a spacewalk that leads to the loss of his partner, but once he lands on the asteroid, it turns into a papier mache affair for a while, until the Thrilling Conclusion. The dialogue is good throughout, though, and the old pro Francis Bushman - who was nicknamed "King of the Movies" - keeps things from descending into silliness with a Convincing Portrayal as the Rhetonian leader Sessom. I've said before, as an actor you've gotta invest yourself in these kinds of movies, because if you don't believe in the dialogue, no one else is going to, either. So when you say, "Herron! The Solarites are breaking through our graviton shield"!, you've gotta say it with conviction!
Thankfully for us, Bushman does. And so do the other actors for the most part. One final Francis X. Bushman note - he had a grandson named Pat Conway who was also an actor. I had never heard of Conway until I bought the dvd box set of a tv series called "Tombstone Territory", on which he played the Sheriff. The show turned out to be a favorite of mine (it initially ran from 1957-60), and during this quarantine I've been watching a lot of episodes. At the end of each one, a name kept appearing in the credits that got my attention : Robert Kinoshita. I noticed him because you don't see a lot of names of Japanese-Americans in tv or movies from that era, but on "Tombstone Territory" he appears as the art director in every episode. And then, lo and behold, he showed up as the art director and executive producer of "The Phantom Planet", so I wondered if there was a connection between Francis X. Bushman, his grandson Pat Conway, and Robert Kinoshita. Probably so, and on a side note it turns out that Kinoshita was pretty famous in his field : he also designed "Robby the Robot" from "Lost In Space" among other credits. So there you have it, a bit of trivia from "The Phantom Planet", which gets Two Solid Thumbs Up from yours truly. Watch it for The Solarites if nothing else. ////
Well, it's now Easter Sunday evening. I hope you had a nice holiday. I did too, though I sure missed singing in church. I've been in choir for the previous five Easters and it's one of the best services for singing. Well, hopefully this nightmare will be over soon and we can get back to living life. If the message of Easter teaches us anything, it's to keep the faith. Now I will go for my walk. See you later tonight at the Usual Time. :):)
Tons of love! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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