Marooned

Saturday is traditionally "Take out the Trash" day.

Marooned (John Sturges, 1969) Martin Caidin's book "Marooned" presented the dilemma of an astronaut stranded in Earth orbit in a Mercury capsule whose retro-rockets—designed to slow its speed and have it fall back to Earth—failed to fire. That astronaut was doomed to remain in space—although eventually, in years, its orbit would decay enough that it would re-enter the atmosphere on its own—until his meager supply of oxygen ran out and he suffocated. As a book, it was merely okay, taking into account the logistics of actually spending the money and disrupting testing schedules and safety protocols over one man's life. 

There have been some close calls. The accidents of both the American and Soviet space programs are well-documented, and Apollo 13 came within a cat's whisker of skipping off the atmosphere on its return journey after an explosion disrupted their oxygen and power supply. But, no being—since the days of testing capsules with animals—has ever been stranded in space. Technically, it happened June 2024, when two astronauts, who were supposed to only spend 8 days up at the International Space Station, had to abandon their return, and have been up there ever since. Supposedly, the new "rescue" mission was supposed to launch this week...but it's been postponed.

Now, a movie was made in 1969 based on author Caidin's book, but, by the time of its release, the space program had advanced enough that there had already been one manned landing on the Moon with another scheduled days away. So, they looked at future NASA plans—one of which would be called Skylab, a low-tech space station using a spare third stage rocket casing as the orbiter—and based the fictional "Ironman One" mission of Marooned on that. Three astronauts (Richard Crenna, James Franciscus, and Gene Hackman) go up in their capsule to rendezvous, dock and spend seven months on their ersatz, roomy space station, but when Hackman's character gets a little space-woozy after just five months, everybody decides it's time to come home and *pfft* the retro-rockets don't work. Oh, the little green-light that says they're working is on ("We're gonna decorate it for Christmas!" the commander cracks). 

Now, the easiest solution is to get back to their little crude space-station which has plenty of oxygen—their space capsule having a limited supply—but since their big engine won't work, it makes it a little out of reach, space-wise. They have maneuvering thrusters, but they don't have the oomph to do anything but spin the space-craft around. So, NASA has to figure out a way to get their astro-boys back before the air runs out in 42 hours. And that's where the proverbial pooches really get screwed. Oh, NASA's good at schedules, and launch-windows, and prepping enough Tang™, but when it comes to seat-of-your-pants Hail Mary plays, well...let's have a meeting about that.

Thank God, that Charles Keith (Gregory Peck) is, as he likes to tell everybody "head of Manned Space," and as soon as you say "Houston, we've got a problem" it's his problem, too. The thing is, after looking at all the read-outs and not being able to repeat the problem with a similar retro-rocket on Earth, he's ready to give the "it's a risky business, and we will go on in their name" speech, he's told by Astronaut Lead Ted Dougherty (David Janssen)—who's "head of Space Man," I guess—that they should launch a rescue mission with an unproven booster, an untested vehicle prototype and with a hurricane bearing down on Florida and do it in 42 hours. What could go wrong?

But, before you can say "hand me those frozen "O"-rings, Keith shoots it down as being too risky and could only make a bad situation worse. That's when he gets a call from the President—it was Nixon, at the time—who says "Make a bad situation worse? I'm all for it!" Daugherty starts training for the mission—it should be the remedial lesson to save time—but, God turns the hurricane towards Florida, delaying the launch, which leads to the decision to launch when the eye of the hurricane is over the cape. That's some precise hurricane. But, the delay will mean that the trapped crew's oxygen supply will run out.

That is, the oxygen supply for three astronauts. Two might just make it. So, Keith gets to make one of the most cringe-worthy conversations in the history of space movies:

 

Charles Keith: Jim... how do you uh... how do you evaluate... the oxygen situation? 

Jim Pruett: Um... Well, we have whatever oxygen's left in the spacecraft system. And, there are only, uh... two bottles of emergency oxygen on board, five minutes each, that's uh... ten man-minutes. Um... my backpack, and uh... Lloyd's and Stone's, but um... there's not much oxygen left in them.

Charles Keith: Well, you'll have to save your backpacks for the EVA transfer.

Jim Pruett: Yeah I know that. 

[pause] 

Jim Pruett: 55 minutes, 

[longer pause] 

Jim Pruett: we'll be dead by then. 

Charles Keith: Well, only if you... continue to use oxygen at the present rate...

Jim Pruett: Well, uh, we can't cut down. 

Charles Keith: Let's... think about that... 

Jim Pruett: Do, uh... do you want us to lower the partial pressure again? 

Charles Keith: No, we've examined that, it won't work... 

Jim Pruett: Well we're lyin' here like corpses now... uh... what else can we do?

Charles Keith: You must... think... 

[astronauts exchange glances, realizing the unspoken implication of Keith's statement] 

Jim Pruett: Yeah, we're... thinkin'... 

Charles Keith: Are we talking about the same thing? 

Jim Pruett: Yeah. 

Charles Keith: Why don't you... talk it over. If you could... work out something... it would be of great help... 

Jim Pruett: Yeah we'll talk it over.

Charles Keith: I must point out Jim, that any *effective* action must be taken immediately... 

Jim Pruett: Look, don't tell me what to do! We've been takin' your god damned orders and where the hell are we? From now on WE'RE gonna make all the decisions! Whatever we do, you're OUT OF IT! 

Charles Keith: Oh I uh... appreciate what you're saying Jim... and I agree with you... You're exactly right...

  

MAD Magazine (#138, October, 1970) had a field-day with that dialog:

As a "space-kid" growing up, eyes glued to the television every time a space mission happened, this seemed absolutely ludicrous (we hadn't had a death in space yet, only during training, and NASA's lucky streak on their space-flights was nothing short of amazing, but you couldn't tell me that). I was already sitting in my seat, arms folded tightly across my chest with a scowl on my face as the depictions of the vehicles in orbit around the Earth wouldn't have passed muster as a "simulation" the networks always used when they didn't have "picture" for what was happening during their coverage (and that was pretty dicey, even though it inspired the movie Capricorn One and hundreds of resultant conspiracy theories).

Look, I was 14 and that's an age when "fair" is a foreign concept. But, Marooned was released a full year after 2001: a Space Odyssey, with its pristine special effects, and I considered this movie one giant leap backwards. Nothing looked right, or even realistic. The space hardware was pristine, no wads of aluminum foil hanging off the ships (used to reflect sunlight and heat at the time), no wear-and-tear, and they resembled the older Aurora models I used to cement together, in fact, I could have sworn at the time I saw glue on the obvious seams of the Marooned ships. These days, I'm more charitable, but back then, I considered the movie "a travesty"—big word for 14!—but, I told my Dad I liked it...hey, he took me to the movie. I was a punk but I wasn't an ingrate.

And the thing won an Oscar for special effects. Granted, it's only competition was Krakatoa: East of Java (and, as we all know, Krakatoa was WEST of Java, so those were some pretty special effects!). You think you've got a gripe with your favorite picture not winning an Oscar? I've got you beat. I'm torqued because this one DID win an Oscar.

David Janssen flying out of the eye of a hurricane.

Marooned has one big Legacy feature: it's the most expensive, star-filled movie ever to have been featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" (albeit in a truncated form entitled "Space Travelers") as the first episode of their fourth season. This is the version of the movie that I prefer to watch.

So, the stranded astronauts still in orbit dredged up the memory of this movie. And I've read a lot of pearl-clutching and rending of garments over their fate, being stuck in orbit floating around Earth with plenty of food, water, oxygen, and the best view in the Solar System. You want to know how the astronauts who've been marooned on the ISS feel about having to stay when they were only scheduled for 8 days? NPR interviewed another member of the astronaut corps and her reply was telling: "Well, I can tell you what the rest of us astronauts down here feel—we're jealous!"

 

Now, that's The Right Stuff. 

Warning Shot (1967)

Warning Shot (Buzz Kulik, 1967) Based on a novel by Whit Masterson (who also wrote the book that had become Touch of Evil), Warning Shot was considered a good vehicle for David Janssen, who was in the middle of his run on "The Fugitive" TV series. The script was by "Fugitive" veteran Mann Rubin* a prolific writer who wrote at least one script for most of the thriller/SCI-FI series of the 1960's and 1970's.

 

The story has a nice affiliation with Janssen's "Fugitive" persona in that he plays a discredited cop accused of killing an unarmed man—and nobody believes his story that the dead man was carrying a gun—a search of the scene has never turned up the weapon, and the prosecuting attorney (Sam Wannamaker) is more than happy to provide no reasonable doubt. It doesn't help that the L.A. police (in the form of Ed Begley's crusty superior and partner Keenan Wynn) have their own suspicions, whether to save face for the force or attain a promotion.

 

Plus, it doesn't help that Janssen has a face that always looks guilty.

It's true that during a drug stakeout, Sgt. Tom Valens (Janssen) has shot a man who was running away from him in the night, in the fog of a swimming pool, but Valens swears it was a "good" shoot; he didn't fire until the suspect drew a gun on him. But, in the light of day, the dead man turns out to be a respected doctor and no weapon can be found on the scene. Valens had been shot a year previously—so the whispers are that he might be a little trigger-happy. Facing manslaughter charges, Valens is forced to do a little investigating on his own.

The victim, Tom Ruston, was a respected doctor catering to diseases of the rich, but also well-regarded for his humanitarian work in Mexico. The doc's accountant (George Sanders) and his floozy wife (Eleanor Parker) are of no help, nor is the doc's assistant (Stephanie Powers). Nope, the only people who seem to have any sympathy for Valens' plight is his ex-wife (Joan Collins) and a pilot (George Grizzard) who lives at "the scene of the crime" and who offers to fly Valens down Mexico-way to see if the doctor's work in Mexico was legit.

Then, things start to get complicated; Valens acquires quite a few bruises after he's been beat up in an apparently random attack. Then, Ruston's nurse dies and the doctor's office is ransacked. Then, Valens is dosed with a mickey in his milk—this was the days of door-stop deliveries**—and nearly gassed by his own fireplace. It would have looked like an accident. But, Valens knows it's enemy action.

Now, it being the 1960's, there's a little bit of experimentation on director Kulik's part with camera angles that are a little too precious,*** and when Valens is beat up (not too convincingly and in sloooow motion) his POV is shown with vasellined and distorting lenses, which is groovy, baby, but didn't strike me as being very convincing. Frankly, when these sorts of shots appear I think less that the person is going unconscious and more that trends in film-making in the '60's were very fleeting.

Ultimately, the entire movie is not very convincing. The plot hinges on one of the most unbelievable and least likely MacGuffins**** in movie history (nope, I won't spoil it, but, once you know, you'll say "why would they use THAT?"). It's odd, but Warning Shot is one of those movies where the script is supposed to be deadly serious, but there are those moments—when Kulik is focusing on a bottle of milk at Janssen's feet, or a shot that shows just how convenient meeting in a graveyard can be—that you think they're trying to have as much fun with the material as they can, the results seeming half-hearted, like the film-makers realizing somewhere in filming they were making one of those Hitchcock "wrong-man" movies. The film is top-heavy with talent—Sanders, Parker, Walter Pidgeon and Lillian Gish—all playing characters they've played and excelled at in their careers—but, the film is far less entertaining than one would expect given all that. The film needs a little bit more absurdity to work. Especially given its ending.

 

* Yeah. No, he didn't write for "Star Trek" but for Irwin Allen and the "Bionic" people. Quite a few scripts for The Alfred Hitchcock show and most of the detective/mystery shows of the era.

 

** It's just a cautionary note in these pandemic times, but don't be like David Janssen and leave the delivered food on the stoop all day so bad guys can poison you...or the food gets so old it poisons you. 

 

*** Check this shot out—that's the heavy-hand of the prosecutor in the foreground during the manslaughter trial. Yup, the judge is Carroll O'Connor.

**** And just in case you don't know what a "MacGuffin" is, here is Alfred Hitchcock to explain...

King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day here.

King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein (aka The Big Bankroll) (Joseph M. Newman, 1961) In the early 1960's, "the Roaring 20's" was a big deal. "The Untouchables" was on TV and there was even a series called..."The Roaring 20's." It seemed to break up the glut of westerns, gumshoes, and family-comedies—as well as the Kefauver Hearings—that saturated small screens in the 1950's.  

Amidst all this, there were a spate of low-budget movies that also looked back at those days, but it was not what you would call a trend. Mickey Rooney starred as "Baby Face" Nelson. Rod Steiger as Al Capone. Charles Bronson as "Machine Gun" Kelly. There was Studs Lonigan. Just before this film was The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.

And at the tail end of the cycle was King of the Roaring 20's: The Story of Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein was featured in Legs Diamond. Nicknamed "The Brain", he is credited with putting the "organized" into organized crime, turning the scatter-shot "wild west" approach of mobstering into a business model of bankrolling potential racketeering schemes (but just be advised to check your receipts). I suppose at the end of the film-cycle, after finishing all the tommy-gun action, they had to include the accountants. You're not done until you do the paperwork.

KOTR2:TSOAR (geez, even the abbreviation is too long!) follows Rothstein's rise  in turn of the century New York as a troublesome kid-grifter (played by Jimmy Baird), giving the local police guff and his upright, serious father (Joseph Schildkraut) so much tsuris for not applying his mathematical gifts to rabbinical studies like his older brother. Rothstein (eventually played by David Janssen) would rather calculate odds and gamble, and eventually, partnering first with a neighborhood pal (Mickey Rooney) on booking centers and poker networks and then with "Big Tim" O'Brien (Jack Carson) on casinos and bigger game.

The film is a little vague on what made Rothstein so successful, other than a careful sizing up of the percentages, making sure that he got his cut and finding strategies that would either undercut the pay-out to his partners or negotiate deals that would have lucrative rewards to himself if his partners screwed up and have to sell out.

One such long con is the eventual prosecution of a tarnished cop (Dan O'Herlihy) who always made sure Rothstein got nicked from boyhood on. The obsession—at least in Jo Swerling's treatment (his last credit)—would prove to be his undoing, as well as a long-held desire to win a poker game with a royal flush. Everything else is as spur-of-the-moment as a dice-roll, and with as much attention as that requires, such as selling out his friends and a "fair-weather" marriage to a chorus girl (Dianne Foster).

That would take somebody extraordinarily charismatic to pull off, and the saddest thing about King of the Roaring 20's is that David Janssen, fine as an actor as he could be, is incapable of doing it. Always an interior kind of actor—as he proved in his long stretch as TV's "The Fugitive"—Janssen is more than capable of luring the audience in and winning their respect if not sympathy, without resorting to theatrics. But here the role is so repellant than no amount of casual inscrutability provokes any interest. And his lack of remorse—or much of anything beyond surface cool—inspires nothing but our own indifference. The audience reflects the performance.

It's too bad because the cast is flush with good character actors—Rooney, O'Herlihy, William Demarest, Keenan Wynn, Diana Dors (in a "blink-and-you'll-miss-her" role), and, one of my favorites, Jack Carson in his last role before his death. But, they're circling around an empty suit, and there's not even enough venom in Janssen's performance to inspire that he get his just desserts, which occurs in a contrivance that's too "on-the-nose." All the way around, the movie's just a bad bet.

Lafayette Escadrille

Lafayette Escadrille (William Wellman, 1958) Wellman's last film couldn't be more personal—the story of American flyers for the French Army during World War I. The director was in a similar squadron during the war, and he's even a character in the movie (played by son William Wellman, Jr., who would go on to make a documentary about his dad called Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick). It's your basic service adventure/comedy—part daring-do, part rollicking hi-jinks, part romance, with the first two provided by the collection of cocky Yanks dealing with the conditions (abysmal), looking for thrills (the flying and combat), and making a mockery of the de riguer training of the French military—the marching, the discipline, the rules—while simultaneously staying above the fray, plotting ingenious, diffident ways to get their flying hours while getting their way breaking the rules. The Americans don't even learn the language making drilling a fait accompli with their harried D.I. (Marcel Dalio) It's the most entertaining aspect of the film.

 It's a labor of amour, but it's bogged down with compromise. For the lead, Wellman wanted Paul Newman, but Newman wanted respect and did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof instead—and so was saddled with a Warners contract player, Tab Hunter, who is so wooden and inexpressive in the part that all the drama called for, the conflicts, the love scenes, simply do not "play."  To be fair, Hunter could be fine in films and only got better with age, and his best scenes are the slightly comic interludes with the Maitre d' of his French girlfriend's walk-up. That poor actress, Etchika Choureau, has to deal with emotional scenes where her co-star is no help, and evokes sympathy just from the wasted opportunity their scenes can't achieve, not that she doesn't try hard.*

But ultimately, despite Hunter, it's a good film, one clearly after the director's heart, as he lived it. And he gets good work out of his son, as well as the sons of Andy Devine and Joel McCrea, and a couple of upstarts named David Janssen (who was starring in the TV Series "Richard Diamond" at the time) and Clint Eastwood—he's usually the tall scowling one in the back.

I'd never heard of this film until seeing the story of its making—which made up a good chunk of young Wellman's documentary of his father. The other great chance to learn more about the man is the episode on him from critic  Richard Schickel's fine series "The Men Who Made the Movies." I'll always remember the section where Wellman talks about interference with his film Buffalo Bill, to make it more heroic and less true to life.  After a scene where a young audience member says "God bless you, Buffalo Bill!", Schickel cut to a pained Wellman who succinctly states "That made me want to throw up!"

Lafayette Escadrille is by no means his best film despite being his last, but it shows his gifts for pushing the envelope, tweaking the censors and, in general, being a creative professional pain in the ass.

"Wild Bill" Wellman at the time of his French service.

* According to Tab Hunter's frank auto-biography "Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star," he has remained close friends with Choureau ever since.