Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Title frame from the trailer for Robinson Crusoe on Mars (dir. Byron Haskin, 1964).



A monkey and Paul Mantee.



Victor Lundin and Paul Mantee.

Best thought of as a pretext for the engaging display of a series of vivid matte shots with bits of live-action motion thrown in here and there as seasoning. It's almost exhilarating to witness what look like the extreme lengths the filmmakers went to in order to ensure that the special effects not look convincing. Haskin even recycles the spaceship design from his War of the Worlds: these alien crafts "dart around" by means of a rapid succession of still cartoon shots. I fumble to articulate a schema according to which such minimalistic spectacularity is an extension of the movie's general ideological blandness, the way the whole thing might as well have been a Soviet production.

Beyond that, the monkey is a nice touch (though it has surprisingly little personality), and there is a charm to the perpetually clean-crewcutness of Mantee as the Crusoe figure, matched by the Friday figure Lundin's perfectly neat pageboy do. It seems hair never grows on Mars. Adam West makes a brief appearance, two years before becoming TV's Batman.

Oh, and how many other movies can you think of that are "based on" a novel (Defoe is even given partial writing credit), but the novel in question is mentioned explicitly by one of the characters? There seems to be some violation of fictive logic there.

Killer Bait

Title frame for Killer Bait [a.k.a. Too Late for Tears] (dir. Byron Haskin, 1949).



Arthur Kennedy and Lizabeth Scott.



Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea.

Much of this film looks like it was shot in a cardboard box. This has more to do with Byron Haskin's just-adequate direction and the general low budget, I think, than with William Mellor's cinematographic skill, which is considerable (the degraded quality of the print doesn't help). But you know what? It doesn't even matter, because you've got Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea as two of the noiriest characters you've ever seen, and they play it for all it's worth. In fact, the overall crappiness of production values and lack of compositional gloss adds to the squalor of the story. A bag of money accidentally gets thrown into a married couple's car, and though the husband (Arthur Kennedy) wants to do the right thing and turn it in, he's a weak sap, and the wife (Scott) takes charge. Then the guy the money was really meant for (Duryea) shows up, and things get really ugly. Don DeFore enters the mix as a questionable man from the past and keeps everyone on their toes. There are all kinds of loose plot ends and half-baked motivations: it's hard to figure out how Scott gets Duryea to the point where he's going out and buying poison for her, but that's part of the beauty of it. These people are just going off half-cocked all over the place.