Marooned on the Red Planet

Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Break out the ray guns, boys! Here comes a horde of little green men? On the contrary, here comes a pleasant surprise: a piece of science fiction based on valid speculation, a modest yet provocative attempt to imagine what might happen if, in the next decade or so, a U.S. astronaut were spaceshipwrecked on the red planet and found himself, as Robinson Crusoe found himself 300 years ago, alone and desperate in a wild new world.

The wreck is credibly contrived. While circling Mars on a reconnaissance mission, the astronaut (Paul Mantee) changes course to avoid a meteor and so falls deep into the planet's field of force. To escape eventual incineration, he ejects his capsule and plunges down into a scene of staring desolation. Hell-hot by day and by night pole-cold, the Mars of the movie supports no visible life and very little atmosphere. However, the astronaut does not expect to be there very long. From the wreck of his capsule he rescues food for 60 days, water for five days, oxygen for 60 hours.

Luck and ingenuity keep him alive. He stumbles on a cave that gives some shelter and contrives to start a fire with yellow rocks that burn like low-grade coal. On the third day, oxygen gone, he discovers that the rocks release it when they are heated, and in jig time he rigs up a pressure cooker and replenishes his tanks. A few days later, led by the small South American monkey that shared his spaceship, he finds a spring of clear water, and in the water a plant that bears edible tubers.

So much for physical survival. Spiritual survival is another matter. Like Crusoe on his island, the modern man on Mars misses cruelly the company of his kind. And like Crusoe he soon comes across his Friday. How? Go to Mars and find out--it's well worth the trip. Death Valley, where the film was shot, really looks like another world. Actor Mantee, a former allround athlete from U.C.L.A., really looks like an astronaut. And the monkey really looks like a monkey. He looks, in fact, like the first cinemape of modern times who didn't learn to scratch himself at the Actors Studio.

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