| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS
(Der Schweigende Stern/Milczaca Gwiazda)
Rating: 
East Germany/Poland. 1959.
Director – Kurt Maetzig, Screenplay – Kurt Maetzig, J. Barkhauer, Jan Fethke, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Stanislaw Lem, Gunther Reisch, Gunther Rucker & Alexander Stenbock-Fermor, Based on the Novel The Astronauts by Stanislaw Lem, US Version Produced by Edmund Goldman, Photography – Joachim Hasler, Music – Andrzej Markowski, Music (US Version) – Gordon Zahler, Special Effects – Helmut Grewald, Ernst & Vera Kuntsmann, Jan Olejarczak & Martin Sonnabend, Production Design – Alfred Hirschmeier & Anatol Radzinowicz. Production Company – Defa/Illuzjon Film Unit.
Cast:
Oldrich Lukas (Professor Harringway), Yoko Tani (Dr Sumiko Ogimura), Tang Hua-Ta (Dr Tchen Yu), Gunther Simon (Robert Brinkman), Michail N. Postnikow (Professor Durand), Kurt Rachelmann (Dr Sikarna), Ignacy Machowski (Professor Orloff), Julius Ogewe (Talua)
Plot: Scientists uncover a magnetic spool at the site of the Tunga explosion in Siberia. This is believed to have come from an exploding alien spacecraft. As all effort is made to decode the spool, it is discovered to have originated from Venus. The planned Mars rocket Cosmostrater 1 is hastily redirected towards Venus, along with a crew of top scientists. But once on Venus the Cosmostrater crew discover a world that has been devastated by atomic war and realize that the Venusians were planning to invade the Earth.
This East German-Polish co-production is a fascinating entry in the frenzy of movie making that greeted the Space Age. Amid the horde of American entries on the subject, this is an effort that quite intriguingly hails from the Communist Bloc. Its success did see several other Communist Bloc sf films come out over the next few years, including The Heavens Call (1959), Storm Planet (1962), Voyage to the End of the Universe (1963) and The Andromeda Nebula (1967), most of which were purchased and re-edited by Roger Corman. Even though the Soviet filmmakers were not permitted to view the American films at the time, there is almost no difference between one of these Soviet depictions of a space mission and an American one. Here all the dramatics that the film goes through – the meteor storm, the perilous EVA mission, the exploration of the alien world – feel like clichés that could have been transplanted directly from an American space mission film like Destination Moon (1950). The one intriguing difference though is that First Spaceship on Venus was the first sf film to depict an international mission – with the crew complement featuring Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Black African scientists. By contrast in American sf we would have to wait until Star Trek (1966-9) to see an international space expedition, even one that featured non-Caucasian Americans. If the East-West nationalistic fervour of the Space Race as depicted by The Right Stuff (1983) was anywhere near accurate, it might appear, at least going by First Spaceship and most of the other Soviet sf films listed above, that much of this was really on the American side rather than the Soviet side, where the Soviet desire to conquer space was driven less by a sense of nationalistic chest-beating that it was one of human achievement.
The film is quite lavishly budgeted for an sf film of the era. Indeed First Spaceship works much better as sf than most other English-language sf films of the era, with the rocket launch being quite credibly detailed. However Kurt Maetzig is not really a dramatic director at all and the film progresses rather stolidly. The characters are dull blanks – the only one who even vaguely gets some depth of characterization is Yoko Tani who is seen to be refusing to deal with her husband’s death. The film does pick up somewhat upon the arrival on Venus, which is depicted with quite a degree of imaginative colour – a world covered in mist, the sky lit up by Aurora and filled with alien geodesic domes, mountains built out of spheres, petrified forests and ruined cities. There’s a sense of unveiling mystery as the astronauts explore the ruined city and a fine sequence where they are pursued up a tower by a sinister oil slick. There’s one great image before we depart where we see the charred outlines of the Venusians crisped against one of the walls of their cities.
Of course in the end what we finally have is really a Soviet version of Rocketship X-M (1950), an American-made film wherein a group of astronauts land on Mars only to find that the Martians had destroyed their own civilization in a nuclear war. In this sense First Spaceship falls into a body of sf films of the 1950s that included the likes of This Island Earth (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956), which took us on journeys to other worlds, only to show that these superior alien civilizations had destroyed themselves and holding up a potent warning about our own capacity to do the same with nuclear war or by allowing our technology to overreach itself. First Spaceship at least ends on an upbeat note with a speech about how it is mankind’s duty to rebuild and then conquer the rest of the universe.
The film was based on a novel by Polish sf writer Stanislaw Lem, whose writings also formed the basis of other sf films like Solaris (1972) and Test Pilot Perx (1979). An English-language dubbed version of the film was released in 1962.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2003
|