Rixflix A to Z: Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953)
Director: Charles Lamont // Universal, 1:17, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 5
It hardly mattered that the boys never got to Mars. Seen on a Christmas morning in my youth, the planet that A&C actually landed on was not the point. Going into the picture, the rocket ride into space was the point. The promise of slithery, slobbering alien creatures was the point. Abbott and Costello goofing off in poofy-looking spacesuits was the point. That the film's title was a complete lie really never was an issue to me, though it seems to be a sticking point with most movie guides, which almost to an overpriced volume of committee-tossed opinions consider the film a colossal bomb.
Military base handyman Bud and professional orphan Lou bumble their way into stealing a rocketship destined for a Mars landing, but their flight pattern goes wackily awry. Science-ignorant Bud and Lou think they are on Mars, when in fact, they are actually in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and mistake the multitude of revelers gussied up in costumes and giant head masks to be Martians of the silliest kind. Circumstances will have them take to space for real, but they will land on Venus instead, and this is where my head did a swivel as a young'un. Somewhere amongst the space vixens of the second planet, naturally inhabited not just by women, but by gorgeous women only (and played by Miss Universe entrants), is the voluptuous Anita Ekberg. I know this now, but at that young age (what was I? 10, 11?), I was years away from seeing La Dolce Vita. What I did know was that once the parade of high-heeled hotties began, all of my concerns about seeing monsters in the film dissipated. Like Steve Martin's Navin R. Johnson, had I at last found my special purpose?
Watching the film anew, I am struck by how it is actually taken over by another accidental comedy team, that of Horace McMahon and Jack Kruschen as Mugsy and Harry, two escaped convicts who stowaway on the rocket to Venus, thereby running afoul of A&C as both teams do battle for control of the spaceship. And of the movie, it seems. McMahon and Kruschen actually get the sharper of the dialogue sequences, with McMahon's gangster tough having a bottomless reservoir of scientific and arcane knowledge at his fingertips, knowing and explaining to Harry exactly how the blaster ray works, and understanding with only the barest hint that the Venusian queen has placed some form of a curse on Costello. Kruschen, who would be nominated for an Oscar a handful of years later for The Apartment, is a brick wall of a man in both size and brain, but he punctuates all of McMahon's suggestions and directions with the charmingly assertive, and oft repeated, "I am with you!" (Emphasis on the last word...) As a child, I remember saying this line here and there, though I probably had forgotten its origin when I did. (Seeing the film a few times over the intervening years has kept the line in my repertoire.)
Despite the sci-fi elements, the film comes out as merely average, though I don't place it as low as others would have done. This is not because of Bud and Lou, however, for they seem overly tired in this one and are practically going through the paces. What saves it from the bottom of the heap is some nice production design on the part of Universal (some pieces were reused in This Island Earth the following year) and some nice production design on the part of Nature, where the girls are concerned. And also, what saves it is that accidental comedy team of Mugsy and Harry. I am with them...
Posted
Monday, August 06, 2007 3:44 AM
It did kind of bother me that they didn't go to Mars when I saw the movie.
One thing it had that one doesn't see anymore: the limberger cheese joke.