The Angry Red Planet

The Angry Red Planet (1959)

Spectacular Adventure Beyond Time and Space

The first manned flight to Mars returns after having been out of communications since it had arrived on Mars. What would it reveal?

Date of release
1959-11-23
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (85)
Runtime
1h 23m
Genres
Adventure, Science Fiction, Horror
Director
Ib Melchior

Casting

Interesting facts

The Angry Red Planet is a 1960 American science-fiction film directed by Ib Melchior and starring Gerald Mohr and Les Tremayne. It was filmed in 1959, and was released on September 8, 1960 on a double bill with Beyond the Time Barrier. It also played in some areas with Circus of Horrors (1960).

Production

The Angry Red Planet began as The Planet Mars, a treatment written by Sidney Pink about a space voyage to Earth's mysterious neighbor. Pink said in an interview a few years before his 2002 death: "It was written on my kitchen table. My kids were my critics, they'd tell me what was good and what just fell flat". Pink gave his treatment to Melchior after meeting him at a party.

The production budget for The Angry Red Planet may have actually been significantly higher than the $200,000 cited by most film and press references. In its online catalog, the American Film Institute refers to a contemporary report in The Hollywood Reporter that announced an increase in allotted funding for the project more than double the frequently given figure.

Comments made by Pink on the eve of filming provide some evidence regarding how little money was spent to design and build sets for the production. In an interview for a September 7, 1959, news item by Associated Press reporter and writer James Bacon, Pink is quoted about the extreme cost-cutting effectiveness of using the new CineMagic process: "Our set for the planet Mars cost us a couple of hundred dollars instead of the thousands we had estim…

The CineMagic process was used to cast a red glow over scenes depicting the surface of Mars. The low-cost process made the actors look similar to cartoon drawings so they would fit in with low-budget, less realistic sets and props.

To achieve this effect, a black-and-white film negative was first processed with solarisation (a process which partially reverses the negative, making some areas of the image appear positive). The resulting film was then tinted red. Making a film positive was not necessary. At the time The Angry Red Planet was produced, black-and-white film cost less than color film and processing.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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