Battle Beyond the Sun

Battle Beyond the Sun (1959)

The GIGANTIC battle! Which race will win...and rule the universe?

English-dubbed and re-edited version of the 1959 Soviet film Nebo Zovyot. Acquired by Roger Corman and reworked by a young Francis Ford Coppola, the film relocates its Cold War “space race” to a fictional future where rival nations—North Hemis and South Hemis—compete to reach Mars first. When one crew’s mission goes awry, their rivals risk their own flight to attempt a daring rescue nearthe Martian moons, where strange cosmic dangers await.

Date of release
1959-09-12
TMDB
4.5 / 10 (23)
Runtime
1h 9m
Genres
Science Fiction, Adventure
Director
Francis Ford Coppola

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: The Sky Calls and Planeta Bur

Battle Beyond the Sun is a 1962 science fiction film. It is an English-dubbed and re-edited American version of Nebo Zovyot, a 1959 Soviet science fiction film. Roger Corman acquired the Soviet film for U.S. distribution and hired a young film-school student named Francis Ford Coppola to "Americanize" it.

Production history

In addition to preparing a dubbing script free of anti-American propaganda and all references to the USSR and USA, and supervising the dubbing, Francis Ford Coppola slightly re-edited the footage, eliminated the framing "daydream" sequences, and even saw to it that a pastel rhombus shape was matted in on a frame-by-frame basis, to cover the Cyrillic letters CCCP (USSR) which adorned the space station and Soviet rocketships.

Coppola also filmed a few shots of two space monsters fighting and cut them into the Soviet material. According to Jack Hill, who worked on the new version (it was his first paid job for Roger Corman), Coppola's idea was that one monster would look like a penis and the other a vagina. The new monster scenes were shot on a sound stage in Hollywood. Hill and Coppola also shot some footage of the Rose Parade at Pasadena.

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