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ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS (Van Cleave) FSM
Unlike my usual Reflections, I am not going to go track-by-track with this, as I feel more inclined to follow my impressions and thoughts about the score as a whole.
A space-age reworking of the classic Daniel Dafoe tale of a marooned voyager, Robinson Crusoe on Mars utilised all the knowledge and tech that NASA and the science community had to offer (or were prepared to offer, at least) at the time. Whimsical thoughts of survival on the angry red planet were cultivated and intricately built upon in the brainchild of novelist/screenwriter/producer Ib Melchior. As such it works along very similar lines to Ridley Scott’s The Martian. Both stories rely upon the fortitude, resilience and determination of their stranded characters to wilfully make the best of their situation and not to simply give in to despair and hopelessness.
But writer Ib Melchior’s and director Byron (War of the Worlds) Haskin’s evocative 1964 film steals the deal from Scott’s infinitely more tech-savvy saga by actually having aliens and action as well as scientific tenacity and speculation. Their movie is colourful and fantastic, merging imagination with tantalising possibility. And their Crusoe (astronaut Kit Draper, played by Paul Mantee) even gains a Friday to accompany him, in the form of an alien slave (Victor Lundin), whom he rescues from mostly unseen, saucer-flying tyrants (a terrific variant on Dafoe’s pirates), and subsequently bonds with. The film is highly stylistic and rich with visual FX and drama, including ancient Martian monuments and bizarre flora and sinister fireballs, laser-blasting spacecraft, ferocious storms and a trek towards the polar ice cap.
Composer Nathan Van Cleave had already explored the realms of speculative SF for Jack Arnold’s The Space Children and Eugene Lourie’s The Colossus of New York (both 1958), with assistance from Fred Steiner, but their styles are very much removed from the larger scale Crusoe. Space Children enjoyed some ethereal electronic effects and Colossus struck out with a weirdly compelling piano quartet.
But for Crusoe, he came up with a score that homes-in on the awe and wonder of an alien planet, and treats the various trials and tribulations of clawing an unlikely existence there without the zaniness and typical space music flourishes so beloved during the era. There is no Theremin here, with electronic organs catering to the glimmering otherworldly factor. His portentous, heavy chords, reminiscent of his work on episodes of The Twilight Zone, strike an immediately recognisable threat. He also ensures that we are forever reminded of the isolation, the fear and the monotonous, taunting passage of time. Draper’s undamaged ship, the Elinor M – that he and his doomed commander (played by Adam West) felt compelled to evacuate due to the threat of a collision with a meteor – orbits Mars regularly, a recurring but unreachable means of escape that forever teases him, and this ceaseless, mocking loneliness breathes inspiration into the entire score.
Thus, his score, largely orchestrated by Steiner, aims primarily for the psychological side of the situation, with its many fantastical asides taking on secondary themes and motifs that tend to evolve from out of this more cautionary and sobering approach. There really are only a couple of major themes at work. The five-note main theme acts as a fanfare and can be heard with brass for a more a heraldic and triumphant voice, but also in several variations, led by horns and woods, or strings, to capture certain moods. For instance, it can be heard in a version of dreamy Americana for strings as Draper begins to take stock of his situation, furnish his cave-dwelling home and feed the probe’s mascot, Mona, a little Capuchin monkey who has also survived the crash landing in the escape lander.
Interestingly, it goes against the grain because it clinically fails to elicit much in the way of hope or character empathy. In view of its strident, impersonal pauses, it conveys hesitation and, with its rise and fall movement, we have only a faltering sense of strength and victory. This is tactically deliberate. Van Cleave, as much, or perhaps more so than the filmmakers is committed to instilling the impression of such a colossal challenge facing the unfortunate protagonist. His music, therefore, goes out of its way to avoid compassion and sympathy in all but the most charitable of moments. A notable example of which would be when Draper and Mona settle down for a meagre Dinner for Two after the downed astronaut has saluted the Stars and Stripes. It does go on to receive a buoyant, fully resplendent rendition come the finale, but this development seems so far removed from how it commences the score that it may as well be a different theme entirely. And, in fact, this End Title salutation, although well-earned, feels a little at-odds with the rest of the score.
The most memorable theme, though, is for the Martian desert, its vast emptiness ominously modulated in a slow, arduous rhythm for woodwinds over a mournful string sustain. A labouring sense of exertion for whenever Draper marches out to explore is reinforced by a ponderous, methodical tritone, eliciting a mood of almost hypnotic hopelessness. This rhythmic pattern becomes the backbone of the score, often interrupted by brass and woods to describe sudden discoveries or incidents, such as a fall down a slope, or the finding of water. Occasionally, the strings will hotly sear across this sombre processional, perhaps in mimicry of the passing Elinor M, or the burgeoning threat of those flaming Martian tumbleweeds that regularly threaten to incinerate our lost spaceman as they burn across the rocky surface of Mars. Cleverly, this feeds into the basic acceptance of this strange and dangerous environment that Draper is forced to develop.
It is a sturdy rhythm that yearns and pulls though, slyly, provides no reachable goal, and no tangible success. Desert trek themes – found in Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia, Morricone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Jarre’s (again) Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, for examples – tend to lead us by a carrot of hope, a faint gleam of mirage-like shimmering salvation, but Van Cleave denies us this, and cooks up, instead, a perfectly scorched bewilderment of stark futility. Slow and relentless, it refuses to yield any sustenance. And yet there is a vein of beauty to mined from within this loneliness. It speaks of endless, empty space in every direction, and of the dominion of the landscape, itself, though this is anything but a musical void in which to wander. The plodding beat within the yawning, stretching tritone inspires a dangerous need to continue. Devilishly, Van Cleave conjures up images of the distant horizon, and invokes within us the powerful desire to get over it. Instinctively, we feel every step that Draper takes across the alien wasteland, and we shuffle along beside him.
Thanks to the woods being frequently so dour and melancholy, many passages have that ominous Bernard Herrmann vibe – especially the four-note motif introduced in Search for Shelter, which certainly instils those exciting low warbling tremors from oboe and clarinet. So, overall, this is dark score that pulls few punches.
Whilst the premise is grim and the music has to reflect this, there is still plenty of adventurous and spectral material to signpost Draper’s experiences. The two electronic organs twinkle with enchantment when the Polar Borealis shimmers across the night sky. Dissonant brass and agitated strings crumble with the rock beneath the castaway’s feet as he investigates a cave network. Flutes and glockenspiel weave haunting voices for the eerie and beautiful Martian night, and the ethereal, mystical dream Draper has of his friend, the deceased Commander, coming to visit him, is heralded by lamenting solo English horn.
Yet joviality also permeates the Martian isolation, Van Cleave allowing little victories, such as the discovery of oxygen-giving rocks, of water and plant-life in a glittering grotto, or the playful antics of man and monkey. Lighter figures for woods diffuse the pseudo-industrial bluster of the main theme, though it is pertinent to note that such interludes are still subject, in some way, to the continual thrust of the score’s overall ambience. Happiness is rarely to be savoured for long.
There is no getting away from the repetitive nature of the score, though this is a deliberately descriptive strategy in emphasising the solitude and the necessity for routine. Far from being a drag, however, this conveyer-belt cycling of themes smothers the film and the score with identity and purpose. The remorseless rhythm of the Martian desert motif becomes the key to perceiving Draper’s will to survive and the phenomenal odds stacked against him ... hence when events take an interesting detour, the deviation from this lumbering trudge is often exciting, brusque and jarring.
When chaos strikes, in the form of adverse weather conditions and treacherous terrain, or flight from alien saucers, trombones, woods and strings erupt for fragmentary spells of squalling, skittering alarm. Van Cleave is able to produce the orchestral equivalent of tumbling rocks and engulfing landslides of hot ash, as well as the suggestion of blistering attack from above. The third act of the film chronicles the forced migration that Draper and Friday must undertake in order to escape the pursuing alien saucers and this section becomes the most diverse. Exploding meteors, beam-imploded mountains, subterranean expeditions and fierce snow storms are awarded roaring brass, strident horn calls, imperative percussion and rhythmic ostinato. So there is action aplenty.
Van Cleave jettisons character themes in favour of maintaining the essence of the environment and the personality of the predicament. For instance, we don’t get a repeated signature for Mona, the monkey. Nor does Friday gain his own theme. Draper, himself, is completely enmeshed within and almost indistinguishable from the main passages revolving around Mars - the man becoming as one with the scenario he finds himself in, a true Martian, musically speaking. With this in mind, his rigging together of scrap pieces of wrecked tubing to fashion his own set of bagpipes is a little work of genius. Although it is only reflected in Van Cleave’s score as a bonus slice of source music on FSM’s outstanding CD release, it is probably as close as we can get to the musical interpretation of our hero’s individuality and redoubtable nature.
But perhaps the most glaring omission, in terms of traditional SF scoring, is the lack of tangible “spacey” menace from the alien miners-cum-slavers. Van Cleave, sticking to his grand plan, simply focuses upon the drama of the incident and how it fits into the already established themes, as opposed to wrangling an explosive new motif that can resurge with vindictiveness when the weirdly blip-blopping, laser-blasting saucers return to chase down their escaped slave with aerial bombardments. This clearly goes against convention but should be applauded in this case because Van Cleave’s prime directive is to embody and decorate Mars, itself, rather than our characters, which are but specks of dust gadding-about on it. Consequently, the overall thrust and tonal colour of the score serves to project the red mystery that surrounds them. Their involvement with the planet is always overshadowed by its own irrevocable power and unforgiving attitude.
Even the main theme, given its brief but grand flurry of heroic might, reoccurs with almost person-less valour. It is not a swaggering endeavour as such. Not the type of rousing clarion-call that we would expect from a movie that, in other directorial hands, would probably have been a fully patriotic chest-thumper with Draper portrayed as a stalwart man-of-action. My favourite phrase in the score is the gloriously desperate fever-pitched and archly anguished take on this theme heard in the first section of the later cue, Water Hazard, in which the motif remoulds itself into an echoing bleat from strings that pierces and penetrates the soul with its lost and plaintiff wail. Backed by cold, pitiless woodwind, there is a star-spun bleakness to this passage that, although, capped with a brassy crescendo, truly epitomises being lost so far, far away from home. Desperation is woven into this motif ... though not despair. Never despair.
Remarking more on Mankind’s intrepid nature, as a race, than upon the fortitude of the individual might seem outwardly opposed to the theme of the film ... but, then again, considering the great pains that Haskin went to in order to portray Draper utilising his training and adapting in accordance with the manual, this is just more evidence of how closely Van Cleave was paying attention to what the film was attempting to say. Man, encapsulated by this one individual, was capable of rising to and overcoming any challenge thrown at him. And could, given the opportunity, forge mutually productive relations when necessary.
Of course, when we say “Man”, we are thinking of American Man. Let’s not forget, or overlook that this was made at the time of escalating East-West tensions, and that America was about to find itself at the forefront of the Space Race ... and with gusto. Haskin, Melchior and Van Cleave were planting the flag of combined US effort in the Martian sand, and it was to be a grand and prophetic cinematic statement, indeed. But the point was being made that the skill, ingenuity and courage of one lone man was actually the product of considerable and concerted effort from the administration back home. Draper might get all the medals under the sun, but it would be NASA that would steal the limelight for giving him the training to cope in the first place.
Melchior’s idea was groundbreaking and Haskin’s interpretation of it was stellar. It is an offbeat film, for sure. But by playing against the formula, the end result is haunting, gripping and, ultimately, uplifting. Its music is an integral component in its success. We totally get the feel of an alien world and the obstacles that plague our boy in his bid for survival on it.
Therefore, I declare Nathan Van Cleave’s score for Robinson Crusoe on Mars to be one of the bravest, most unusual and highly distinctive from the genre during this later phase in its Silver Age.
Of course, if you really are a fan of the film and its music, you need to add Victor Lundin’s song of the same title to your intergalactic Crusoe playlist. This is a wonderful space oddity that Lundin would perform at conventions and I, for one, love it. It offers up a crazy memento for Lundin’s father that is blended into lyrics that recite the film’s plot in a pseudo biographical fashion. Lundin’s voice is hardly beatific but it swells with pride and heartfelt sentiment, and provides quite a surge of nostalgia.
Your thoughts on this wonderful score are, as always, most welcome.
Chris
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I've loved this film and score since seeing the first run in the small local theater as a kid. The FSM release is a shining treasure. Nice article!!
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Great review there Chris well done Ta a good read I haven't got this score but heard of the composer Nathan Van Cleave good composer I will pick this FSM cd up been meaning too forgot.
Cheers mate!
I definitely think you will enjoy this one. I always look at your triplets of listening pleasure, and I reckon this will go very nicely with one of your SF groupings. Hope you get it soon.
Thanks
Chris
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I've loved this film and score since seeing the first run in the small local theater as a kid. The FSM release is a shining treasure. Nice article!!
I'll bet seeing this on the big screen was a wonderful experience. The Criterion Blu-ray release boasts a fabulous transfer, but I'd still love to see those majestic matte paintings yawning across a vast canvas. I'd take those over CG vistas any day.
Thanks
Chris
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Absolutely great write-up there, Chris. Love the film, and the FSM release of the score is fantastic. Your descriptions and observations seem to me spot-on. I too find a kind of plodding relentlessness to much of the CD, but I mean that in a good way. You said it much better than me.
Thanks Graham.
Yes, it is this pitiless, relentless theme that really grips you and totally embodies the plight and the loneliness. It's hardly the sort of music you think would be a pleasure to listen to ... and yet ... it conveys so much within its earnest, endless depths that it does, in fact, become a thing of beauty.
An addictive quality, I find.
Cheers
Chris
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