A Dream Come True (Mechte navstrechu) (1963)
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 6.4 by 240 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Red; subspecies: musical.
Verdict: pedantic eye candy.
A space happy comrade croons a tune to woo a comradess and inadvertently beams it to the cosmos. It tops the charts in far away Alpha Centauri wherefrom Colonel Tom with two assistants to proclaim his genius blasts off for Earth to find those tonsils and sign them up for life ever after. In his haste to go the colonel forgot to tank up with dilithium crystals and his spaceship conked out near Mars. Not good. Earth is a lot closer than home, so they vlog an SOS to the Pacific Ocean whence it is recovered and a Beta video machine is found in a museum to play the tape of the star-seeking star-travellers. Yes, the technologies are compatible, as are the shoe sizes. Just read on.
So help me, Marx! That is the plot.
Comrades to the rescue of these Marsrooned aliens! Not as easy as it sounded in the script conference. The aliens may travel the stars but they do so without light bulbs. The vlog is dark and shadowy. All the self-appointed rescuers know is that the message came from Mars. Off they go! Boom! Zoom! The space ship is called Ocean I, because there is an Ocean II. These details add verisimilitude, right? Wrong.
The going is hard. The seats aren’t padded, but when comrades weaken they rouse each other with stirring songs. Yes they do. Repeatedly. While the first song was crooned to woo a lady, these others are belted out marching band style. Moreover, they are preceded, or followed, or both by a ponderous narration that celebrates the unity of Earthlings, despite some rocket dragging by those with Anglo names, in hastening to offer salvation to these illegal immigrants.
All that strident singing, all the insistent narration, all those set-piece announcements by authority figures, when all of these sidebars are combined with the short runtime of barely more than an hour there is zero time for character development. The cosmonauts start and end as ciphers. But then they were none too bright to begin with for when they do find a surviving alien (a humanoid woman) they realise they have no room for survivors on their twenty-room space ship and to save her, one of them must stay behind, while Ocean II gears up. (As if.) Needless to say after all that stirring music they all volunteer for certain death while waiting for Ocean II.
Ciphers yes, but let it noted that in this 1963 film one of the cosmonauts is a woman who blasts off and does her job. This is at a time when it was routine in Yankee SF to include a woman only for the men in the crew to fight over, and for the smooth male lead to marvel that a woman could pull a switch or identify a dick head. Chalk this one up for the comrades.
There were originally three aliens in the murk. One died in the crash, and two survivors wandered around in a daze. The comrades find one, and silently we all agreed to forgot the third one. Singing seems to have impaired counting. Since they sport some kind of wire rabbits ears it is hard to take these aliens seriously. They need to go wireless and soon!
By the way, during the flight to Mars we see a comrade cosmonaut whiling away the light-speed by reading…a hardback book. Could it be the 900-hundred page volume two of Das Capital?
The visuals of the alien ship and Mars are extraordinary. The sets are much more ambitious than the story line in the compressed runtime. It is no wonder Roger Corman bought its US rights and recut it into … what was it, oh yes, Queen of Blood (1965). I have immortalised it on the blog elsewhere, click away. It has some good moments.
Did I mention shoe sizes? Yes, well that was a tease to get a reader to continue. Gotcha.
The version I found on You Tube has English subtitles that were done in East Germany, and it shows in some of the disconnected and convoluted renderings. Still they are adequate for the material and the price.