Black Gate

We’re going to do something a bit different this time and focus on a single movie, 1968’s (US release), Mission Stardust, starring sf’s longest continually published fictional character, Perry Rhodan.

I just discovered this film quite recently. It’s not like I’ve seen every movie ever made, or even every sf movie, but the fact that there was a Perry Rhodan movie in the 1960’s totally surprised me. First, though, a bit of a disclaimer. Detailed knowledge of the Perry Rhodan phenomenon entirely escaped me. I’ve never read any of the 126 books or so Rhodan books published in the U.S. Don’t know why, actually – it’s not like I was boycotting them, I just missed them. Part of the reason is that a good portion of the time they were on the bookshelves here (1969-1978) I was in college and grad school, and my sf reading was probably at the lowest point in my entire literate lifetime.

For those of you who might be unaware (and I was astonished by these figures when I wiki-pediaed them), Perry Rhodan is a German sf series that has been published weekly between September 1961 and February 2019 (when the wiki article was written) for over 3000 issues. Now, these are “booklet novels” usually sixty-six pages apiece, but still. This publication history makes my brain cramp. And that doesn’t even take into account the 850 spin-off novels of the “sister-series” Atlan or the 400 paperbacks and 200 hardcovers releases which I gather from the wiki article were in addition to the weekly series.

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Through the years I’ve never missed the opportunity to write some interesting tidbit about one of my favorite movies of all time, Jaws. However, I was a bit freaked out to discover that my inaugural opus about all things Jaws, appeared here at Black Gate 10 years ago this month.

Really… July, 2010.

Sigh.

Anyway, that article packed in quite a lot of trivia I had collected over the years, including this: the actual “Orca,” Captain Quint’s boat in Jaws, used to be moored on the lake in the Universal Studios California Jaws ride. There’s a story that Spielberg used to sneak into the park when he was working on the lot, and have his lunch sitting in the hull of the Orca, I guess as a way of keeping in contact with a physical relic of the movie that made his name in Hollywood. One day, Universal employees decided that the boat had rotted too much to remain in place, and it was removed and destroyed. Spielberg was understandably irritated.

However, 45 years later, Spielberg is (probably) heartened to know the Orca will sail again.

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Every time I tell Brit friends I’m a big fan of the “stiff upper lip” British war films of the 50s like Sink the Bismark and The Dam Busters they always, *always* want to talk about Ice Cold In Alex. I had to confess that I’d never seen it. For some reason it was simply unavailable over here.

Having rectified that today, thanks to Amazon Prime, I can see why. I was riveted.

It’s the story of a group of UK medical officers assigned to pull out of Tobruk and retreat to Alexandria as Rommel makes his last, fateful drive to history at El Alamein. But for a war film, there isn’t really even a battle, this is more of a “man vs. nature” movie of four people — and one tough ambulance that’s the real star of the film (an Austin K2 ambulance lovingly referred to as “Katy,” who you end up rooting for much like the motorboat in “The African Queen”) — against the desert. If “Katy” didn’t inspire Werner Herzog in Fitzcarraldo I’ll eat both of my dad’s old sun hats, the big ones my mom sent me.

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

So, TCM was afloat in hardboiled/noir/crime flicks, with Edward G. Robinson as the May Star of the Month. June was at least as good, with Ann Sheridan in the spotlight. Alas – July’s Star is Tony Curtis. Good actor, who made some fun movies. But there’s less of our favored genres with him in the spotlight. Fortunately, TCM is still an excellent network, and we have some things to look forward to:

MONDAY, JULY 6

9:00 AM – Jailbreak

Also called Murder in the Big House, this 1936 crime film is about a reporter who goes inside a prison to solve a murder. And the lead is Barton MacLane, who is probably my favorite Warners supporting actor in the gangster/crime heyday. He popped up in good movie after good movie, such as The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Manpower, and All Through the Night. He was the second-lead in the Torchy Blaine movies (his character was actually the main one in Frederick Nebel’s short stories). He did get the lead in some B-movies, but they’re not around much. So tune in and see him out front for a change.

2:15 PM – Each Dawn I Die

Quite a performance by James Cagney as a crusading reporter who undergoes quite a personality change when he’s framed and imprisoned. This was George Raft’s first movie after signing with Warners. The first thing he did was bump Bogart from the part of Hood Stacey.

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