Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a 1964 American science fiction film directed by Byron Haskin and produced by Aubrey Schenck that stars Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin, and Adam West. It is a science fiction retelling of the classic 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The film was distributed by Paramount Pictures and filmed in Technicolor and Techniscope.
Plot Commander Christopher "Kit" Draper, USN, and Colonel Dan McReady, USAF, reach the red planet in their spaceship, Mars Gravity Probe 1. They are forced to use up their remaining fuel in order to avoid an imminent collision with a large orbiting meteoroid; they descend in one-man lifeboat pods, becoming the first humans on Mars, but are separated. Draper eventually finds a cave for shelter. He figures out how to obtain the rest of what he needs to survive: he burns some coal-like rocks for warmth and discovers that heating them also releases oxygen. This allows him to refill his air tanks with a hand pump and to move around in the thin Martian atmosphere. On one of his excursions, he finds McReady's crashed pod and corpse. He also finds their monkey Mona, who survived the crash. Later, Draper notices that Mona keeps disappearing and is uninterested in their dwindling supply of food and water. He gives her a salty cracker, but no water. When Mona gets thirsty, he lets her out and follows her to a cave where he finds a large pool of water in which are growing edible plant "sausages". As the days grow into months, Draper slowly begins to crack from the prolonged isolation. At one point, he imagines an alive, but unspeaking, McReady appearing. He also watches helplessly as his spaceship, an inaccessible "supermarket", periodically orbits overhead; without fuel, it cannot follow his radioed order to land. While walking about, Draper comes upon a dark rock slab standing almost upright. Curious, he digs in the ground around it, exposing a skeletal hand and arm wearing a black bracelet. He uncovers the rest of the humanoid skeleton and determines that the alien was murdered; the front of the skull shows a hole, and the back shows heavy charring. To hide his presence, Draper signals his ship to self-destruct. Not long after, Draper sees a spaceship descend and land just over the horizon. Believing it might be a rescue ship from Earth, he heads towards the landing site the following morning, only to see alien spacecraft darting about in the sky. He approaches cautiously and sees human-looking slaves being used for mining by human-shaped captors wearing spacesuits and bearing weapons. One of the slaves escapes and runs into Draper; an alien spaceship blasts the area as the two escape. Draper notices the stranger is wearing black bracelets just like the one he found in the grave. Draper rescues the stranger and takes him back to the cave. The aliens bombard the mine area that night and depart. Later, when he and the stranger investigate, they find the dead bodies of the other slaves. Draper names his new acquaintance "Friday", after the character in Robinson Crusoe. At first, Draper is wary of his new companion, but they gradually grow to trust and like each other. Soon, Draper begins to teach him to speak English. A portion of the passing overhead meteoroid explodes, showering their area with a thick black ash. Draper is buried under the heavy material, but Friday saves Draper and shares his "air pills", which provide oxygen. After a while, the alien spacecraft return, apparently tracking Friday by his bracelets. Draper tries to remove the bracelets with a wire saw. When the aliens blast their hiding place, Draper, Friday, and Mona flee north through underground Martian canals. They eventually surface near the polar icecap. Exhausted, freezing, and nearly out of air pills, they build a snow shelter. Draper finally manages to cut off Friday's bracelets shortly before a meteoroid crashes into the ice cap; the resulting explosion and firestorm melts the ice and snow, saving them from freezing to death. Shortly thereafter, Draper detects an approaching spaceship. He fears it is the returning aliens, but his portable radio picks up an English-speaking voice. A capsule descends, and the film ends with Mars receding in the distance.
Cast The film feature only four characters as in the opening credits:
Paul Mantee as Commander Christopher "Kit" Draper, USN Victor Lundin as Friday Adam West as Colonel Dan McReady, USAF Barney the Woolly Monkey as Mona
Production Exterior locations were shot mostly at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park, California. Special effects by Lawrence Butler and Academy Award-winning matte artist Albert Whitlock gave the film the benefit of "big-studio resources usually lacking in movies about outer space". Whitlock provided the matte paintings used in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, as he commented that "some scenes of spacecraft in motion were created with the kind of flat animation seen in official NASA promotional films". For the alien spacecraft, designer Albert Nozaki constructed three miniatures closely resembling the "Martian war machines" he had made previously for Haskin for The War of the Worlds (1953). Byron Haskin told interviewer Joe Adamson:
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