Flight To Mars (1951)

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Lippert Pictures struck paydirt with 1950's Rocketship XM, and was hoping for a similar result with this feature. As early sci-fi, the movie's okay, but lacks the grit of its predecessor. The premise is a real stretch with an underground Martian civilization that speaks flawless English, while the women parade around like Las Vegas show girls. (Not that I'm complaining.) Then too, the rocketship crew treats their pioneering flight like a trip to the mall.But if you can get past some of this nonsense, parts of the movie are eye-catching. I really like the standing rocket in the dome with the people beneath. It's a well-done effect, especially in color. Also, the script deals fairly thoughtfully with the predicament the Martians find themselves in. In short, that aspect is not settled in a typical Hollywood wrap-up. Then there's the great Morris Ankrum as Ikrom, the sneaky plotter. Would any sci-fi of the period be complete without his lordly presence. Anyway, despite the pacing that sometimes drags, the movie ends up somewhere in the middle of all those goofy 50's space operas.

For Flight To Mars, Monogram Pictures and its penny pinching head Sam Katzman must have really cracked open the cookie jar to spend money on this film. Color even, unheard of for Monogram film. It was probably their big budget item that year, comparatively speaking.Four scientists, Arthur Franz, Virginia Huston, John Litel, and Richard Gaines and a reporter Cameron Mitchell are the crew of the first manned flight to Mars. And the Martians are humanoid as we are and have a nice little underground civilization that unfortunately runs on a material called Corium. As essential to them as the buffalo was to the Plains Indians.But they're running out of Corium on Mars and the leader of the high council wants to use the earth astronauts rocket-ship to take armies back and conquer Earth. How they're going to do it with dwindling Corium and one rocket is something the script doesn't really go into.In the meantime Arthur Franz finds a little love on Mars in the person of shapely Martian Marguerite Chapman. Still the Earth visitors are caught in a power play between Martian leader Morris Ankrum and former leader Robert Barrat.Sad to say even with color Flight To Mars suffers from the same lack of production values that typify Monogram's products and the lack of a really coherent script. But the Martian girls are lovely to look at, it was like watching a Miss America pageant.

Well this one is a gem among the rubble. The plot thin, the dialog typical of the genre and the era...and by this I mean pretty bad. That plus the long legged Martian hotties make this a a must see for anyone who likes these types of movies and / or girls.I give the movie a 3 but the Martian babes with legs that go all the way up I give a 10. So it averages out to be about a 7.I happened to have found this online and downloaded it, I don't know if it's fallen into PD but it is available to find on the Internet for free. The print I saw was as choppy as the previous comments have attested to but so what, the Martian babe makes up for any and all shortcomings this flick may have.Find it, watch it, Love it. I know I did.

Cheesy, shlocky and campy as it is, I suppose that 1951's "Flight to Mars" still has a claim to historical relevance. According to one of my film Bibles, "The Psychotronic Encyclopedia," it was "the first space-flight movie in color." But hey, wait a minute...what about "Destination Moon," made the year before? Better make that "one of the first..." Anyway, in this one, newsman Cameron Mitchell tags along with four scientists (one of them the obligatory hotty female scientist) on the first, uh, flight to Mars. The group's members wear bomber jackets and wide-brimmed hats, more suitable for a fishing expedition, and, during liftoff, strap themselves into blanketed cots. After toughing it out through a meteor storm (that looks like a bunch of orange dots), our Earth band finds the remnants of an underground Martian civilization, whose remaining members attempt to steal the Earth ship so as to evacuate their dying planet. Luckily, for the male Terran viewer, some of these Martians are leggy, miniskirted and babelicious; one of them is even named Aelita, in a not-so-subtle homage to the 1924 Russian sci-fi classic "Aelita, Queen of Mars." The sets and FX on display here, it must be said, range from imaginative and impressive to slapdash and laughable. (It's hard to believe that "Forbidden Planet," one of the real sci-fi champs, with its superb FX, was made a scant five years later!) The film's Cinecolor looks just fine on the DVD that I just watched, but the source print itself has been badly damaged, with many words missing. A somewhat tense finale, unfortunately, is also marred by a too abrupt ending. All in all, a mixed bag that should still be of interest to fans of '50s sci-fi. Oh, by the way: Cameron Mitchell reveals, in one of the DVD's extras, that this movie was filmed in just five days! Maybe they should have taken six.