Boomer Films   /     Movie Review: “Marooned”

Greg Ptacek reviews films of the baby boomer era and contrasts them with todays films

It was December 1965 and the space race was on. The USSR had launched Luna 8 and on the next day the U.S. sent Gemini 7 into space with astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell.

A year earlier, Martin Caidin, a prolific novelist specializing in stories often involving aeronautics technology, had his book “Marooned” published. The plot revolved around the survival of a Mercury spacecraft astronaut and was impressively accurate. Four years later in 1969 – and just four months after the Apollo 11 spacecraft successfully touched down on the moon – the novel became the eponymous movie.

In the hands of director filmmaker John Sturges (“Magnificent Seven” “The Great Escape,”) the movie “Marooned” remained loyal to the novel’s story of survival. But in the film version, the single-pilot Mercury capsule is replaced by an Apollo command-service module with three astronauts headed to a Skylab-like space station.

The three astronauts are played by James Franciscus, Gene Hackman and Richard Crenna, as the mission commander. However, the real star of the film is Gregory Peck, who plays the NASA director faced with the daunting task of rescuing the crew when their spacecraft’s engines fail and its marooned above earth. Rounding out the cast are Pecks’s nemesis, the gung-ho, earthbound Chief Astronaut played by David Janssen, and the crew members’ wives played by Lee Grant, Mariette Hartley and Nancy Kovack.

Adding further drama is a hurricane that hits Cape Canaveral, scraping a planned rescue mission.

Ultimately, the film is not only a story of survival but sacrifice. With only enough oxygen left for two of the three crew members before a Soviet spacecraft arrives with a fresh supply, captain Crenna “accidentally” tears his spacesuit as he exits the space capsule to supposedly make repairs.

“Marooned” was a breakthrough film for its realistic depiction of modern and “near- future” space travel. Prior to its release, there had been scores of sci-fi movies about fanciful depictions of space travel to the moon, Mars and beyond, beginning with the 1902 release for George Méliès “A Trip to the Moon.”

“Marooned” was different. It was scarily realistic and helped to usher in a documentary style of filmmaking eventually known as “docu-drama.” Many of the panoramic scenes of earth seen from space and the spacecrafts themselves are seemingly contemporary.

Film director Alfonso Cuarón (“Y Tu Mamá También,” “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”) was influenced by “Marooned” in the making of his critically acclaimed 2013 film “Gravity,” starring Sandra Bullock. Indeed, the films are striking similar in both their fascination with space technology and their themes of survival and sacrifice in the great void. “I watched the Gregory Peck movie ‘Marooned’ over and over when I was a kid,” said the Mexican-born director in a recent interview.

Perhaps more than anything, “Gravity” – which has been short-listed for multiple Oscar awards including, notably, Best Actress for Bullock – brings the space travel film genre into the 21st century not so much by its depiction of technology but by its decisions about characters and casting. Bullock, the film’s undisputed star, portrays a single mother scientist – who is also an astronaut. She may look sexy in her skimpy astronaut underwear, but it’s a far cry from when Lee Grant – an accomplished actress with an uncanny physical resemblance and screen presence to Bullock – was relegated to a role largely consisting of wringing her hands for her husband lost in space (played by Crenna).

Trivia note: In a case of reality eerily echoing fiction, four months after the film was released, the real-life Apollo 13 crew in April 1970 found themselves nearly marooned in space by an oxygen explosion – an incident that gripped the nation.

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