FANTASIA OBSCURA: Robert Altman Joins the Space Race in His Less Than Stellar Second Feature
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you can never be sure what’s going to happen in the future to what or whom you’re looking at now…
Countdown (1968)
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
Directed by: Robert Altman
Once someone had launched people into orbit, the next step was putting them on the moon.
As we saw before, the race for the ultimate high ground was being continually run both in fiction as well as fact. Many people looking back at Apollo 11 rightly think of it as a grand feat of technology; whether you thought it was worth it or considered it a waste of resources better used here on earth, that such a feat could be and was done still elicits wonder and amazement.
While those looking back and accepting it as history can assume that the result was inevitable, the finish line for this part of the space race was never really in sight until just before the end. Even then there were no guarantees of this being an unalloyed triumph, as disaster could have hit at any point from liftoff to the splash down.
A sense of which comes through in a film that came out less than two years before Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the moon:
We open as we watch the crew of an upcoming Apollo mission deal with an emergency. While astronauts Rick (Michael Murphy) and Chiz (Robert Duvall) can bring to the task the calm that being officers in the US Air Force requires, for their colleague with a civilian background, geologist Lee Stegler (James Caan), the pressure gets to him as he starts to panic.
Thankfully, we find that this is an exercise, one that’s cut short by the brass, with nothing but worried looks on their faces. We get an answer as to why this happened later that night, when the guys come over to Chiz’s place and are told all about the sudden developments:
However, Washington has concerns that the first man on the moon being a military officer is going to send the wrong message to the rest of the world. They decide to put Lee into Pilgrim instead, which leads to an in-house row between project director Ross Duellan (Steve Ihnat) and project physician Gus (Charles Aidman):
They’re not alone in their bickering and talking over each other: Chiz is upset at being pushed aside for Lee for political purposes, and Lee has to keep talking himself into doing this, while assuring his wife Jean (Barbara Baxley) that everything’s going to be fine, honest, until the point where Lee gets the chance to back out but finds deep in his gut, he really does want to go through with this.
And if all the tension and tsuris between people on the team wasn’t enough, things get more complicated when the secrecy covering Pilgrim is blown away and word leaks out two days early. This prompts the Russians to send their landing team ahead of schedule to try and beat the Americans, while NASA’s press officer Walter Larson (Ted Knight) tries to get ahead of the story and turn what looks to be the first Americans on the moon, as opposed to the first humans, into something worth crowing about.
All of this is sound and fury that gives way as it must when Lee finally gets to the surface of the moon, the past made insignificant by the act of getting to the lunar surface…
Much the same can be said about the film too, where Altman’s adaptation of The Pilgrim Project by Hank Searls is a pain to sit through for most of the run time. The continual arguing and petty one-upsmanship is unpleasant to look at, even if Altman is very good at staging it, as we see later in his more maverick films MASH and Nashville.
The front end of the film, in fact, got him in trouble for his handling of people being upset with each other. Taking on his first film for a major studio after doing mostly TV the last decade, Altman thought actors acting over each other was very natural. But studio head Jack Warner hated it, and he asked the film’s executive producer William Conrad to remove Altman from the picture. Conrad would then do a few pick-up shots after Altman was removed to try and punch up the film to Warner’s satisfaction.
Let that sit for a minute: the director who was nominated for an Academy Award five times over his career, getting fired and having reshoots done to his film by the actor who would go on to star in Cannon and Jake and the Fatman…
But when we get to the moon, finally, the film actually starts to come to life. All of the technical assistance NASA gave the production gets a chance to show here, now that it’s one astronaut against the lack of a lunar atmosphere. It’s not flashy, and we still have to deal with the wildly out-of-place score from Leonard Rosenman that helped make the early part of the film a drag, but for the last act there’s now something fascinating to watch. And for someone who didn’t wander too often into genre work, his lunar survival tale manages to get anyone who didn’t walk out and left before now to pay closer attention with interest.
For his first real theatrical feature, we see some of what Altman promises is to come. Like his other films, it’s a bit of a mess that does 
manage to come together at the end, even if it’s far more conventional than his later work. You almost imagine that Altman could have done some interesting work in genre if he kept at it…
…until you remember that he goes on to do Quintet…
Of note is that the film overall shows us desperate people, straining as they messily struggle to get someone on the lunar surface, only to end up doing something worth recalling for its skill and for achieving its set of accomplishments.
Much like what happened in real life by July 20 of 1969…
NEXT TIME: You folk think you comin’ ‘round here, tellin’ us what a good film is? Damned Yankee city folk…
