When I started watching RIDERS TO THE STARS, I had thoughts that it might be another entry in the movies to be overlooked series and I was right. But, I actually liked this one. Make no mistake, it wasn’t a very good movie and didn’t rise to that level of badness that makes it good. But I liked it anyway. Go figure.
In this world, a ship is launched into space and crashes back to Earth. The parts found had been bombarded by cosmic rays and shattered very easily when banged against something. The scientist in charge knew that meteors floated in space for billions of years with no apparent effect. How? Some kind of shield over it. They needed to know.
A plan was born.
A dozen scientists, scientifically picked, were invited for a week at an air base. They weren’t told why and went through a battery of tests, psychological and physical until they were whittled down to four. Those four got the plans then and an offer to be part of it.
A meteor swarm was scheduled to pass Earth in a couple of weeks. Three ships were to be sent out in an effort to get meteor samples, a scoop in the nose of each. They were given a week to decide whether to participate. One angrily declined immediately, one signed up just as fast, and the other two wanted to think about it.
Walter J. Gordon(Robert Karnes) was the one who decide first. The next was Dr. Jerome “Jerry” Lockwood(Richard Carlson). The final member was the son of the project lead scientist, Dr. Richard Donald Stanton(William Lundigan).
Now the things wrong with this one.
The first I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t read it. The business of cosmic rays destroying metal couldn’t happen and was already known at the time.
The things I noticed wrong:
When they got the exact time of the meteor swarm passing, the project leader said, “You’ll need to take off in fifty-three minutes at 5:00 am. They must have used a lot of stock footage because every out door scene of them getting the rockets in place was in broad daylight. And most of them were shots of ships being lifted into place, cranes rolled in and hooked up, stuff that would take a lot more than fifty-three minutes, stuff that should have been done days earlier at the least.
The first ship to go down tried to corral a meteor too big and exploded. We see the fellow in space suit floating along, a grinning skull peering out of the face panel.
And the big one:
They wanted to find out why their ship was turned into mush so to speak. So what do they do, send three ships up to catch meteors and no such effect happened to them.
The script was by Curt Siodmak with an uncredited rewrite by Ivan Tors, likely the reason for so much scientific inaccuracies and was directed by Richard Carlson.
It was the second in Tors’ Office of Scientific Investigations trilogy, the first being THE MAGNETIC MONSTER and the third GOG, which I haven’t run across yet.
This was better, not by much, than THE MAGNETIC MONSTER.
1: The Third Gate(ARC) – Lincoln Child: the latest thriller from Lincoln Child due out on June 12th
2: Triple Play(ARC) – Max Allan Collins: collection of Nathan Heller novelettes just out.
3: Arctic Wargames(ebook, review copy) – Ethan James: Canadian Intelligence agent Justin Hall and his partner, Carrie O’Connor investigate two icebreakers in northern Canadian waters and face betrayal from one of their own.
Max Allan Collins is here with another collection Nathan Heller tales, to long for short stories, to short for novels(Mr. Collins even makes note in the introduction of his confusion over the difference between novellas and novelettes, an understanding I thought I was the only one who had).
Three novella/novelettes of cases that weren’t quite complex enough to be worthy of a novel and a bit much for a short story.
DYING IN THE POST-WAR WORLD puts Heller back in the PI business after a stint in WWII, a wife pregnant and feeling unworthy, and smack in the middle of the “Lipstick Killer” case. Collins and his researcher, George Hagenaeur, do the scut work in bringing the fictional Heller into a real world case, though he notes that some historical elements have been altered slightly in the interests of storytelling.
KISSES OF DEATH finds our hero meeting and taking a job guarding a young Marilyn Monroe and eventually to looking into the murder of novelist/poet Maxwell Bodenheim, a man he barely remembered stopping into his father’s bookshop when he was a child.
STRIKE ZONE has a baseball theme of sorts as Heller investigates the death of Eddie Gaedel, the “little person” Bill Veeck hired to pinch hit as a publicity stunt. 3’8,” he walked on four pitches and was replaced with a runner, his sole appearance in a major league game.
The fun for me in the Hellers, whether novel, short story, or otherwise, is doing a bit of looking around myself at these true cases. Collins, as usual, has a section in the back of the book where he discusses books researched for the stories. I’ve managed over the years to run across a few.
Enjoyed this one. Collins’ prose is always easy to get into, one falling in and not usually coming up for air until done.
Dorothy M. Johnson(1905-1984) was known primarily for her western stories. She grew up in Montana and later taught creative writing at the University of Montana. Her writing career began in 1930 with an article sold to the Saturday Evening Post and her first fiction sale was in 1935. It was after WWII, which interrupted her writing as she worked for the Air Warden Service, that she really took off. Three of her stories were made into the notable films THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, A MAN CALLED HORSE, and THE HANGING TREE. Her short story LOST SISTER won the Spur award for best short story and she was given the Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award for bringing dignity and honor to the legends and history of the West.
This collection came out in late 1958(my copy is the seventh printing from early 1977. The ten stories come from the early to mid-fifties except one from 1942.
The stories in order: a brief look at some favorites.
1: LOST SISTER(Spur Award winner): the family was all agog because a sister was returning home from a life with the Indians. The only sibling that was alive when she was taken lives a thousand miles away. The other three and a brother expect someone like them. But you see, she’d lived among the Indians for forty years.
2: THE LAST BOAST
3: I WOKE UP WICKED: a naive young puncher gets involved with a slightly crooked relative while waiting for the bank to open so the trail boss can pay off the men. He’s standing by the sheriff’s horse while his relative, a deputy, goes in to see if the bank is open for business. Shots ring out, the relative and a few others burst out of the bank and leap onto horses. The puncher jumps on the sheriff’s horse right behind. Suddenly he’s a bank robber and a horse thief.
4: THE MAN WHO KNEW THE BUCKSKIN KID:
5: THE GIFT BY THE WAGON
6: A TIME OF GREATNESS
7: JOURNAL OF ADVENTURE: a man goes west to learn, leaving behind a woman and promising to return. He keeps a journal of his adventures, the near death, living with Indians, getting sidetracked, and finally coming full circle.
The Hanging Tree is the longest story comprising close to half the book. A fine set of stories by a writer I need to read more of if I can find them, find the time.
For more forgotten books, check out Patti Abbott over at PATTINASE.
CLOCKWORK ANGELS is the name of Rush’s forthcoming album, a concept it seems and SF novelist Kevin J. Anderson will be working with drummer, and lyricist, Neil Peart on a novel based on the album. Both album and novel are due late summer, early fall. To whet your appetite, here’s a video of the first single release HEADLONG FLIGHT:
The first time I saw these boys live was Bon Scott’s last tour in 1979 I believe, the HIGHWAY TO HELL shows. I’m glad I caught them then as he passed away by “Death By Misadventure” as the Ted Nugent song was titled, left passed out in a car after a night of drinking by his mates. A huge loss for AC/Dc and fans of metal. They did find a more than adequate replacement in Brian Johnson. Th show I saw wwith him will be featured next week.
It was with a certain amount of curiosity that I set the record button on the DVR when I noticed last Tuesday THE MOON IS BLUE was coming up on Turner Classics later in the day. If you’re a M*A*S*H-phile like myself, you’ll remember this was the movie they built an eleventh season episode around where Hawkeye and B. J. were making all kind of trade-offs and deals to get it sent to the 4077th. They’d read in a newspaper that it had been banned in Boston for “salacious” content and just had to get this work of art for viewing. Charles tried to warn them that Boston banned a lot of things pretty tame. They were outraged at how clean the movie was when they finally got it, though Father Mulcahy did point out one of the characters said the word virgin.
A romantic comedy produced and directed by Otto Preminger, It was based on a 1951 play, also directed by Preminger, by F. Hugh Herbert who also did the screenplay. It was indeed condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, hanging a “C” on it despite giving the play the milder “B” as unobjectionable for adults. The Breen office advised Preminger that his screenplay violated the Motion Picture Production Code for its “light and gay treatment of illicit sex and seduction.” Changes were made and they still objected with Preminger informing them he would film it as it was, no more changes.
William Holden is thirty year old architect Donald Gresham who meets a young woman, Patty O’Neill(Maggie McNamara in her first screen role), on the observation deck of the Empire State building. She’s twenty-two and he’d spotted her in the lobby, following her up after seeing her look at a tube of lipstick and put it down. He purchases it and manages an introduction where he gives it to her. He learns he’d been watched also, wondering at his purchases, pumice stone and rubber bands.
A loose button on his suit jacket comes off and she offers to sew it back on, having a needle and thread in her purse. Gresham manages to lose the needle and thread, tucked them under a lapel, while she’s working on the broken threads, then gets her to come down to his office, in the Empire State Building, where his secretary is sure to have a needle and thread. After hours of course and he can’t find any, finding a framed picture of an attractive young woman stashed in a desk drawer that he seems reticent about explaining, so he asks her out to dinner. Naturally he has to stop off at his apartment to repair the jacket.
Unmentioned so far is Patty is a chatterbox, rarely shutting up, asking all sorts of questions, generally nosing around the subject of sex. When Gresham calls her on it, she says, “isn’t it better to be pre-occupied with sex than occupied.”
At his apartment building, the elevator door opens and there is the woman in the picture, who angrily closes the doors and goes back up. In his apartment, there sits another framed picture like the one in his office and the word stinker in lipstick on a mirror. The story comes out then. Cynthia Slater(Dawn Adams) is his now ex-fiancee following an argument last night. She lives upstairs with her father David(David Niven). The blowup apparently was caused after he dropped er off after dinner and a show, she comes downstairs after finding her father entertaining a young woman and is offended that he sleeps on the couch while she takes his bed.
When Niven arrives while Gresham is out to buy food so that Patty could cook their dinner, it had started to rain quite heavily, she takes to him quite easily and he’s taken with her as well, being somewhat more of a playboy than Holden’s character. She invites him to stay for dinner, much to Gresham’s displeasure when he returns with enough groceries for an army.
They talk while she prepares dinner, the fastest meal on Earth. In about five minutes screen time, she brings in three steaks, coffee, and salad.
From this point on, we’re subjected to a series of incidents reminiscent of the finest sitcom(but since it was this early in the TV era, possibly they all took cues from this movie. Niven slings ketchup on Patty’s dress, the ex-fiancee comes down the fire escape in pouring rain to see her taking her dress off in Gresham’s bedroom, she returning to her room for a hot bath, then calling Gresham threatening suicide(not really, just to get him out of the apartment), then managing to leave the spigot on the tub running when she leaves to meet Gresham. David and Patty left in the apartment when they see water dripping from the ceiling. There he ends up proposing to her, gives her money, no strings attached, then Gresham shows up looking for them just i time to catch her kissing Niven.
It goes on and on like that, people getting offended, then calming down until Patty is ready to leave, going back to Gresham’s apartment to retrieve her dress, cleaned now and needing ironing, where they argue again, then she storms into the bedroom to put on her dress just as the doorbell rings. A big. bluff man in a trench coat storms in. You guessed, it Patty’s father, Michael(Tom Tully) who opens the bedroom door just in time to find his daughter with her dress just over her head. He’d found her by questioning her roommate she’d called earlier. He slugs Gresham and takes his daughter out.
Of course, as in all romantic comedies, things work out in the end.
A few observations:
A different time I assume. Such a naive young woman getting into these predicaments might not happen today, who knows. Like as not she would end up dead being so friendly so quickly and going up in just a few minutes of knowing a man.
The word virgin was thrown around quite a lot in the film, in one instance Patty was called a “professional virgin” by the ex-fiancee. When asked why Gresham explained “that a girl who advertises it as much as she did had something to sell.”
The movie was rather talky, not straying far from it’s stage roots. Wasn’t bad, but now that I’ve seen it, no desire to again.
1: Fire Will Freeze – Margaret Millar: not read any Millar, though love her husband. So, thinking it’s time I did, I got this one for Forgotten Friday’s single author day.
2: The Bar-None Ranch – Robert Asprin & Mel White: the second in the graphic novel series from the late author and artist Mel White
3: The Raiders – Robert Asprin & Mel White: the third and final graphic novel of this team of Duncan, a son of a minor nobleman more interested in love than war, and Mallory, a dragon more interested in con games.
4: Lonely Street(ebook) _ Steve Brewer
5: Baby Face(ebook) – Steve Brewer
6: Witchy Woman(ebook) – Steve Brewer: ebook versions of the Bubba Mabry P.I. novels originally published in the early nineties.
7: Robbers Roost(ebook) – James Reasoner: originally published as part of the Powell’s Army series.