Paul Mantee is best known for his starring role in “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” (1964). (It’s actually pretty good but the “science” doesn’t hold up very well.)

About 10 years early when he returned from the Korean War, Mantee modeled for physique photos under his real name Paul Marianetti.

Films Watched in 2023: 95. The Manitou (1978) - Dir. William Girdler

Day of the Animals

“Vultures and rattlers and bears, oh my!” could have been the tagline for William Girdler’s DAY OF THE ANIMALS (1977, Shudder) had anybody on the film been honest about how ridiculous it was. The depletion of the ozone layer creates a virus that affects animals and some humans (well, one that we see) in higher altitudes, which doesn’t bode well for Christopher George’s wilderness survival expedition. It doesn’t do much for the audience either unless you’ve got someone to laugh with you. Sadly, my dog and cat were not so inclined. It takes almost 30 minutes to get to the first animal attack, and many of them are laughably staged. Instead, we get a lot of forced drama as we meet the people foolish enough to book the expedition as some form of vacation fun. There’s a news anchor (Linda Day George) who wants to experience life rather than talk about it, an advertising executive (Leslie Nielsen) looking for people to treat rudely, a single mother (Ruth Roman) trying to bond with her 12-year-old son (played by a short 25-year-old stuntman with a gratingly high voice), a squabbling couple, a dying football player (Paul Mantee), a college professor (Richard Jaeckel) and two young innocents (Andrew Stevens and Susan Backlinie, the first victim in 1975’s JAWS) with no apparent motivation. Jaeckel  and Christopher George (and the bear) had co-starred in the director’s previous film, GRIZZLY (1976), and Day came along to work with her husband. Their courtship scenes are among the film’s few saving graces, and it’s rather sad that not all their films together gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their easy rapport. The rest seem to be whoever needed to pay the rent on casting day. As the one human driven mad by ozone depletion, Nielsen fares the worst. He starts as a jerk and ends up an uneasy combination of Captain Ahab and Wolf Larsen. Lalo Schifrin did the score, and his attempts to build suspense by accompanying closeups of stalking animals with screeching strings and low piano notes get some of the film’s biggest laughs.

The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo, 1936)

Cast: Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Genevieve Tobin, Dick Foran, Porter Hall, Charley Grapewin, Joe Sawyer, Paul Harvey. Eddie Acuff, Adrian Morris, Nina Campana, Slim Thompson, John Alexander. Screenplay: Charles Kenyon, Delmer Daves, based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: John Hughes. Film editing: Owen Marks. Music: Bernhard Kaun. 

Robert E. Sherwood was once America's pre-eminent playwright, winning three Pulitzer Prizes for drama (plus one for a biography of FDR's relationship with Harry Hopkins). But his plays are rarely revived today, and The Petrified Forest shows why: It's talky and its characters are more vehicles for ideas than human beings. The protagonist, Alan Squier, wears the label Effete Intellectual like a badge of honor. The leading lady, Gabrielle Maple, is the Wide-Eyed Naïf. The villain, Duke Mantee, is all Animalistic Evil. The actors who play them in the film -- Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart, respectively -- do what they can to bring them to life, but they still have to speak Sherwood's lines, or the equivalents provided by screenwriters Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves. Sometimes the dialogue consists of things no human being ever found the way to utter: "The trouble with me, Gabrielle, is I, I belong to a vanishing race. I'm one of the intellectuals.... Brains without purpose. Noise without sound, shape without substance." Howard makes what he can of this self-pitying poseur, but who sheds a tear when he gets his comeuppance? Bogart, who was in the original Broadway production along with Howard, fares a little better: All Duke Mantee has to do is snarl and growl his lines. It's not prime Bogart, who learned to give a little more depth to his bad guys, but it gave his career a boost after Howard insisted that Bogart be cast in the role instead of the then better-known Edward G. Robinson. Davis comes off best, especially when you remember that her previous teaming with Howard was in John Cromwell's 1936 Of Human Bondage as the slutty Mildred, a character 180 degrees away from the dewy-eyed hopeful Gabrielle. The rest of the cast is entertaining, though Charley Grapewin's gramps, a garrulous old foof who can't help telling tale tales about his encounter with Billy the Kid, gets a little grating after a while. The cast also includes two African-Americans, Slim Thompson as the wealthy couple's chauffeur and John Alexander as a member of Mantee's gang. They are not stereotyped, and they have a brief moment of interaction in which the gangster lords it over the chauffeur, one of the few moments in which the reality of black life in America surfaces convincingly in a mainstream mostly white movie of the era. 

Commander Christopher "Kit" Draper Lands on Mars on the Sharp Color Television Model 32SF560 from Glenn Edward Waters on Vimeo.

Commander Christopher "Kit" Draper Lands on Mars on the Sharp Model 32SF560, Made October 2006, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, DVD. Sharp Color Television Model 32SF560, Sharp 32 inch color television, Paul Mantee as Commander Christopher "Kit" Draper. Science Fiction at its best. #sharp32sf560 #sharptelevision #robinsoncrusoeonmars #mars #paulmantee

Lurking Fear - C. Courtney Joyner 1994

Paul Mantee in “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” (1964)

107. Robinson Crusoé em Marte (Robinson Crusoe on Mars, 1964), dir. Byron Haskin

The crazy-nuts horror cheesefest, The Manitou – featuring Tony Curtis as a psychic who discovers that the lump on his girlfriend’s back is the gestating reincarnation of a demonic Native American spirit – was delivered into theaters on April 15, 1978.

Actor Paul Mantee in “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” (1964)

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964, Byron Haskin)

12/5/20

The Manitou

Graham Masterton’s novel THE MANITOU was hardly great writing, but it had two things going for it: a grimy feel for its New York setting and an attempt to link its plot to Manhattan’s theft from Native peoples (so I guess you won’t find it any Florida public school libraries). Those are both missing from William Girdler’s 1978 film version (streaming on Shudder), which moves the action to San Francisco, where the action keeps stopping for picturesque views of the Golden Gate Bridge. The plot, in which a shaman’s spirit is reborn from a growth on Susan Strasberg’s neck, is defanged because the shaman is now from a tribe that had died out long before white settlers reached the area (so you could show the film in Florida public schools). As a result, he’s just “the other,” a hideous non-white played by little people Felix Silla and Joe Gieb, thereby rendering the film both racist and ableist. It’s clearly just an attempt to work a variation on THE EXORCIST (1973) with effects that can’t approach those of the earlier film. As a fake mentalist who used to date Strasberg, Tony Curtis tries to make the thing work. His early scenes in sessions with older women clients (first Jeanette Nolan and then Lurene Tuttle) have a nice comic rhythm. And even in his later years, he moves with an athlete’s grace. But he can’t conquer the film’s overall tackiness. By the time the shaman emerges from Strasberg’s neck and starts wreaking havoc on a hospital, it’s all just too silly. Curtis and Michael Ansara, as a shaman brought in to fight the evil spirit, have to act scared while wandering through sets that wouldn’t fly in an early video game. When naked Susan Strasberg rises from the seeming dead to join the fray as poorly matted fireballs and lightning bolts fly about, all you can do is laugh. The cast is filled with recognizable names, including Stella Stevens as a medium, Ann Sothern (still beautiful in her sixties and acting up a storm), in one scene as Strasberg’s rich aunt, Paul Mantee as a doctor and Burgess Meredith in a scene-stealing bit as an absent-minded anthropologist.

Supremely hunky Paul Mantee bathing in a Martian grotto in Robinson Crusoe On Mars.