20 Million Days to Spring

I was peacefully enjoying (and mocking) 20 Million Miles to Earth at a friend's house tonight, unaware that outside in the cold distance, my car was getting nature's glazing. Yes, another shower of ice from God's great beyond. As faithful readers know, my wipers are shit in the ice, so a 30-mile drive home took over an hour. To top it off, I feel crappy since I missed American Idol. No.

If you've never seen this movie, do. It isn't that it's a cinema classic, because it's not. It's so utterly ridiculous, and funny in its ridiculousness, that it's fun. It must have wowed movie audiences in 1957.

It features a tiny fishing village in Sicily, where the people are apparently unaware that there is a planet called Venus - hence the continual asking, "The planet Venus?" when they are told that a mission to Venus just returned. I imagine that there is no newspaper, radio or television there, since the United States was able to secretly send up a rocket to Venus right under the noses of Europe. There was no CNN in 1957.

There's a horny, chain-smoking astronaut chasing after a woman who is "almost a doctor", and specializes in dressing patients in clean shirts and neckties for their hospital stays. She has no compunction toward touching the diseased skin of the dead astronaut, then picking up her bag and leaving the room, presumably with the disease ready to spread to Sicily and beyond.

When the ship crashes into the sea, two fishermen pull a survivor out of the wrecked spacecraft. While they're making a fuss over the rescued astronaut, a kid steals an embryo and sells it to a local biologist for 200 lire - for which he pays the kid out of his change purse with something approximately the size of a quarter. Good deal, kid. A shame you didn't have Ebay.
The kid is apparently some sort of sea-urchin/orphan, who hangs with two fishermen and occasionally breaks into a Brooklyn accent while scrounging for alien cocoons. While the U.S. government officials are debating the whereabouts of the cocoon, the kid clues them in, and in rapt amazement, they decide to follow him to the trailer of the local biologist - after the astronaut enjoys a cigarette. Really.

Three days after the ship crashes, the military leaps into action. We are taken to the Pentagon (I know this because the screen says PENTAGON) where a General is saying that the ship has crashed [pointing at a map] "in this vicinity" [waving his arm in an area that takes in everything from the east coast of Africa to Hawaii]. The military is the only thing in the movie that hasn't changed in 49 years.

The creature changes size several times (both intentionally and unintentionally), and after it breaks out of a steel cage, the Italians try to lure it into a rickety wooden cart - the strategy being to contain the creature in progressively weaker structures until it is completely on its own. Gratefully, the film climaxes with a battle with an elephant (that's right) and a death-leap off the Colosseum in Rome. I don't remember how he got to Rome.

All of this takes place in front of two people from the military and fifteen media people. I was barely alive in 1957, but I can reasonably assume that a manned flight to Venus, a crash, rescue and hatching of a Venusian embryo would attract more than 15 people from the news media. My, how the world has changed. I only wish we had such a cavalier attitude toward space-related catastrophes around here. An astronaut can't even drive from Houston to Florida without a thousand people following her.

We stuck with this loser for an hour and a half, waiting for the big moment of sci-fi wisdom that sums up the plot and brings things to a nice thought-provoking conclusion. As the creature is lying dead on the street, the camera cuts to Dr. Uhl for the witty remark that will send movie audiences thoughtfully moving toward the exits ... Ready?

"Why is it always … always so costly for man to move from the present to the future?"

Gee, I don't know. Maybe because you had fishermen in charge of a rescue operation, let a seven-year old run around with Venus embryo, allowed a medical student to treat astronauts, kept a giant lizard in a flimsy metal cage, failed to transport the thing to the United States, sponsored a fight with an elephant and shot away pieces of the Roman Colosseum in an effort to contain a creature that you should have left alone in the first place. I'm just saying.

Immediately, I was ready to start scraping the ice glaze off my car, and meet the challenge of the icy drive home to the future, where I will need costly wiper blades.