Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Dir. Byron Haskin, recently released by Criterion: This film follows a stranded US astronaut ("Christopher Draper", played by Paul Mantee) who finds himself on Mars after an accident, with only the monkey Mona for a companion. (Mona looked like a doll at some junctures, but the credits say that she was played by a real simian, "Barney, the Woolly Monkey".)

After a funny scene in which he watches a useless instructional video provided by the Navy on the subject of survival in a foreign land, Draper solves the problems of shelter (cave); air (a yellow Martian rock, when burned, releases oxygen); water (Mona finds an underground pool); and food (Mona's pool grows funny seaweed with summer sausage-looking pods in it). Then he starts feeling isolated and having funny dreams with the captain of his spacecraft in them (who is played by Adam West, of TV Batman fame, though Nick had to tell me that).

Just about this time, conveniently, Draper discovers a skeleton buried in the desert with metal bracelets on it, and shortly thereafter sees alien spacecraft in the sky. (I thought these looked like the ones in the 1950s "War of the Worlds", and Wikipedia actually backs me up - though these have grids which emit lasers, instead of menacing stalks on top.) The American investigates, and the ships seem to follow him, blasting holes in the rocks around him. Eventually he stumbles upon his human Friday, a slave of the alien mining corporation, which sent the ships and can track Friday by his bracelets. This human-slave-of-aliens plot is much like the Stargate movie, except there's no interesting ambisexual Ra behind the scenes manipulating things with a cat in his lap. Or is it an allegory about Communism? Crusoe comes on the scene to rescue those in oppression and tell them about the possibility of another life? Regardless, the deus ex machina/American spaceship comes to rescue them before they ever see the alien overlords, which is kind of disappointing.

The film was made in Death Valley, our own baby Mars. Daniel Defoe gets a writing credit, leading me to imagine what would have happened if Defoe had lived in the 30s or 40s and had, Faulkner-like, ended up in H'wood, pounding out scripts in the winter of his discontent. Ha!