Screening on film!

Mikhail Karyukov and Aleksandr Kozyr, USSR, 1959,35 mm, 80 min

A tale of two rival space probes, headed for Mars and the moon, that crash-land on a nearby asteroid, HEAVENS CALL features spectacular spacescapes, as well as a prescient prediction of the Earth’s orbit cluttered by man-made satellites. Roger Corman helped himself to the film’s plot and footage for the 1963 opus BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN, but core elements of the story (noble Russian cosmonauts helping stranded American astronauts) were unacceptable for US audiences during the Cold War, and the film was reconfigured into a cheesy drive-in movie. The pro-Russian elements were replaced with monsters by one of Corman’s trusted directors — an ambitious young director named Thomas Colchart, better known these days as Francis Ford Coppola.