Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 1959
Nebo Zovyot
Buy Nebo Zovyot now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'Nebo Zovyot' (, translit. Nebo zovyot, lit. 'The Sky Beckons' or 'The Heavens Beckon') is a Soviet science-fiction feature film, produced by Aleksandr Kozyr and Mikhail Karyukov, and filmed at the Dovzhenko Film Studios in 1959.
It premiered September 12, 1959.
Synopsis
A Soviet scientific expedition is being prepared as the world's first mission to planet Mars. Their space ship 'Homeland' has been built at a space station, where the expedition awaits the command to start.
An American ship 'Typhoon' experiencing mechanical problems arrives at the same space station, secretly having the same plans for the conquest of the Red Planet. Trying to stay ahead of the Soviets, they start without proper preparation, and soon are again in distress.
The 'Homeland' changes course to save the crew of 'Typhoon'. They succeed, but find that their fuel reserves are now insufficient to get to Mars. So 'Homeland' makes an emergency landing on the asteroid Icarus passing near Mars, on which they are stranded.
After an attempt to send a fuel supply by unmanned rocket fails, another ship 'Meteor' is sent with a cosmonaut on a possibly suicidal mission, to save the stranded cosmonauts.
Cast
* Ivan Pereverzev scientist Eugene Kornev
* Alexander Shvoryn engineer Andrey Gordienko
* Constantine Bartashevich astronaut Robert Clark
* Gurgen Tonunts astronaut Erwin Verst
* Valentin Chernyak cosmonaut Gregory Somov
* Viktor Dobrovolsky space station chief Vasily Demchenko
* Alexandra "Alla" Popova Vera Korneva
* Taisia Litvinenko doctor Lena
* Larisa Borisenko student Olga
* Leo Lobov cameraman Sasha
* Sergey Filimonov writer Troyan
* Maria Samoilov Clark's mother
* Mikhail Belousov ( uncredited )
Crew
* Screenwriters Alexei Sazonov, Evgeniya Pomeschikov
with the participation of Mikhael Karyukov
* Consultants corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Abnir Yakovkin, Engineer Aleksandr Borin [http://www.rujen.ru/index.php/%D0%91%D0%9E%D0%A0%D0%98%D0%9D_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80_%D0%90%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B4%D1%8C%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87 Borin, Alexandr Abramovich Russian Jewish Encyclopedia ]
* Production Director - Valeri Fokin
* Story Editors Renata Korol, A. Pereguda
* Staging directors Mikhael Karyukov, Aleksandr Kozyr
* Art director - Tatiana Kulchitskaya
* Chief Artist Timofej Liauchuk
* Sets director Yuri Shvets
* Costume Artist G. Glinkova
* Makeup artist E. Odinovich
* Special Effects Directors Franz Semyannikov, N. Ilyushin
* Special Effects Art Directors Yuri Shvets, G. Loukashov
* Director of photography Nikolai Kulchitskii
* Sound engineer Georgij Parahnikov
* Film Editor L. Mkhitaryants
* Composer Julij Meitus
* USSR State Orchestra
Conductor Veniamin Tolba
*
(Experimental Electronic Music Ensemble)
Orchestra Director Vyacheslav Mescherin[http://www.muzelectron.ru/03articles_2008-1ivanov_mescherin.html #1-2008: .. : ]
U.S. version
In 1962, Roger Corman invited film school student Francis Ford Coppola to produce an English-language version of the film, rights to which Corman had acquired for U.S. release, to be called 'Battle Beyond the Sun'. In addition to preparing a dubbing script in American English, Coppola removed all references to the US/Soviet conflict from the dialogue, blotted out all the Cyrillic writing on the various spacecraft and superimposed neutral designs, replaced shots showing models and paintings of Soviet spacecraft with scenes showing NASA ones, replaced the names of all the actors with made-up names which had their first letters identical to those of the players (and thus turning Taisiya Litvinenko into a man, Thomas Littleton), and inserted a scene with monsters on Mars's moon Phobos. In all, the resulting film is 13 minutes shorter than the original.[http://www.kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/sov/9315/annot/ entry at kino-teatr.ru] The film was distributed by American International Pictures.
Some space scenes from 'Nebo Zovyot' also appear in Corman's 1965 film 'Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet'. (Most of the scenes in that film are taken from another Soviet science-fiction film, 'Planeta Bur').
Related facts
'Nebo Zovyot' was released two years after the launch of the first artificial satellite 'Sputnik 1' and two years before the first manned flight into space by Yuri Gagarin.
Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film '2001: A Space Odyssey' used drawings and graphics solutions from 'Nebo Zovyot' created by the fiction artist Yuri Shvets.
'Nebo Zovyot' was re-released in Germany as 'Der Himmel ruft' on June 15, 2009. Furthermore, the film was officially translated into Hungarian and Italian.[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053103/releaseinfo IMDB - releaseinfo]
In the film the fictional Soviet spaceship 'Rodina' (, 'Motherland') landed vertically on floating landing platform in Yalta harbour, similar to SpaceX CRS-8 landing on April 8, 2016,[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Iw5AMfZs4E Soviet SpaceX Falcon 9], fragment from 'Nebo Zovyot' (with SpaceX having successfully accomplished their first vertical landing recovery of a first stage booster as a return to launch site during Flight 20 of Falcon 9 on December 21, 2015).
References
Buy Nebo Zovyot now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 1959