******SPACE RACE SPOILERS!******
I’m still feeling a bit of moon fever after the success of the recent Artemis 2 flight, so this column will examine a relatively obscure moonshot movie from the late 1960s called “Countdown.” Directed by the late iconic filmmaker Robert Altman (“M*A*S*H,” “Nashville,” “The Player”) and produced by actor Willam Conrad (“Ironside”), this American-made film was first released in the UK in 1967 with a subsequent US release in 1968. The timing meant it was soon eclipsed by the real-life success of NASA’s Apollo 11 moon landing only a few years later in July of 1969.
James Caan plays lone lunar astronaut, Lee Stegler, who’s promoted largely because NASA wants a civilian to make the first landing, which loosely parallel’s Neil Armstrong’s own story.
Watching this nearly 60-year old film today, it feels like a precursor of sorts to Apple TV’s “For All Mankind,” with the Soviets beating the Americans to the moon. In the universe of “Countdown,” the three-man Soviet landing ends in tragedy, leaving the US still in play to make the first successful manned lunar landing. With the Apollo spacecraft not yet ready (the movie was made in the wake of the fatal Apollo 1 launchpad fire), the movie sends lone astronaut ‘Lee Stegler’ to the moon in a modified Gemini capsule attached to an Apollo descent stage. Designed as a rush job to beat the Russians at all costs, this Frankenstein lunar mission is called “Pilgrim.”
Caan costars with his future cast-mate from “The Godfather,” Robert Duvall.
James Caan (1940-2022) plays Pilgrim astronaut Stegler. Caan is joined by his future castmate from “The Godfather,” Robert Duvall (1931-2026), who plays Stegler’s friend/rival, Colonel Charles “Chiz” Stewart, and the two actors are in peak form here. The supporting cast includes Joanna Moore, Barbara Baxley, Charles Aidman, Steve Inhat, Michael Murphy and Ted Knight. Written by Loring Mandel (“The Little Drummer Girl”), the screenplay was adapted from author Hank Searls’ 1964 novel “The Pilgrim Project.”
With that, let’s explore the moon fever drama of…
“Countdown” (1967)
While training in an Apollo command module mockup, astronauts Col. Charles “Chiz” Stewart (Robert Duvall), Lee Stegler (James Caan) and Rick (Michael Murphy) are forced to abort their training session when their NASA boss Ross Duellan slips the codeword “Pilgrim” to Chiz. The Russians are going to the moon first, so Apollo is temporarily postponed, as NASA goes with a scrappier, riskier “Project Pilgrim.”
Note: There’s a great line delivered later in the film regarding Project Pilgrim, where astronaut Rick (Michael Murphy) quips, “Who thought it up? An LSD research team?” Then again, this was made in a time when the technology to send humans to the moon was created in less than eight years (!). From the time of President Kennedy’s moonshot speech in 1961 to the Apollo 11 landing in the summer of 1969. Also of note, actor Michael Murphy would later have a small supporting role as a US Army officer running a Tokyo brothel in director Altman’s Korean War dramedy “M*A*S*H” (1970), which inspired the long-running TV show (1972-1983); one of the finest TV series ever made.
Lee is picked for the mission, which means he might have to spend a few months to a year on the moon, until an Apollo crew can retrieve him. Lee now has to tell his long-suffering wife Mickey (Joanna Moore), their all-American son Stevie (Bobby Riha), and his toy rubber mouse, “Jose.” Mickey takes it with the same fatalism she takes every twist in her husband’s dangerous career.
Note: Little Stevie’s rubber mouse Jose (which is significant later on) could possibly be named for “Jose Jimenez,” comedian Bill Dana’s stereotypical Bolivian astronaut character seen on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in the early 1960s TV (“My name… Jose Jimenez”). The character was also seen in 1983’s “The Right Stuff.”
Angry at being passed over for Pilgrim, Chiz confronts NASA’s Ross Duellan (Steve Inhat), who picked Lee because NASA wants a civilian to be first on the moon, not a military man like Chiz. Adding insult to injury, Ross orders Chiz to train Lee. Chiz refuses.
Note: This selection process also led to ex-military man Neil Armstrong being first on the moon for Apollo 11. Since the mission placard read “We came in peace for all mankind,” it seemed appropriate that the first man on the moon be a civilian. Also of note; actor Steve Inhat plays a near-perfect dickhead. Inhat’s Ross is the most hilariously insufferable character in the movie. He also gets most of the movie’s best lines. Inhat costarred with Robert Duvall in the two-part episode of The Outer Limits (“The Inheritors”), and later played the dangerous, power-mad mental patient “Garth of Izar” in the colorful third season Star Trek TOS episode, “Whom Gods Destroy.”
Chiz decides to train Lee, though his bruised ego means that he’s going to put him through hell first, in hopes Lee will drop out.
Note: The production was made with the cooperation of NASA, who apparently weren’t concerned with showing the public how the sausage was made with the movie’s morally-dubious astronauts and executives. As a result, we see actor James Caan sitting in an actual Gemini capsule mockup. Project Gemini (1961-1966) was the intermediate program between Mercury and Apollo designed to help astronauts develop the skills of orbital rendezvous, docking and extravehicular activities (EVAs); all of which were necessary to land on the moon. Apollo astronauts who went through Gemini first were very fond of the two-seater Gemini capsule (built by McDonnell-Douglas), which they compared to a space “sports car.”
Lee’s best friend, NASA Medical Officer Gus (Charles Aidman), pleads to Ross on his behalf, insisting they be frank with Lee about the dangers of this rushed mission. Ross tells him to suck it up, and keep it under his hat.
Note: Ross gets the movie’s darkest and funniest line in this scene, when he tell empathetic Medical Officer Gus to “Stop making friends.”
In this scene, Lee and Mickey’s up-and-down marriage is currently in an up-phase, as Lee and Chiz fly into Houston for training.
Note: Those expecting a space-based nail-biter of a movie might be a little disappointed with the amount of screen time devoted to the domestic squabbling between Lee and Mickey (Joanne Moore). Personally, I didn’t mind it, as this isn’t meant to be a ‘space movie’ per se; it’s an ensemble drama with space elements.
A space-suited Lee trains for lunar gravity attached to a ‘Peter Pan rig’ in a NASA vacuum chamber with the Pilgrim shelter. With limited oxygen, Lee accidentally snags and unplugs his oxygen hose on a ladder, but manages to make it inside just in time.
Note: This training scene shows Lee bouncing under the ‘Peter Pan’ rig in a reasonable (if slightly exaggerated) approximation of the 1/6th gravity felt on the moon. Up until the digital age, it was very difficult for most movies to simulate realistic low gravity (kudos to Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13”).
Chiz rides herd on Lee, to the point of overriding Gus’ medical veto to stop, after Lee accidentally disconnects his oxygen hose.
Note: The character of Colonel Charles “Chiz” Stewart seems loosely based on the infamously ill-tempered Mercury astronaut Alan B. Shepard, the first American in space, whose inner ear issue (Ménière’s disease) took him out of consideration to be the first man on the moon. With his condition later resolved through surgery, Shepard eventually flew as commander of Apollo 14, becoming the first man to swing a golf ball on the lunar surface.
Gus enjoys a day of boating with the families of Lee and Chiz, while Chiz’s wife Jean (Barbara Baxley) nurses one of many drinks.
Note: I appreciated that the wives of “Countdown,” however poorly treated by the chauvinism of the time, were dimensional characters in their own right. Even Chiz’s long-suffering, clearly neglected wife Jean (Barbara Baxley) is seen as a barely functional alcoholic. Sadly, her inferred alcoholism isn’t directly addressed or dealt with. I imagine she and Chiz would most likely divorce in real life, as a number of early astronaut wives did after their husband’s missions.
Lee argues to Ross that he has the right stuff to fly the Pilgrim mission, despite Chiz riding his ass in the simulator.
After the successful launch of the unmanned Pilgrim shelter, Ross tells Lee that the Russians have just launched their manned mission to the moon. Lee will not be first. Chiz argues that’s reason enough to abort, but Lee insists on going anyway.
Note: Fun fact; a few weeks after the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, the Russians secretly flew an unmanned Zond 7 spacecraft to the moon as well. The Zond 7 mission carried several turtles and other biological specimens, but no crew. Zond was supposed to be Russia’s manned equivalent of Apollo, but the Russian manned lunar program was abandoned after the moon race was lost. Russia instead focused on space stations, with their Soyuz ferry craft (modified versions of which are still flying) and their seven successful Salyut space stations (1971-1986), which eventually led to Mir (1986-2001), before the Russians became partners in the International Space Station (1998-present).
Gus and Lee have a falling out at his mission party after he learns Gus spilled the beans to his wife about the dangers of Pilgrim.
After Gus leaves, Mickey confronts Lee about the truths he’s kept from her. In response, he growls at her to “SMILE!” which he quickly regrets, and tries to soften with an embrace.
Note: The relationship between protective Medical Officer Gus and his impulsive friend Lee reminded me of the relationship between the starship Enterprise’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. McCoy and Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek.
Lee and Mickey cuddle during his last night on Earth, as he comes clean–expressing his own self-doubts and concerns.
Note: The scene between Lee and Mickey in the bedroom softens much of the tension seen between them from earlier the film, reminding us there is still a core of love between these two, despite the moon-fever madness. It’s a small scene, but it’s one of my favorites in the film.
Note: Using a modified Gemini for a haphazard moonshot feels vaguely doable, but the Gemini Titan II booster we see sending Lee to the moon did not have the power to send even a single man to the moon (let alone his gear, or anything else). Even the Saturn IB booster used to ferry Apollo astronauts into Earth orbit would was not powerful enough for a successful trans-lunar injection (TLI). Apollo astronauts needed the massive Saturn V rocket for that kind of heavy lifting and velocity (or even the current Space Launch System NASA uses for Artemis). Nevertheless, the Gemini-Titan II stock footage better matches Lee’s Gemini capsule, so it was used for the movie. Modern visual FX could’ve easily digitized a bigger booster, but not in the 1960s. It’s possible that Lee rendezvoused with a larger booster in Earth orbit, but it’s never mentioned, or even implied.
On the flight back from the Cape to Houston, Chiz tries to comfort a nervous Mickey, while his own wife Jean listens.
Note: Chiz makes an awkward attempt to comfort Mickey about Lee’s condition after liftoff, while his wife Jean eavesdrops. I assume from her heavy drinking that this is something he rarely, if ever, does for her.
En route to the moon, Lee experiences a series of malfunctions, including a shorted solenoid that is slowly draining power within his Gemini capsule. With communications shorting out, Lee uses his spacesuit for life support, as his capsule temperature drops.
Note: The loss of internal power aboard Lee’s Gemini capsule feels like a preview of what plagued the crew of Apollo 13 a few years later in April of 1970, after a damaged coil caused an explosion in an oxygen tank that crippled their command module, Odyssey.
Despite a loss of communications, and his malfunctioning spacecraft slowly losing power, Lee Stegler lands on the moon.
Note: The lunar surface is effectively created for the film by combining location footage from the Mojave Desert in California with optically created black skies and matte paintings. Less effective was the simulation of lunar gravity, with actor James Caan (or his double) walking only slightly slower than usual. All the same, this is a commendable attempt, considering the film was made two years before humans would actually walk on the moon. Mojave would also double for the Martian surface in “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” (1964), with red skies optically matted in.
Back in Houston, outside of the Mission Control Center, Micke looks up at the moon and wonders about Lee, as Chiz once again awkwardly attempts to comfort her.
Note: I get that Chiz is trying to offer Lee’s potential widow some comfort, but if only he turned this level of attention to his own long-suffering wife. This is one of those little scenes that keep the movie’s focus on the characters instead of simple space spectacle. This is not “2001: A Space Odyssey.”; this is about fallible people in a dangerous business. In that respect, it’s not too unlike Duvall and Caan’s “The Godfather” five years later.
After lying to Mission Control about spotting the shelter beacon from orbit (“I believe I see it!”), Lee now treks across the lunar surface to find it. Along the way, he stumbles across the crashed Russian Voshkod lander, with all three cosmonauts dead.
Note: Throughout the movie, the actors refer to the three-man Russian capsule as a “Vossod,” which sounds like a mispronunciation of “Voshkod” (which means ‘sunrise’); a real-life Russian counterpart to America’s Gemini program. The Voshkod series (1964-1966) carried the first multi-person crew into space, as well as cosmonaut Alexei Leonov to his pioneering first spacewalk in Earth orbit.
NASA PR guy Walter Larson (Ted Knight) reports that communications are still down, but estimates say that Lee has only five minutes of oxygen left, and the shelter hasn’t been activated.
Note: Actor Ted Knight (1923-1986), who plays NASA press liaison Walter Larson in the movie, would achieve his greatest fame on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (1970-1977) as airhead TV news anchorman Ted Baxter. He’d later star in TV’s “Too Close for Comfort” (1980-1987). Before “Countdown,” Knight played a cop in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) and a busybody government official in the The Outer Limits episode, “The Invisible Enemy” (1964), which was directed by Byron Haskin (“War of the Worlds,” “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” ). Knight also costarred in the popular 1980 golf comedy “Caddyshack.”
After draping both US and Russian flags near the dead cosmonaut crew’s crash site, Lee continues his search for the shelter and facetiously uses his son’s rubber mouse Jose as a compass. With only a minute or so of oxygen left, the movie ends with the red glow of the nearby Pilgrim shelter’s beacon reflecting on Lee’s visor…
Note: The draping of both US and Soviet flags at the Russian’s crash site was a nice way of expressing that the race to the moon ended in a draw–ultimately the race to the moon was a human endeavor, not a national one. At the end of the day, the self-doubting, sometimes unlikable Lee proved he really did have “the right stuff” after all…
The End.
Summing It Up
In addition to being soon overshadowed by the real-life Apollo 11 lunar landing, Robert Altman’s “Countdown” also got pummeled by Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), which was released months later. While “2001” is clearly a superior film, comparisons are inapplicable, since “Countdown” doesn’t compete for epic grandeur. Its strength comes from its flawed, all-too-human characters; an area where Kubrick’s film falls short. “Countdown” also unveils many trademarks of Altman’s later movies; overlapping dialogue, busy ensembles, and a more naturalistic, quasi-documentary feel.
Playing the two highly competitive astronauts, James Caan and Robert Duvall give us a preview of their future chemistry together in the 1972 classic, “The Godfather,” where the two play Vito Corleone’s boys, Sonny and Tom. Duvall’s Chiz is arrogant, prideful and unyielding, while Caan’s Lee is more excitable, anxious and quick-tempered. Lee needs Chiz’s firm hand to get him to the moon. Both characters break the stereotype of NASA astronauts as two-dimensional, stalwart heroes riding high on gleaming white rocketships. Though a work of fiction, “Countdown” has elements in common with Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book “The Right Stuff” (later adapted into a 1983 film and a short-lived Disney+ series). Both helped to shatter the image of astronauts as something greater than fallible human beings. It’s those foibles and shortcomings that made the astronauts’ accomplishments all the more amazing.
In the movie’s minuses column, the pacing is downright glacial at times, with gobs of footage shot on location at Cape Canaveral (nee: Cape Kennedy) and Cocoa Beach, as well as the aerospace works of NASA contractor McDonnell-Douglas (now merged with Boeing). Granted, this footage gives this movie its realism, but there’s just so much of it. Running only 101 minutes, the movie often feels considerably longer. By the time the nearly-asphyxiated Lee locates his lunar shelter, we’re nearly as exhausted as he is. The pacing isn’t helped by a mediocre score from composer Leonard Rosenman (“Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”). Nevertheless, the movie’s issues are ultimately outweighed by the movie’s morally-gray characters and what-if premise of the Soviets beating America to the moon. At the time, that outcome must’ve seemed imminent, coming so soon after the tragic Apollo 1 fire of 1967.
As a documentary-style film capturing the mood of late 1960s ‘moon fever,’ “Countdown” is the genuine article. Its “Mad Men”-era flourishes and attitudes make for a fascinating period contrast with the recent Artemis 2 mission. There’s also the added bonus of seeing future superstars Robert Duvall and James Caan right before each hit peak stardom. They’re supported by an able collection of TV and movie veterans, too.
For fans of alternate-history fiction like “For All Mankind,” and/or character-driven Robert Altman ensemble dramas, 1967’s “Countdown” might be worth strapping in for.
Where to Watch
“Countdown” is available to stream for free on YouTube Free Movies (with ads), and is also available to stream on Prime Video. The movie can also be purchased on DVD from the Warner Archives Collection (via Amazon; prices vary). For this review, I dusted off my old Warner Archives DVD I bought some years ago, and ran it on my 7 ft/2-meter projector screen. Despite a soft image, the overall DVD quality is acceptable. Unfortunately, this nearly forgotten film is not yet available on Blu-Ray.
