Okay so wait…so it’s news that Katy Perry rode some giant cock-shaped thing just to be more famous? Doesn’t she do that every day? And isn’t the fact that Gayle King rode anything cock-shaped the real story here? God I can’t keep it all straight.
I prefer my astro-nuts from the old school. Considering my choices at the theaters this week were either seeing a movie based on a video game or yet another vampire flick or, bottom of the barrel, something part 2 with Ben Affleck, I did what any self-respecting “film historian” (blech) would do: I pushed aside all my Criterion discs and reached for a Don Knotts movie.
By Paul Mavis
Having already looked at Andy Griffith’s sublime, Angel in My Pocket, as well as Knotts’ first movie off his Universal contract (the hilarious The Ghost and Mr. Chicken), I thought why not screw the entire 21st century and review what I like: 1967’s The Reluctant Astronaut, Knotts’ second outing for Universal, written by The Andy Griffith Show masters Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, directed by McHale’s Navy producer Edward Montagne, and co-starring a cast of beloved familiar faces, including Leslie Nielsen, Joan Freeman (pleasant…but not really beloved), Arthur O’Connell, Frank McGrath, Paul Hartman, Jeannette Nolan, Robert F. Simon, Burt Mustin, Nydia Westman, and Jesse White.
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The “Mr. Spaceman’s Rocket Ride” at the Kiddieland Park, Sweetwater, Missouri, U.S.A., 1967. Acrophobic 35-year-old ride operator Royal “Roy” Fleming (Don Knotts) needs help from his assistant, Ned (Burt Mustin), just to climb down the rocket’s 3 foot ladder, but he’s not shy about begging and whining for a date from snack bar manager, Ellie Jackson (Joan Freeman), who isn’t all that thrilled with her own acquiescence.
Called home by his overprotective mother (Jeanette Nolan), Roy’s father, overbearing, patriotic World War I vet Arbuckle “Buck” Fleming (Arthur O’Connell), proudly informs Roy that he’s going to be a real astronaut. Without telling Roy, Buck sent off an application to NASA, and they’ve accepted his application as a WB-1074.
Upset with his father for still trying to run his life (Roy tells Buck about how he’s ignored his son’s true feelings, since he was a boy. Buck ignores him), Roy has little choice but to accept his fate. After all, his father’s friends, including townies Plank and Rush (Frank McGrath, Paul Hartman), and his girl, Ellie, are so proud of him for becoming an astronaut. How can he let them down? Taken to the local airport for his flight to Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center, Roy ducks out in the bushes and takes a bus, instead.
Walking onto the vast complex, Roy is offered a ride to the Admin building by real astronaut, Major Fred Gifford (Leslie Nielsen). Once inside, Roy meets his boss, Space Center Janitorial Supervisor [N 1] Donelli (Jesse White), who immediately informs Roy that, far from being an astronaut, he’s actually been hired to be a WB-1074 Apprentice Janitor, equipped with the latest NASA technology: the Jiffy Super 120-C Mop.
Crestfallen Roy further compounds his troubles by getting caught in a newspaper picture with Major Gifford, adding fuel to his hometown’s pride when they see him mislabeled as an astronaut. Granted leave to go home, Roy is shocked by a surprise party his father has organized, along with a confession that Buck was wounded in the war…when he was a librarian at Fort Dix, and the Encyclopedia Britannica landed on his arm (“B to D”). Unable to tell his family he’s failed, and wanting to redeem his father, Roy heads back to Houston (surreptitiously by bus, again).
Unfortunately, Buck, Rush and Plank come to visit, with Roy pretending to be an astronaut (to disastrous slapstick results), before Donelli blows his cover and fires him. Just when things look bleakest for Roy, salvation comes in the hands of the Russkies. Our space race rivals plan on sending up a fully automated capsule, manned by a civilian (a dentist), so NASA is forced to respond: they’re going to send Roy, the “astro-janitor.”
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As well known to any kid of the 1960s and 70s as The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, The Reluctant Astronaut didn’t achieve the same level of box office success, nor (later) critical regard, as that nearly-perfect little horror/comedy. Historians like to connect up the coincidence that The Reluctant Astronaut‘s “pre-release world premiere” in Houston occurred just two days before the Apollo 1 fire tragedy on January 27th, 1967, with one well-known book on Knotts even claiming the movie was quietly pulled from release.
The connection is tenuous at best, though, linked only by (perhaps) negative connotations in the press during the promotional stage of the movie, and by the Universal suits, who may have gotten cold feet about properly promoting the movie. Universal, attempting to imitate the successful regional release strategy of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, which had grossed many multiples of its relatively paltry $500,000 budget, was always going to slow release of The Reluctant Astronaut in Texas theaters in February and March, before giving the movie a broad, general release months later, in May, 1967. That release strategy was in place months before the Apollo 1 fire.
Other space-related movies did just fine at the box office after the Apollo 1 event, including Dean Martin’s Matt Helm opus, The Ambushers, and the big one: the Bond epic, You Only Live Twice. Looking at the box office, The Reluctant Astronaut still made plenty of money for Universal; within 6 months, it had rentals of $1.5 million, against a million dollar budget (which producer/director Edward Montagne claimed was really in the high $600,000s). Later monies would come from the TV sale and several kiddie re-releases.
Now, if I had to guess, I’d say the reason The Reluctant Astronaut didn’t make as big an impression at the box office was Don Knotts’ absence from television’s The Andy Griffith Show, and the relatively heavy undertone to the witty, slapstick script.
Don Knotts was the kind of TV star that people going to the movies didn’t discriminate against (unlike the accepted wisdom at the time from the studios and networks that stars from each medium would have trouble crossing over). And media publicity synergy between projects was, and still is, a powerful component. When Don Knotts did promotional interviews about The Andy Griffith Show, he could talk about his movie career, and vice versa. With Knotts off the Griffith show in 1965, that extra bit of weekly exposure was gone (not in reruns, but in mainstream publicity) for 1967’s The Reluctant Astronaut.
More importantly, the underlying psychology of The Reluctant Astronaut‘s script is frankly a little heavy, a little more sad, than average family audiences were expecting for a kiddie slapstick outing. Of course Knotts is an underdog here (that was his on-screen persona), and in the great tradition of all underdog comedians, he has to undergo some form of strife and humiliation, before he can triumph over his circumstances.
And certainly an overbearing father and an overprotective mother, along with a proud, pushy hometown, are perfect foils for a 35-year-old kiddie ride operator straining against living at home with his parents. What’s interesting about The Reluctant Astronaut‘s Roy Fleming, though, is the fact that he doesn’t pursue something greater in his life, as we’d expect the underdog to do. His father fills out his NASA application. Roy may dream of space, but he knows himself: he’s a coward afraid of heights (“Astronaut? I can’t even get up on the chair to get the marmalade!”). He’s mortified when his father and his friends and town’s expectations, push him into orbit.
That’s a big difference from Knotts’ coward in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Luther Heggs yearns for greatness in the “newspaper game,” and he’s willing to do anything—even face his fears by staying the night in a haunted house—to get a byline and to start moving up the ladder, and out of typesetting down in the newspaper’s basement. Here, in The Reluctant Astronaut, we feel the constant pushing by Roy’s family and friends to make him into something he doesn’t really want to be, and that’s not quite as enjoyable as rooting for the cowardly-but-scrappy Mr. Chicken.
Perhaps screenwriters Fritzell and Greenbaum, and particularly Arthur O’Connell, are too successful in rendering the pathetic, even contemptible Buck Fleming. A blowhard who, according to his wife, “loves that war [WWI] as much today as he did then,” Buck is a father who never acknowledged his son’s fear of heights (when Roy tells him this, he ignores him. Again). Indeed, he still treats him like a child, admonishing his behavior (“You’re getting all keyed up! You need a nap!”) before marching him, military-style, to his room.
And later, when he pathetically admits to lying about his war-time exploits, only to include his son in his own self-hatred (“No, son…we’re just a couple of losers,” he says with disgust, when finding out Roy’s a janitor), we the viewer may laugh at first at O’Connell’s perfect delivery and scary-bright eyes filled with delusion and sadness, but afterward we wonder why any son would go to such lengths to get his approval. It’s easy not to think too much of this kind of stuff while we’re laughing at Knotts’ antics, but this rather serious, sad undertone of total failure and familial failure, runs unmistakably throughout The Reluctant Astronaut. And at times…it’s a rather surprising downer.
Fortunately, there are more than enough moments of genuine wit and slapstick yoks in The Reluctant Astronaut to smooth things over. With the opening Universal logo, we get what might be the movie’s biggest disappointment—the lazy, rip-off of Do You Know the Muffin Man theme from Vic Mizzy, a real shock considering how wonderful his music was from The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Luckily, we’re laughing again at all those huge, phallic shots of the exploding rockets as we contemplate their inevitable clash with droopy, limp, floppy Don Knotts.
Fritzell and Greenbaum load up one amusing, clever set-up and comedic line after another. When Roy informs his kiddie crew that they’ll be landing in twenty minutes, child actress Pamela Ferdin announces, “I have to go to the bathroom,” to which an instantly panicked Roy states, “We have just touched down.”
All the Sweetwater scenes have that unmistakable gentle/clever humor so indicative of the best of The Andy Griffith Show. Many times, Roy may as well be Barney Fife, first faux-macho straightening himself up and smoothing back his hair after embarrassing himself on the rocket ladder, before talking with Ellie, opening with, “A bunch of us were standing around the corner in front of the drug store and they were saying it’s getting kinda of obvious I got a crush on you,” to which she answers, “Oh, Roy—would you hand me that scouring pad, please?” (the look of shocked rejection is nicely handled by Knotts).
Begging and whining to make her take a date with him, his plans come right out of Fife’s playbook: “We’ll make a big evening out of it: dinner at the snack bar, a walk through the park, then over to her place to watch that George Raft picture.” Buck and his cronies see Roy as a credit to not only his family, but to his nation and now…”the universe,” in their inflated view (they salute him like The Dawn Patrol, before throwing their beer bottles into the fireplace).
The Manned Spacecraft Center section (some establishing shots were allowed for the movie) are geared more towards slapstick, including Roy’s first realization that he’s not an astronaut but a janitor (the centrifuge blows all his clothes out of his suitcase, before he admits to Donelli: “I had a little trouble with my underwear,”), as well as later, when Buck visits, such as snow coming out of Roy’s air-conditioned space suit, and his accidentally igniting the rocket sled (“Whoa, boy!” Roy screams).
Back home in Sweetwater, Roy’s surprise party is classic Mayberry humor. Greeted by an ecstatic, clueless Buck (“Hard as nails! Brown as a berry!”), a whole host of Mayberry-isms crop up to needle Roy, from a kid with a face-full of jelly kissing him, and marvelously funny Nydia Westman‘s Aunt Zana repeating again and again, “I used to change his didies!”, to 6th grade teacher Loie Bridge grilling him on his state capitols (“What’s the capital of Wisconsin?”), to everyone giving a disappointed, “Ahhh….” when the flashbulb doesn’t go off, ruining the group snapshot (definitely not Mayberry is the grotesquely phallic rocket cake Knotts has to cut, to paralyzingly funny effect).
We even get to see Roy in action, Barney-style, putting the moves on Ellie (unseen in the bushes), before she slaps him. He comes out with lipstick on his face, mussed hair…and a nosebleed. Classic (too bad they couldn’t get Mr. Chicken‘s Joan Staley back as Knotts’ love interest—Freeman isn’t funny).
As expert as that surprise party sequence is, the final section of The Reluctant Astronaut is a nice mix of the movie’s two styles: the kiddie-type slapstick and the clever lines, as Knotts makes a mess of the whole launch. As kids, we certainly didn’t mind seeing Knotts hanging off the capsule, with seconds to spare, or eating peanut butter and crackers in zero gravity while the peanut butter, from a tube, snakes around him like a cobra.
And who cared if you could see the wires holding up Knotts’ stunt double (the famously physically-adverse Knotts refused to do the stunt)? That was part of the fun, part of the joke. The special effects in a Don Knotts movie were expected to be as ineffectual as his character.
Fritzell and Greenbaum save their best lines for last, including Knotts euphemistically asking how to go to the bathroom in his suit (they cut during the answer to Knotts, who delivers a beautifully devastated, “You’re kidding,”), and flight director Robert F. Simon (funnier here than I’ve ever seen him) getting the single biggest laugh in The Reluctant Astronaut when, after all the foul-ups, he says to no one in particular, absolutely dejected and disgusted, “We should have used a monkey, or a dog…or something.” It doesn’t read so funny, but Simon absolutely kills with it.
Just as witty and clever as his previous hit, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, it’s a shame that The Reluctant Astronaut doesn’t get quite the same amount of love from fans and critics. It’s a gem, and a solid follow-up effort for Knotts’ then-promising big-screen career. Let’s see how well he does in this third Universal outing, The Shakiest Gun in the West.
Read more of Paul’s movie reviews here. Read Paul’s TV reviews at our sister website, Drunk TV.
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