Nebo Zovyot (russian: Небо зовёт, translit. Nebo zovyot, lit. ''The Sky Beckons'' or ''The Heavens Beckon'') is a

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

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 Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, only being larger than Mercury. In the English language, Mars is named for the Roman god of war. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin at ...

. 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 Ivan Fyodorovich Pereverzev (russian: Ива́н Фёдорович Переве́рзев; 3 September 1914 – 23 April 1978) was a Soviet and Russian stage and film actor. People's Artist of the USSR (1975). Filmography * '' The Convey ...

— 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 * 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 Yuri may refer to: People and fictional characters Given name *Yuri (Slavic name), the Slavic masculine form of the given name George, including a list of people with the given name Yuri, Yury, etc. * Yuri (Japanese name), also Yūri, feminine Ja ...

* 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 * Экспериментальный ансамбль электромузыкальных инструментов
(Experimental Electronic Music Ensemble)
Orchestra Director —

Vyacheslav Mescherin Vyacheslav Valerianovich Mescherin (russian: Вячеслав Валерианович Мещерин, 30 June 1923 — 6 October 1995. In Russian) was a Soviet and Russian musician and composer, founder of Vyacheslav Mescherin's Orchestra of Ele ...

U.S. version

In 1962,

Roger Corman Roger William Corman (born April 5, 1926) is an American film director, producer, and actor. He has been called "The Pope of Pop Cinema" and is known as a trailblazer in the world of independent film. Many of Corman's films are based on works t ...

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 The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

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.Небо зовёт entry at kino-teatr.ru
/ref> 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 Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin; Gagarin's first name is sometimes transliterated as ''Yuriy'', ''Youri'', or ''Yury''. (9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human to journey into outer space. T ...

. 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. In the film the fictional Soviet spaceship ''Rodina'' (russian: Родина, ''Motherland'') landed vertically on floating landing platform in

Yalta Yalta (: Я́лта) is a resort city on the south coast of the Crimean Peninsula surrounded by the Black Sea. It serves as the administrative center of Yalta Municipality, one of the regions within Crimea. Yalta, along with the rest of Cri ...

harbour, similar to

SpaceX CRS-8 SpaceX CRS-8, also known as SpX-8, was a Commercial Resupply Service mission to the International Space Station (ISS) which was launched on April 8, 2016, at 20:43 UTC. It was the 23rd flight of a Falcon 9 rocket, the tenth flight of a ...

landing on April 8, 2016,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

External links

* {{Francis Ford Coppola, state=collapsed 1950s science fiction films Soviet science fiction films Dovzhenko Film Studios films Films about astronauts Mars in film Space adventure films Films scored by Yuliy Meitus Hard science fiction films