Shortly after we put a man on the moon, a conspiracy theory emerged that it never really happened, that the whole thing was filmed in the Arizona desert. Capricorn One is based on this conspiracy theory, except that instead of the moon, the plot of this movie consists of an effort to fake a manned mission to Mars.  It seems that Congress is ready to cut NASA’s budget at the first opportunity, and when it turns out that the planned mission would fail, certain bigwigs at NASA decide to fake the Mars mission to keep Congress at bay.

One of the problems with conspiracy-theory movies like this one is that there are too many conspirators. There are, of course, the superiors at NASA that are in on it.  Reluctantly, the three astronauts have to go along with it because the conspirators threaten to have their families killed if they don’t.  The astronauts are taken to a remote location where they can be filmed supposedly walking around on Mars, so a film crew must be added to the list of conspirators, as well as men who will guard the astronauts in case they have second thoughts about going along with it.

However, the computer simulation of the spaceship returning from Mars shows that the module lost its heat shield on its return to Earth, which would mean the death of the three astronauts.  The astronauts realize that the conspirators will try to kill them to cover things up.  They escape and steal the jet that took them to their isolated location.  However, they run out of fuel and have to land in the middle of a desert.  When they get out of the jet, one of them delivers the best line of the movie: “It looks like we’re on Mars.”

In addition to the conspirators mentioned thus far, helicopter pilots are needed to search for the astronauts and kill them when they find them.  Later on, the helicopters try to shoot down a crop-dusting plane with the one surviving astronaut, Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), on board along with Robert Caulfield (Elliot Gould), a reporter.  Earlier in the movie, some mechanics that are also a part of the conspiracy sabotaged Caulfield’s car in an effort to get him killed in an accident.  Since that didn’t work, some Drug Enforcement Agents that are also in on the conspiracy plant some cocaine in Caulfield’s apartment and arrest him for possession.

Another problem with movies like this one is the conspiracy becomes overly complicated.  A complication worth singling out for special attention is that of trying to make it appear that someone never existed.  In this movie, that person would be Elliot Whitter, a technician at mission control.  He figures out that the television signals are not coming from Mars but are really coming from somewhere on Earth, about three hundred miles away.  He tells his superiors, but as they are in on the conspiracy, they tell him not to worry about it.  However, they are worried about him. He tells his friend Caulfield about the signals one night over a game of pool.  Just then, Caulfield is called to the telephone, which allows some henchmen to spirit Whitter away and then kill him.

The next day, Caulfield goes to Whitter’s apartment, which he has been to many times before over the years.  When he arrives, there is a woman pretending that she is the occupant of the apartment and that she knows nothing about Whitter. The apartment has been completely redecorated and refurnished, and there are stacks of magazines addressed to this woman.

This is totally absurd.  The simplest thing to do would be to just let Caulfield go to the apartment and find that no one is home.  Sure, he could report his friend’s disappearance to Missing Persons, but people go missing all the time. There would have been no need to include that woman as part of the conspiracy, not to mention all the people needed to completely renovate the apartment.  Oh, and the people in the leasing office are part of the conspiracy too, because they show him rental receipts from her for over a year.  And the personnel department at NASA is in on it too, because they say they have no record of Whitter ever working there, and they have never heard of him.

By letting Caulfield knock on the door and find that no one is home, nothing would have been lost but the absurdity.  He could still have continued to investigate based on Whitter’s remark at the pool table.  Moreover, the woman in the apartment claiming to be the tenant and the scrubbed records in the personnel department at NASA only confirm that something insidious is going on, thereby guaranteeing that Caulfield will start investigating; whereas if Whitter had merely disappeared, Caulfield might have shrugged the whole thing off.

But why kill Whitter anyway?  The superiors at NASA could continue to dismiss Whitter’s concerns as a computer malfunction.  And if he persisted with his story, most people would laugh him off as some goofball who is into conspiracy theories.

Given that it is not only preposterous but also unnecessary to try to make Caulfield believe that his friend Whitter never existed, at least the apartment where Whitter was living was still there.  Imagine if Caulfield had gone to visit Whitter and found that the apartment he lived in was no longer there, with only a wall where his door used to be!

Such is the basic idea of So Long at the Fair (1950).  During the 1889 Paris Exposition, Victoria Barton (Jean Simmons) and her brother Johnny check into a hotel.  She gets room 17, and he gets room 19. The next morning, Victoria finds that Johnny has disappeared along with the room he was in.  The hotel manager, Hervé, her brother, Narcisse, and the porter all deny that she arrived with her brother, and they insist that there never was a room number 19.  The bathroom on that floor now has the number 19 on it instead.

Victoria remembers that she spoke to the maid that cleaned Johnny’s room, and she figures that the maid will support her story.  However, the maid and her boyfriend go up in a balloon, the balloon catches fire, and everyone on it is killed.  Now, did the balloon accidentally catch on fire, or did Narcisse manage to sabotage it while no one was looking?  Complicated conspiracy movies like this one often avail themselves of such ambiguity:  if an accident seems unlikely, we can think of it as part of the conspiracy; if being part of the conspiracy then seems unlikely, we can go back to thinking it was an accident.

With the aid of a man Victoria recently met, George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), they discover that the door to the room Johnny was in was walled over.  The reason for this is that Johnny got sick during the night. A doctor diagnosed it as the plague.  Fearing that the entire Exposition would be ruined if word got out, with the hotel in particular losing lots of money, Hervé and the doctor move Johnny to a hospital under another name.  Then they managed to construct a fake wall over the door to his room in the middle of the night without waking anyone.

In real life, a normal hotel manager would have awakened Victoria during the night, told her that her brother was ill and was being moved to a hospital, and asked her not to spread it around that he had the plague, lest it cause a panic. But let us assume that the manager has decided to keep Victoria from finding out that her brother is now in a hospital.  The simplest thing to do is wait until Victoria discovers that Johnny is not in his room, which is still there, of course. When she inquires at the desk, the manager feigns ignorance of Johnny’s whereabouts, suggesting that he might have gone out for a walk. When Johnny does not show up, he becomes a missing person, perhaps the victim of foul play, not out of the question with all the visitors in Paris at that time.  That’s a lot easier than trying to convince her that neither her brother nor the room he was in ever existed.

All right, so these two movies are not realistic, if by “realistic” we mean the sort of thing that could actually happen.  But they are realistic in the sense that they match the outlandish imaginings of people that espouse conspiracy theories, such as the one that we faked the moon landing.