1950s SF film

[peteryoung]

( SOME SPOILERS )

Rocketship X-M, 1950, USA   DIRECTED BY KURT NEUMANN
What was the first film to seriously entertain the notion of carrying guns into space? I suspect it was Rocketship X-M. The weapons issue is for me the most problematic aspect of this film, and to make my point I could contrast it with that very first science fiction movie that also sent men into space, George Méliès' inspirational Le Voyage dans la Lune from 1902, in which the pioneering moon voyagers did battle with Selenites with nothing more than umbrellas. It was comical but it's all they had; they weren't expecting to find beings on the moon, let alone unfriendly ones, and when considering the course of the action to come, providing them with guns or rifles would have been an illogically pre-emptive development, and Méliès must have realised this.

Fast forward forty-eight years. Before 1950 there had already been plenty of guns in science fiction movies (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon et al.), however in Rocketship X-M the guns and rifles used against the Martian survivors of a nuclear war actually give me two problems for the reasons stated above: that their presence provides an illogically pre-emptive solution to an unexpected event and their presence can only be rationalised if one assumes that they were expecting to find trouble on the moon before they left; secondly, there is a regrettable cultural aspect as to why they are there, rooted in expectations of cinema's use of dramatically violent methods of problem solving, and it was probably inevitable that at some point a serious screenplay that carried guns into space would one day be filmed, and Rocketship X-M unfortunately had those weapons on what was the very first manned spaceship, as well.

Overall, I see the presence of that weaponry as a regrettable and problematic oversight (and which in all the above respects makes it, in my own mind, curiously inferior to Méliès' short masterpiece), but retrospectively it must have seemed almost natural that they'd bring along some firepower, what with outer space for too long resembling a Wild West frontier in the popular American imagination. However I do wonder if the scriptwriter, producers and director ever stopped to debate the inclusion of those weapons in their depiction of our first step into space. A more thoughtful exclusion of the weaponry would not have diluted the film's anti-nuclear war message at all; in fact it would have enhanced it, and even without the astronauts' guns and rifles the outcome could have been made to turn out the same. But although Rocketship X-M was scripted and hastily filmed to pre-empt George Pal's Destination Moon this was still Cold War cinema, and perhaps some violent conflict had to be expected, and provided, to draw an audience.

But to the picture, as it is. Given their time and budget constraints, this aspect of skirmishing with an alien, war-ravaged culture was something that Kurt Neumann and his producers were able to turn to their advantage. Allegedly avoiding a lawsuit from George Pal who didn't want his own better advertised Technicolor film upstaged by a cheaply made black-and-white flick depicting a similar story, Neumann instead diverted his plot to Mars, for which he was also able to shoot scenes in sepia. Secondly, he wisely avoided any hope of a happy ending – in fact it's refreshingly realistic to see a film which doesn't show its remaining cast heroically defying the odds for survival on their return to Earth. But what Rocketship X-M couldn't steer clear of were some cultural mores of the time. Science fiction cinema has historically provided more than its fare share of smart female role models that helped set a more enlightened tone for gender equality, and while this film has a smart female rocket scientist and astronaut combined, it's let down considerably by the condescending attitudes towards her displayed by her fellow male astronauts. These days it just looks awkwardly quaint, but the sexist aspect is enough to fix Rocketship X-M firmly to the time in which it was made, not really allowing it to directly influence much that came after.

There are two cuts of this flawed movie available, the public domain version and the DVD re-release which features some scenes re-shot by Wade Williams in the 1980s, mostly to enhance the scenes on Mars and to remove the stock footage of the V-2 rocket which was meant to double for the actual rocket. By beating Destination Moon to the box office Rocketship X-M was successful enough in its day, but if it had had a decent budget, more shooting time and had benefited from a little more foresight, it might have avoided all these pitfalls and become something much more enduring.

Comments

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Well, Mars was thought to be covered in canals and hence populated, at least in the popular imagination. The children's encyclopedia I had when growing up in the 50s (though probably produced in the 40s) showed Mars with canals.

Plus, explorers! What explorers didn't carry guns? I mean in the real world? Did the explorers of Antarctica go unarmed? [checks...] From here...

http://www.heritage-antarctica.org/content/library/Extract_from_CR_Conservation_Plan_List_of_Supplies1.pdf

.45 revolver
.32 revolver
303 rifle
12 gauge shotgun

All that without expecting hostile natives. Having a gun on board a vessel when going to sea would've probably been the norm in 1950 and hence not seen as out of place on a ship to Mars. There may have been monsters there, just as there are monsters at sea.

Have you been...

[godelescherbach.livejournal.com]

...channeling your inner Clute of late?

Waiting for you to view "The Creation of the Humanoids". Me, I'm looking for a DVD of the Leinster classic "The Wailing Asteroid". Your reviews put me in mind of that flick.