I have a lot of affection for this movie. When I was a kid back in the 1950s I watched it on the family’s small-screen, black-and-white TV. I loved it! It had everything a 10-year-old boy could want in a film: a rocketship! spaceflight! a meteor barrage! dead civilizations! Martians!
Synopsis
The crew of RX-M (Rocketship Expedition-Moon) is led by a brave and dedicated
scientist. (Note: in those days scientists were valued and respected members of
society, unlike today, when they’re attacked and vilified by people who don’t like
hearing the truth.) The leader’s name is Dr. Eckstrom. (As a kid I imagined his
last name was spelled Xstrom
and that there was some sort of connection
between his name and the name of the spaceship.) He is portrayed by the
silken-voiced John Emery, a stage actor of distinction who once played Laeteres to
John Gielgud’s Hamlet and was also Tallulah Bankhead’s second husband! The cocky
but competent pilot is limned by the (always) cocky and (usually) competent Lloyd
Bridges. Hugh O’Brien is the more reserved but equally competent
navigator. Bridges and O’Brien went on to television immortality by starring in,
respectively, Sea Hunt (1958-1961) and
Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).
Rounding out the crew are two stock characters: the Beautiful Lady Assistant Scientist (see Joan Weldon in Them! (1954)) and the Funny Guy (see Sid Melton in Lost Continent (1951)). The Funny Guy is essential to provide some comic relief while the tension mounts; what the Beautiful Lady Assistant Scientist was there for only became clear to me with the onset of puberty. Rocketship X-M's Beautiful Lady Assistant Scientist is played by the comely and even exotic Dane Osa Massen. The Funny Guy is Noah Beery Jr., who carved out his own niche in TV history as James Garner’s father in The Rockford Files (1974-1980). Actually, Beery’s character is not very funny and his references to his home state (Texas, off course!) are tiresome, but the actor has such a pleasant persona that we can easily forgive these shortcomings. At first, things go well for our crew: the lift-off is smooth and the first hours of the voyage are uneventful. Then, 25 minutes into the movie and 14 hours into the voyage, the power goes out! Without power, they are stranded in space and would be unable to land on the moon at any rate. They decide that the fuel mixture is at fault. Calculations are made and checked, and a new fuel ratio is fixed upon. The new formula works and the rocket powers up, but the force is so great that the whole crew blacks out and the speed increases unabated! After an indeterminate amount of time the five begin to reawaken, to find themselves off course and far beyond the moon’s orbit. Some calculations, followed by a glance out of the porthole, reveal that they’re within the gravitational pull of the Red Planet...Mars! Seeming to have enough fuel for a Martian landing and the return trip, they decide to proceed with touchdown.
The Martian scenes are effectively tinted red, something I could not have known watching on our old black-and-white TV. This was, of course, my favorite part of the film and remains so today. Death Valley, California, may not technically resemble the actual surface of Mars, but its utter desolation is well suited to a Mars of the Imagination.
The explorers stumble upon the ruins of an advanced civilization apparently destroyed by a thermonuclear holocaust. They vow to return to Earth with a warning message about the dangers of nuclear testing and the arms race. Then they encounter the Martians! While these “Martians” may just be extras and stunt men dressed in fake animal skins, this whole sequence has the disquieting quality of a nightmare and works wonderfully well. For one thing, with a couple of exceptions, we never see these extraterrestrials up close. One exception involves the close-up of a blind Martian woman, her affliction evidently connected to radiation poisoning or genetic mutation. Her screams lead the Martians to attack the Earth people. As the camera pans the cliff tops we see the Martians hurling rocks and tumbling boulders down upon our astronauts. The utter hostility of the extraterrestrials is chillingly captured in this sequence. Then things really go sideways: the Funny Guy is killed, crushed by a loosened boulder! His demise was hard to accept for a ten-year-old, but not unprecedented. After all, Sid Melton gets gored to death by a Triceratops in Lost Continent! The next casualty is Dr. Ecstrom, felled by an ax thrown by a Stone Age Martian. His death was easier to accept; after all, he was already quite elderly (maybe 45?) and thus due to die of old age in a year or two. At least the other three will make it back to the ship OK. But wait...O’Brien is struck and injured by a hurled rock. Massen and Bridges help him back to the ship, and the three survivors leave the hostile planet.
The return journey is uneventful, although O’Brien is in pretty bad shape. Only when they enter Earth’s gravitational field do they realize that they are out of fuel and will crash land, killing them all! This plot twist was really hard for a kid to accept! Did they all have to die? Couldn’t at least Massen and Bridges make it back OK? Did the script writers intend this ending to send a message? I’m not sure, but if they did, maybe the message for a ten-year-old was that things don’t always work out as we hope they will, that bad things can happen to good people, that endings aren’t always happy.
The final scenes of the film involve Dr. Ralph Fleming, the ground coordinator and
overall boss of the project. Fleming is played by B-movie superstar character
actor Morris Ankrum. We see Dr. Fleming, surrounded by reporters, anxiously
awaiting word of the fate of RX-M and her crew. The phone rings and Dr. Fleming
answers. The camera moves in for an extreme closeup of Ankrum’s face as he hears
the message; his expression registers hope, then incredulity and astonishment, and
finally anguish, grief, and maybe despair. But he recovers sufficiently to
announce to the assembled newsmen:
Tomorrow we begin construction of RX-M 2!
Maybe not as great an ending
line as Keep watching the skies
(from Howard Hawks'
The Thing from Another World)but not bad, either.
Discussion
Director Kurt Neumann (1908-1958) was born in Bavaria. He helmed his first film in 1931 and his last in the year of his death. With around 60 features to his credit, Neumann was strictly a B-level director. He made westerns, comedies, mysteries, and just about every other type of genre film imaginable. In addition to Rocketship X-M, his science-fiction credits include Kronos (1957) and The Fly (1958).
Despite his Germanic name, cinematographer Karl Struss (1886-1981) was born in New York City, New York. His first screen credit was in 1920 (Something To Think About, directed by Cecil B. DeMille). He was a top cameraman during the silent era, lensing such classics as Ben-Hur (1925), Sparrows (1926), and culminating with F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), for which he shared the first Academy Award given for Best Cinematography with Charles Rosher. Struss continued to be in demand during the 1930s, photographing many A-level pictures. After photographing Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), Struss’ career seemed to decline; by 1950 he was making only B-level movies like Rocketship X-M. He also did some television work. The cause of his downward career trajectory is unclear.
Recognition should be given to composer Ferde Grofé (best known for the Grand Canyon Suite), whose work on Rocketship X-M is exemplary. His use of the eerie sounds of the electronic theramin adds to the general disquietude of the Martian scenes.
Further Reading