1950s SF film
Cat-Women of the Moon, 1953, USA DIRECTED BY ARTHUR HILTON
Arthur Hilton's very hokum movie riffed in several ways on Leslie Selander's Flight to Mars that was made two years earlier, was itself later remade as Missile to the Moon and was successfully plundered for its 'battle of the sexes' preoccupations by Edward Bernds for Queen of Outer Space in 1958. A mission to the moon from Earth is secretly manipulated by an ancient moon culture of women who can project their thoughts over long distances, bringing the astronauts - via the unwitting help of the crew's only woman - to their giant cave on the dark side of the moon. They speak English "just as we speak all of Earth's tongues". They could make themselves invisible but were otherwise entirely humanoid, if a little bored and lonely... they killed off their men as they needed to conserve the moon's oxygen; they then planned to exploit the male astronauts' weak spots to make them stay and then head back to Earth in the men's place to spread their own style of feminine ideology. I have a sneaking suspicion that in no way was this an accurate representation of the aspirations of 1950s American feminism. Nor was it meant that way, and instead it flounders around unhappily, thankfully taking place somewhere out there in outer space instead of here on Earth, reinforcing the usual stereotypes in a way that didn't take science fiction forward or even embed it in a 1950s notion of a future reality, which makes this kind of film more fantasy than SF. Maybe I'm being harsh on this film, but I can only tell it how I've always seen it.
Let's start small, regarding the production, cast and some of the props. It was filmed for 3-D yet may as well not have been, employing no tricks to make it a typical '3-D' movie. Many scenes in the spaceship appear to have been filmed in a barely-disguised warehouse rather than an elaborate film set, so at least some of the moon settings had a bit more thought put into them. One guy (following a theme I suspect started with Rocketship X-M) is inexplicably carrying a gun into space on a mission to what they believe is a lifeless world. Turns out the gun was needed: the fauna they encountered was the infamous Moon Spider, puppet strings clearly visible and too slow on its feet to actually kill anyone - it also appeared in the supremely bizarre Mesa of Lost Women that same year and also hung around (just) for Cat-Women's remake Missile to the Moon in 1959, though by then it was looking much older and considerably less scary. The music was composed by Elmer Bernstein, who also composed the memorable theme to the notoriously bad Robot Monster, also in 1953. Most of the cast never provided performances that went above the merely functional, although Marie Windsor as the astronaut Helen is by far the most interesting performer.
But as to what the movie is about - and bearing in mind that it was first and foremost intended as an entertainment - it's fair to say the movie has not fared well in terms of gender politics. I honestly wonder if the cast and crew thought they were at least making good science fiction, because the sheer nonsense of Cat-Women's plot is barely redeemed by the apparent serious intent with which the film was made. Yet watching it today only reveals to me its ridiculous aspects, and at the same time it never seems to give so much as a nod towards its potential for comedy: it was left to Queen of Outer Space to acknowledge that, five years later. All actors play their parts very straight with occasional stabs at throwaway dialogue that are meant to humanise the characters, yet everything just comes across as a bunch of poor fools reciting a bad script composed of dialogue better suited to cavemen. This is not a noticeably camp movie either, and today there's little that can be said constructively about Cat-Women because of this very perceivable lack of self-awareness. The cast and crew of B-movie regulars simply created an unfortunate story that's come to misrepresent ’50s female emancipation ("We have no use for men!") with exaggerated male condescension in counterpoint ("You're too smart for me, baby. I like 'em stupid,") in some alarmingly polarising, destructive and confusing ways.
It also sends out mixed messages as to how women (well, Cat-Women, anyway) perceive men, at once proud of having rid the Moon of their men yet also wishing to fawn over those few who've just arrived. On a subtextual level it shows a bunch of macho, simple-minded guys trying and failing to understand women because they're essentially alien: likening them to cats implies they are manipulative and untrustworthy (while similarly in Mesa of Lost Women the same year, likening women to spiders is meant to imply they are inescapable predators). At it's weakest, Cat-Women is a naïve example of sexual misnomering that resolves nothing and by today's standards of gender discourse it would be seen as a complete failure; then, however... well, the Sixties hadn't happened yet, and we now have the benefit of more than half-century of perspective with which to watch it. Viewing it for the first time many years ago was a small exercise in cinematic archaeology, and seeing it several more times since I've never really been able to enjoy it as a simple entertainment, as was intended. If it did display any kind of self-aware camp humour (such as that delivered in Queen of Outer Space) I could certainly watch it differently.