Outer Space Comes of Age

Chairman of the New York Film Critics, BOSLEY CROWTHER has been screen editor and critic of the New York Times since 1940.

NATURALLY, it was inevitable that Hollywood should finally get around to a protean exploration ol that mere thing, the Universe.

Beginning almost at their beginning, with George Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), which brazenly kidded crackbrained science through primitive trick photography, the movies have often rocketed into future time and space, tagging along with such foreseers as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. As a matter of fact, we know a fellow who claims that the only relevant movie ever made was the one which Alexander Korda fetched from Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come.

However, for all those previous projects, the current popular rush towards outer space was well advanced before the Hollywood producers were air-borne on a spate of science films. Already the comic strips, the radio, the breakfast-food boxes, and TV had crisscrossed the interstellar regions with traffic as thick as in Times Square. Buck Rogers was almost as conventional and venerable as Admiral Byrd.

Now a layman, accustomed to the usual, might have figured that Hollywood’s lag behind the competition was a fairly propitious sign — that the film folks were diligently boning up on scientific facts before entering this controversial realm. But we feel compelled to inform you that. the first rush of science-fiction films — six or eight have already reached the market and as many more have been announced — indicates that the movie producers may be expected to assist mankind with about as clear an understanding of the universe as they have generally given him of the world in which he lives. A fast observation of the evidence — and the prospects — will hint whal we mean.

There is no point in looking too inquisitively into The Flying Saucer or The Man from Planet X or even Rocketship X-M, three minor items. The first was no more than a cheap shocker that rode the late “flying saucer" wave, and the other two were low-budget efforts that were merely satellites to more ambitious films. The Man from Planet X was in the orbit of that smash-hit monster thriller called The Thing, and Rockctship X-M flickered faintly in the bright reflection of Destination Moon. '

Destination Moon , however, bears observing, for it was not only the first of the booming cycle of “sciencers” to be done on a large and costly scale bul it also put forth an invitation to be taken at least semi-seriously. And, as a matter of fact, enough of it was sufficiently close to the scientific line to warrant its being regarded with a certain amiable respectfulness.

It was — for the information of those who missed it —a lively account of a rockctship expedition from the earth to the moon, gone upon by four scientists — or, rather, three bona fide scientists and one Brooklyn radioman. (The last was purposely included for whal is quaintly termed “comic relief,” he being the voluble skeptic and the wisecracker towards the whole show.) But despite its major and minor flights of fancy to make an eventful adventure yarn, it did contain lots of information of a technical and astronomical sort.

The theory and operation of rockets, the nature of interstellar space, and the general character and features of the moon’s surface, as astronomers figure they must be, were interestingly portrayed. Significantly, the producer ol the picture, George Pal, is a former maker of animated puppet films, and he cleverly conveyed much information with animated demonstrations and diagrams. Particularly were the illustrations of the earth as seen from the soaring rocket, and from the moon, of fine artistic and imaginative quality; and the lunar landscapes, frigid and dead, were graphically conceived and executed. Color added to the visual excitement of the film and gave a good popular conception of how such an experience might look to the mundane eye.

But somehow the cool impersonality and the traditional objectivity of science seemed to be missed in a considerable and obvious predilection for the curiosities and reactions of the average man. A good bit of pictorial slapstick, pseudoscientifically adorned — such as one member of the expedition going adrift as a “free body” in outer space — was worked into the picture. And a great deal was made of the desire of the American scientists to capture the moon before Soviet scientists got there.

“Whoever controls the moon has military control of the earth,”they solemnly said. The concept is stimulating but scientifically questionable.

We mention this feature particularly because the Russian menace appears destined to infiltrate and prove a slightly confusing factor in many of the first round of science-fiction films. Presumably the Hollywood people incline, in their thinking, to combine the Communists and whatever is mysterious and forbidding in the outer realms. This may be a carry-over from the helpless stale of anxiety aroused by the late-lamented “flying saucers,” which were popularly assumed to have come either from Russia or from another planet. So far as peace of mind was concerned, it didn’t much matter which.

Some vagrant suggestions of the menace were tossed out in The Thing, which was the second of the major items in the cycle of science-fiction films. In this one, the direction of discovery in Destination Moon was reversed. Man didn’t go to the mysterious; the mysterious came to him, which enlightened the movie audience to the fact that outer space is a two-way street.

An American scientific expedition, located in the Arctic wastes (for purposes which any modest student of advanced military strategy might well assume), suddenly found itself confronted with a baffling radioactive disturbance of the atmosphere, inexplicable by any of the normal variations in that area. Did it have earthly inspiration, directed by you-knowwho, or was it some supernatural or cosmic phenomenon?

We won’t hold you breathless as long as the film did. It turned out that the disturbance was created by a weird and awesome “thing" that had plunged to earth in some sort of space ship and was embedded near by in the Arctic ice. When this mysterious creature was removed from its natural deep-freeze and thawed out, it was revealed, appropriately, to be a giant and deadly mobile vegetable, more powerful, more shrewd, more efficient, and infinitely more fertile than man.

There’s no need for further discussion of the drama unfolded in The Thing, except to record that the monster was contained and eventually cooked to death right there in the Arctic wasteland, despite its terrifying tendency to reproduce in multicellular abundance from any part of it that was cut off. It is well to note, however, that this film advanced the cute idea that the universe is full of frightful creatures that may arrive and destroy us any day.

This tidy prospect was recently envisioned in The Day the Earth Stood Still, which had creatures from another planet (not Republicans) invading Washington. And it will no doubt be liberally considered in countless science-fiction films to come. Mr. Pal has conceived a variation in his latest, When Worlds Collide, which tells what happens when the earth is destroyed and a handful of refugees escape in a roeketship. Me also will go into it fully in an upcoming version of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which is best remembered for its dramatic performance by Orson Welles on the radio a few years back.

As reassurance for the fearful, it is significant that The Thing was destroyed by a unit of the American Air Force, operating contrary to the desires of the intellectually curious scientists. (The latter impractical fellows, probably Reds, wanted to keep the exotic vegetable alive.) This sort of comfort is to be expected, though one may wonder how long it will be before it is expedient to have the earth’s peoples being fed on vegetables from outer space.

As for such forthcoming items as CaptainVideo, based on the television favorite of the junior scientists; A-Man, in which the heroes will be a cyclotron and a computing machine; Lost in Space, 3000 A.D., Lost Planet Airmen, and Flying Disc Men from Mars, the shivering movie audience can only wait and pray. No doubt, however, a pattern will eventually be devised which will render the “sciencers” as standard as the present low-budget Western film. Someday we’ll probably have our heroes, in their rubberized, bubble-headed suits, rounding up at Asteroid Y-3 to be told unequivocally by the boss, “ Pete, you take this gang and jet off through Eagle Galaxy; Curley, stay here with the rocket; the rest of you space-men, follow me!”