Rocketship X-M: The First Space Adventure of the Atomic Era - Reactor

Rocketship X-M (1950). Directed by Kurt Neumann. Written by Kurt Neumann, Orville H. Hampton, and Dalton Trumbo. Starring Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, and John Emery.

Let’s go back to 1946. World War II had been over for a matter of months, and postwar anxiety about the future is high. The relationship between United States and the Soviet Union, who had been allies during the war, was rapidly degenerating into what would become the Cold War, but exactly what that would look like was still a few years in the future. This was before the Soviet Union began testing nuclear weapons, before the U.S. declared the so-called “Truman Doctrine” for preventing the spread of communism around the world, before the Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Pact, before the Space Race.

In March of 1946, Hollywood screenwriter, novelist, and columnist Dalton Trumbo published an opinion piece in a weekly magazine called Script. Script was a Hollywood-based film magazine with a strongly literary tone and a very liberal political bent; it had been founded by Rob Wagner, an outspoken progressive socialist, and continued in that vein after his death in 1942.

The article Trumbo wrote for Script in 1946 carried the tongue-in-cheek title “The Russian Menace,” and in it he points out that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are making the same aggressive political, economic, and military moves around the world, and he suggests that the anti-Soviet fear Americans feel is echoed by anti-American fear in the Soviet Union.

He was right, of course, but he was also a member of the Communist Party USA, and being right about American politics in 1946 while also being a communist working in the film industry meant he was making a lot of people very angry in Hollywood. That included Billy Wilkerson, the founder and owner of The Hollywood Reporter, who in 1947 wrote a column called “A Vote for Joe Stalin,” in which he named Trumbo and several others as communist sympathizers. A few months later, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) used the names Wilkerson had published to summon the several directors, screenwriters, and actors to appear before Congress. The “Hollywood Ten,” as they came to be known, refused to cooperate with the hearings and were charged with contempt of Congress. Leaders of the film industry got together immediately afterward and put together the first iteration of the Hollywood blacklist.

Trumbo was one of the cited and blacklisted screenwriters; he went to prison for several months in 1950. But he was also one of the few who kept working over the next decade, albeit quietly, without his name appearing on his films. Those films include Roman Holiday (1953), one of the great romantic comedies of all time; Trumbo was not fully credited on the film until 2011, fifty-seven years after he won, but could not claim, an Academy Award for the story.

Just as he had been central to the beginning of the blacklist era, Trumbo would be equally important in bringing about its end, when actor Kirk Douglas brought him on to write Spartacus (1960) and director Otto Preminger hired him to write Exodus (1960). With one of the most prominent victims of the blacklist being properly and publicly credited on two huge films, and the Hollywood studio system in its dying days, that was the beginning of the end for the blacklist era.

Amidst all of those big, world-changing events, it’s almost a quaint little footnote that while he was blacklisted, right before he went to prison to serve out his sentence, Trumbo also did some speedy script-doctoring on a slapdash, low-budget, barely-more-than-a-B-movie sci fi film about going into space.

Rocketship X-M is certainly no Roman Holiday or Spartacus, but it is a movie that sits at an interesting turning point in cinema history, as it was the first science fiction film of the Atomic Era and the first post-WWII film about space travel. But it only holds those distinctions by a hair, because it went into production specifically to capitalize on interest in the film that ended up being second.

That film was George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950), a highly publicized, much anticipated “serious” movie about the practical problems of space travel. Destination Moon was in production for two years, with a respectable budget and a script co-written by Robert A. Heinlein. (Which also means a script with shades of Heinlein’s post-WWII politics, but that’s a topic for another day.) It was also being filmed in Technicolor in an era when about half of American films being made were still black and white. We’ll watch Destination Moon in the future, but what matters now is that without Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M would never have been made.

When news got out that Destination Moon would be delayed, Lippert Pictures decided to take advantage. Lippert was a studio known for making films very quickly and very cheaply, which is exactly what they did with Rocketship X-M. They called up director Kurt Neumann, who had spent some of the 1940s making Tarzan films for RKO Pictures, to talk about a space travel story he’d shopped around.

The problem with the initial script is that it was basically the same story as Destination Moon. As in, it was about going to the Moon, as suggested by the spaceship being called Rocketship Expedition Moon. The switch to send the ship to Mars instead happened after the fact, just like it does in the movie. That’s when Dalton Trumbo was brought on to doctor the script. He’s the one who refigured the Mars scenes—and in doing so, completely changed the tone of the film.

It took Neumann all of nineteen days to film Rocketship X-M, and less than a month later the movie was released into theaters.

And it shows. It shows that this movie was thrown together in a rush. Nobody so much as cracked a middle school science book, much less consulted any scientists. The film uses stock footage of a V-2 rocket launch for the take-off scenes. The gender politics and clumsy romance are such a mess I could physically feel the feminism curling up to die inside my soul. It’s filmed in a handful of interior sets, one of which looks like a classroom. Nuclear cavemen with rocks beat astronauts armed with guns. There is a Texan. There is always a Texan.

(Aside: The outdoor Mars scenes were filmed at good old Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, years before that same location will once again play Mars in Robinson Crusoe on Mars [1964]. I went looking for what else has been filmed at Zabriskie Point, and I learned that parts of Spartacus were filmed there. There is also a film called Zabriskie Point [1970]; in his review Roger Ebert said of director Michelangelo Antonioni, “He has tried to make a serious movie and hasn’t even achieved a beach-party level of insight.” I haven’t seen the film but: ouch. Zabriskie Point is also famously the location of the cover image on U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree. I hope you can all recognize it now by sight. This concludes today’s edition of “Know Your Geology Landscapes.”)

Rocketship X-M would be such a silly movie, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s also a dire warning against nuclear annihilation in which all of the explorers die at the end.

The film opens with one of the most unintentionally funny pre-liftoff sequences I’ve ever seen in a space movie. There is a voice proclaiming over loudspeaker that takeoff is just a few minutes away, but all the characters are having a leisurely press conference in the aforementioned classroom. We meet the members of the crew that’s headed to the moon, which includes rocket scientists Karl Ekstrom (John Emery) and Lisa Van Horn (Osa Massen), and the flight crew of Floyd Graham (Lloyd Bridges), William Corrigan (Noah Beery, Jr.), and Harry Chamberlain (Hugh O’Brian). Nobody at the press conferences asks why the actual rocket scientists are going on the trip, but they do ask why a woman would worry her pretty little head with things like chemistry.

The mission heads into space, but on their way to the Moon they run into some problems. First there’s a flurry of meteors around them, then the ship abruptly loses power. Eckstrom and Van Horn decide that a different fuel mixture will solve the power problems, so they sit down to calculate the appropriate mixture on paper. When they come up with different calculations, Eckstrom tells Van Horn her pretty little head must have made a mistake on account of being too female; they go with his calculations instead. Even when Van Horn once again expresses misgivings about the proposed fuel mixture, they forge ahead with Eckstrom’s solution.

This turns out to be a bad idea, because his fuel mixture sends the ship careening off into space at such a high acceleration that it knocks the entire crew unconscious for several days. When they wake up, they realize they have accidentally flown to Mars. Van Horn is a professional so she does not immediately wake up and say, “I told you dumbfucks there was something wrong with the calculation,” but I said it to the television while I was a watching.

After they get over their initial shock, the crew is actually very excited for a chance to explore Mars. And you know what? I believe that. Of course they ought to be excited! They might have taken a wrong turn, but they are on Mars!

They set out to explore, at which point the film switches from black and white to a reddish-pink tint. A Martian filter, if you will. After tromping around Zabriskie Point for a while, they stumble upon the ruins of a Martian civilization. Their Geiger counters tell them the radiation is very high—so high that they immediately know the civilization was nuked to ashes—but they keep exploring anyway.

During their radioactive campout that night, they finally spot some Martians. The Earthlings eagerly go to meet them, but the Martians respond by attacking. Most of these attacks involve throwing rocks down from clifftops. Corrigan the Texan and Eckstrom are both killed, and Chamberlain is badly injured. The three survivors somehow make it back to the ship and head back to Earth—the film skips over the details pretty quickly—but as they near home, Van Horn and Graham realize they don’t have enough fuel to land. They relay what they can about their mission to ground control, then the ship crashes in Nova Scotia, killing the crew.

Afterward, the mission commander on Earth (played by Morris Ankrum) reassures the press that in spite of the tragic end, the mission was not a failure, because they learned a great deal about both space travel and Mars, and can do better next time.

I am absolutely fascinated by this ending. I wasn’t expecting it at all; I assumed Van Horn and Graham would survive to be obnoxiously heteronormative in the worst 1950s fashion. But they didn’t. They get smashed to pieces in Canada! That’s an ending I didn’t see coming.

Rocketship X-M was made specifically to get carried along in the wake of Destination Moon’s promotional blitz and hype. The two films have strongly different politics, and Destination Moon did overshadow Rocketship X-M when it premiered all of twenty-five days later. But Rocketship X-M’s attempt to borrow some of Destination Moon’s hype actually worked, because it was pretty successful in theaters, especially considering how cheap it was to make. (Dalton Trumbo was serving an eleven-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress when Rocketship X-M came out. Years later, in a documentary about the Hollywood blacklists, he would say about his conviction, “As far as I was concerned, it was a completely just verdict. I had contempt for that Congress and have had contempt for it ever since.”)

Rocketship X-M lived on for a while on television, like so many other low-budget black and white sci fi movies of the ’50s, fading but never entirely vanishing.

One of the people who saw it in the early ’50s was Wade Williams, a theater owner in Kansas City. At some time in the ’70s, he set about trying to figure out what had happened to the film he remembered so fondly. He was able to locate a copy of the film—the original copies had degraded, but there were duplicates—and acquire the rights. He wanted to rerelease Rocketship X-M, but he felt that audiences in the late ’70s would look at it very differently than audiences had in 1950. So he decided to contact some Hollywood special effects people to give the film a bit of makeover. The goal was to replace the stock footage of the V-2 rocket launch and add a handful of spaceship exterior shots.

That’s exactly what they did, although I can’t figure out if the slightly expanded film was ever played in theaters in the ’70s. It is more or less the version that made it to home video releases and eventually to streaming. I say “more or less” because a lot of people have pointed out some discrepancies between the descriptions of the added scenes and what’s in modern versions of the film, so it’s possible some of the added scenes were later removed before the film made it to home video and streaming. I don’t think the original 1950 theatrical version of the movie currently exists anywhere we can watch it.

Rocketship X-M is not a good movie, but I like it anyway. It starts out feeling like exactly what we would expect from a quick-and-dirty cash grab designed to take advantage of another movie’s expensive advertising campaign, but it makes a dark turn that I find so interesting. And that pro-science, anti-war tone ends up being a prescient look at the themes sci fi films would be grappling with through the ’50s and ’60s.

For one thing, the film is very clearly saying that nuclear weapons will destroy civilization. A lot of sci fi films that followed in the 1950s have a cautionary tone toward nuclear weapons, but Rocketship X-M goes beyond cautionary and into prohibitionary. When the characters first encounter the Martians, Ekstrom says, “From Atomic Age to Stone Age,” a solemn pronouncement that is treated as the inevitable outcome of nuclear war. When designing the look of the radiation-scarred Martians, makeup artist Don L. Cash is said to have referenced photos from survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film is not being wishy-washy about this matter.

But I’m just as interested in its firmly pro-science stance. In 1950, neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union had even launched artificial satellites into orbit, much less tried to send an animal or a person into space. Nobody had died trying to get to space yet. And here is Rocketship X-M, the very first movie with a fictional take on what a space mission might look like, coming right out and saying that people will die, but it will be worth it. That’s not something very many sci fi films say outright.

What do you think of Rocketship X-M? Does anybody recall seeing this one back in the day? Does anybody know why there is always a Texan in cinematic spaceship crews?

Next week: We’re skipping over more than 70 years of cinematic history for something completely different. Watch Mars Express on Apple, Amazon, Fandango, or Plex.