Curiosities/Time Capsules -- 1960’s Sex Pre-Psychedelic Style

Sex and the Single Girl (1964, Richard Quine) **

“They want me to turn that dirty rag into the most influential news magazine in the whole world.”

The bestseller and iconoclastic book, by Helen Gurley Brown, screen rights were purchased by Warner Brothers for the unheard of sum of $200,000; not for the content -- but for the title alone. The review in Time magazine described it this way, “Since the book is plotless, a collection of jiffy food recipes pressed between pages of instant indiscretion, the film makers fabricated this silly little comedy starring Natalie Wood and other celebrities old enough to know better.”

On so many ways we want this middling mid-sixties comedy to succeed. But alas despite the A-list cast, it fails as comedy on so many levels. But in a weird way the movie makes up for its shortcoming as a time capsule (& curiosity).

In retrospect the movie; Sex and the Single Girl was at the nexus of many of the major players in mythical community of Hollywood and American popular culture in its day.

In the mid-1960’s, before the “summer of love”, America was still trying to shake-off the boring lifestyle and conformity of the Eisenhower post war years. Movies like this played into the imaginary notion of “sexual liberation” (a term not yet invented). 

Sex and the Single Girl as a movie came wrapped in the most seductive package of all – it was recommended for Adults Only and it opened on Christmas Day.  “Adults Only” was the consummate label of the era intended to create interest and excite the imagination of the “adult” film going public and guarantee box-office; odd for a Christmas movie – talk about counter-programming.

Adult moviegoers were promised they were going to see something, “dirty”.  Because “sex” was dirty in 1964.

“Sex comedies” were nothing new; either as a genre or as films directed by Richard Quine (who made a bundle making them). The notion of using double- entendre to “say more than you’re saying” had been popular in movies since silents (no pun intended) and in the theater since, well how long do you want to go back? Let’s face it, sex sells and it always will.

Other bright spots in Quine’s sex comedy career extend to How To Murder Your Wife (from the same year) and The Notorious Landlady two years earlier (1962).  Additionally he also acquitted himself very well with the “woman’s weeper” in 1960 with Strangers When We Meet and the stylish production of the Broadway hit Bell Book and Candle (1958). It made Manhattan look so inviting, almost like a “Disneyland for adults”. 

A key ingredient of the genre, and for all practical purposes a character in its own right, is “booze”. The primary component for the loosening of inhibitions and likely to make the female of the species susceptible to seduction and of course sex, often adulterous and always outside of marriage.

“How about a drink?”

 “I don’t drink.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

Booze was a big part of things.

“Is there any more of this?”

“Are you kidding?”

In Sex and the Single Girl we have two generations of super-star couples; Wood & Curtis and Fonda & Bacall. Natalie Wood plays Helen Gurley Brown. But in this incarnation it’s Dr. Brown, a psychologist specializing in marital issues (short hand in those days for “sexual relations”).

Curtis edits a salacious magazine about sex and gossip  – always dressed to the nines in solid dark suits and fashionable “sports” clothes. This was the early 1960’s, people still dressed up.

Sex and the Single Girl demonstrates the top of Curtis’ star power – he is able to claim top-billing in the movie version of the #1 Best Seller of the decade and have his character fashioned into the lead (vs. Wood’s character who plays the book’s author).

Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda are too old for rock and roll but too young for America’s songbook – this generation of stars had to pretend to be infinitely contemporary and not be thought of as “classic film stars”.

Henry Fonda (his third film in ’64 along with Fail Safe and The Best Man) plays a married man who owns a hosiery company (who is obviously fascinated with women’s legs) and lives in constant fear of (Lauren Becall) his wife’s routine eruptions of jealous rage.

What now might be construed as a fantasy sequence is played straight, as a musical number with Count Basie and his Orchestra in a nightclub.  This was a time in movies when musical popular culture straddled the great divide between top 40 music and adult contemporary. It had to “swing” but not be traditional big band or popular rock – music that everyone thought was “listenable”. Unfortunately in nearly every outing this philosophy of movie music ran a ground and appealed to nobody.

Lauren Bacall, a creation of Howard Hawks (in the manner of Slim Keith) and the widow of Humphrey Bogart, made a handful of undistinguished films in the intervening years after his death. The only arguable exception is Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956). Bacall made only one more film before going back to New York and reinvented herself on Broadway. In Harper she played a wronged wife and femme fatal, against the inquiring PI played by Paul Newman. (Watch out, this is one of my favorite movies so it will no doubt wind-up in a future post.) Remember, Betty is not back on the screen until 1976 when she appears in Don Siegel’s western, The Shootist.

For the record: Slim Keith was her own recreation  – with embellishments from Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward and much later Truman Capote, said in her memoirs, more on this in a later post). "God blessed me with a happy spirit and many other gifts. What I was not blessed with I went out and got. Sometimes the price was too high, but I've never been much of a bargain hunter." from Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life (1991).

Fonda and Curtis made two movies together, this one and in 196x The Boston Strangler – the last good movie Curtis made.

Jack Lemmon and his work in Some Like It Hot (with Tony Curtis) is lampooned throughout the movie. It was five years after Wilder’s film and it was still considered topical. “He’s young and handsome and charming, he looks like Jack Lemmon.” Curtis’ character is called Mr. Lemmon once while wearing a woman’s nightgown.

“Go to Vegas kid you can make a bundle!”

Curtis and Wood had made Kings Go Forth (with Frank Sinatra) in the late 50’s, and went on to make The Great Race (with Jack Lemmon) before both of their careers disintegrated when the 1960’s commenced in full force with Easy Rider. And the “super-star system” became undone.

An incredible cast of supporting players include (our favorite best pal from all the Fred & Ginger pairing in the 1930’s) Edward Everett Horton, Mel Ferrer (at the time married to Audrey Hepburn), Stubby Kaye after Li'l Abner (1959) and before Cat Ballou (1965) and the indomitable Otto Knuger.

Knuger in his last role plays the head of the psychology practice where Wood works. He made his film debut in 1923, but it was in the 1930s that Kruger's polished, urbane characterizations came into full swing. Although he occasionally played a hero, as in Corregidor (1943), he was often cast as the amoral villain (in Hitchcock’s 1947 Saboteur) or a charming but corrupt businessman (usually a banker), a task at which he excelled. Kruger was one of the industry's busiest character actors until a series of strokes brought about his retirement in the mid-1960s.

Another fascinating artifact about this movie is that its screenwriter was Joseph Heller screenwriter – it was ’64 when his 1961 novel Catch-22 was optioned by a studio, his other screenwriting credit is Dirty Dingus McGee easily the worst movie Frank Sinatra made after we first saw him act in From Here To Eternity.

Our movie ends in a manic car chase (foreshadowing things to come in movies and in real life Los Angeles). Los Angeles’ freeways are just as barren and unattractive today as they are in second-unit footage for this film. It’s important to note that nowhere in the film is its locale identified; either by name or iconography until the madcap freeway chase.   Hollywood’s idea of the 1960’s was as over-the-top in concept as it was in execution.

The finale at the new Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), with its icon the Theme Building in full view portends a look at America’s future.  Next stop the “swinging sixties” and most definitely in La La Land.

The American Myth/John Ford’s Forgotten Movie and acceptable stereotypes.

Tobacco Road (1941, John Ford) **

An often-overlooked John Ford film, Tobacco Road is based on a wildly successful novel by Erskine Caldwell, who published over 25 novels and sold over 80 million books in his lifetime. Tobacco Road’s success extended to Broadway (eight plus years and 3,182 performances) where it was still running when the 20th Century Fox film was released. The play was revived in 1942, 1943 and 1950. The original Broadway production is the sixteenth longest running show ever. The play was ban in England until 1949.

The controversy and success of the book and play, created a bidding war among the studios for the motion picture rights – even though the Hay’s Office had practically declared the play and its content “unsuitable for motion pictures.” RKO was Darryl F. Zanuck’s chief rival for the rights and was promising the role of Jeeter to Charles Laughton. Henry Fonda was even mentioned for the role as was the more age appropriate Walter Brennan.

Zanuck’s rushed the movie version to capitalize on the title’s momentum especially hard because as always, Fox was in need of a hit. And John Ford was one of the most reliable directors in the business, having just won an Oscar for The Grapes of Wrath the previous year for the studio. This made him the logical project for the high profile project.

Again Ford worked Nunnally Johnson as screenwriter, but this time (at Zanuck’s direction) they concocted the film as the broadest of Ford’s comedies, retaining none of the original story’s earthiness, social realism or relevance. Erskine Caldwell disavowed himself of having anything to do with the movie.

After it’s release Time Magazine complained that the stage version was a “case study in degeneracy”, and was turned by Hollywood into “a slow, sentimental account of Jeeter's aged life and times.” The review went on to say, “In giving the disheveled story a moral scrubbing, a bath of pathos and a sort of happy ending. Hollywood has rubbed off its sharp edges of character and depraved psychology.” The always, outstanding blog, Shooting Down Pictures provides an excellent review of the film’s critical reception.

It is interesting to note that in the popular biography “Pappy: The Life of John Ford” written by Ford’s grandson Tobacco Road is never mentioned. It’s also conspicuously absent from Mel Gussow’s biography of Darryl Zanuck “Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking.”

Film maker Lindsay Anderson captured Tobacco Road on film, perhaps better than anyone, when he wrote: “The whole of Tobacco Road, which for the extraordinary balance and control of its continual variations of mood – wistfully elegiac and wildly slapstick, cruelly satirical and tenderly sentimental – constitutes perhaps the most sheerly virtuoso performance of Ford’s career.”


Tobacco Road is set in a proverbial Georgia backwater at the height of the Great Depression where abject poverty is the order of the day. As for progress nothing much has happened since the end of the Civil War.

It’s important to know that Ford cast Charley Grapewin as Jeeter Lester to reprise his role in the Broadway production. Otherwise it might seem that Grapewin was channeling his earlier role as Grandpa in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. Jeeter is a shiftless conniver and patriarch who must secure the money to pay the mortgage on the old homestead or be packed off with Ma to the “poor farm”.

Best (and most relevant today) quote, “I don’t own it, you don’ own it. Now the bank owns it and they didn’t have anything to do with building it”.

The Lester family resembles every “hillbilly” stereotype imaginable. The Lester’s are rural poor, white and uneducated. They have been maligned and ridiculed in various forms for the better part of the 20th century – “The Beverly Hillbillies”, Li’l Abner, Ma and Pa Kettle and Deliverance. This may well be Ford foreshadowing Tennessee William’s Baby Doll (directed on the screen by Elia Kazan).

Ford takes full advantage of the hillbilly motif and plays it for laughs with a heavy helping of sexual innuendo. That comes in the form of Gene Tierney (years before Laura and Leave Her To Heaven). Here she plays Ellie May,  Jeeter’s daughter; who by all suggestion (in the words of my mother) is a sexpot.

When this movie was made, lampooning people like these folks was “fair game”. Today they would be described as “rural down scale white working class voters” – the same as the target of Lyndon Johnson’s failed “War on Poverty” in the early 1960’s.

In a broad episode, Jeeter’s son Dude (William Tracy) marries a “somewhat touched” Sister Bessie (Marjorie Rambeau), who breaks out into full-blown gospel hymn (“Bringing in the Sheep”, “Onward Christian Soldiers”) at the drop of a hat. Bessie may be touched but she is full throttle forward for Jeeter’s son, even buying him car as part of her dowry for marrying the boy of 20. She admits to being 39. Dude pretty much wreaks the car on their way back home. But no matter, the horn still works.

Are these the people who Obama was talking about with his “cling to their guns or religion” remark during the campaign?

John Ford however has affection for these characters and has Arthur Miller photograph them with the same luscious care and beautiful cinematography as he did for How Green Was My Valley and Young Mr. Lincoln.

I first saw this late one Saturday night on The Fabulous 52 with my dad. I couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13. My dad remembered the movie from his youth. We laughed our heads off. Maybe that’s what Ford wanted us to do – otherwise it would be too sad.

The film closes with Jeeter falling asleep on his porch after bragging about his plans for tomorrow. “I can just tell by the way it smells this is going to be a great year for cotton.” One gets the strong sense that tomorrow never comes for Jeeter and Ma.

Curiosities & Time Capsules -- This Crooner Is For Hire

Suddenly (1954, Lewis Allen) *****


“Tonight at five o'clock I kill the President. One-second after five there's a new President. What changes? Nothing!”


Often described as a film noir, I think of Suddenly as a tight B-movie capturing Frank Sinatra on the upswing of his show business comeback - a foreshadowing of things to come for both Frank and the rest of us.
Smack in-between the two seminal events of Sinatra’s comeback from the show business junkyard; the Oscar for From Here To Eternity and releasing the single Young At Heart (cut with his new arranger Nelson Riddle), Suddenly was released in October of 1954 by United Artists.
I first saw this as a public domain VHS tape on sale at a video store for a buck or two. Sinatra movies have always held special interest for me, as my mother was a fan; but Suddenly slipped through my television experience.
The best “B-movies” have their own cosmology. Each one exists in a cosmos where the most improbable of coincidences make perfect sense and the inevitable climatic twist (or surprise) is foreshadowed at the beginning. Suddenly has such a marker in its first few minutes and delivers quite a wallop at the end. Moreover like the perfect “B-picture” it satisfies and makes one want to come back for more.
The action takes place, in real time, in a small California town called Suddenly –


First Driver: [stops car to ask for directions] Officer, can you tell me the way to Three Rivers? 

Slim Adams: About two miles to the first main intersection, then turn left. It's about sixty miles. 

First Driver: Thanks. What town is this?
Slim Adams: Suddenly. 

First Driver: Suddenly what?
Slim Adams: No no. That's the name. 

First Driver: [laughs] That's a funny name for a town.
Slim Adams: Uh huh. Hangover from the old days. That's the way things used to happen here: suddenly.
First Driver: I see.
Slim Adams: Road agent, gamblers, gunfighters.
First Driver: Well, I take it things have changed. 

Slim Adams: Uh huh. Things happen so slow now, the town council is figuring to change the name to Gradually. 

First Driver: [laughs] Thanks, officer. 
[begins to drive away] 

Slim Adams: Pleasure. Come back.


Suddenly is the quintessential 1950s small American town. Where everyone knows everyone and all play by the rules. It has a main street where everyone shops and a grocery store just up the block from the toy store where you can buy a six-bit toy gun.
Microscopic in its detail of character Suddenly opens showing us just how the small town operates along the main drag over looked by a small house on the hill that will be stage for the main action of the film.
Despite wearing the familiar fedora this is not the affable Frank of the MGM years. After playing streetwise character of Pvt. Angelo Maggio, Suddenly provides the training wheels for future anti-hero film roles. Frank plays John Baron a sociopath turned psychotic during WW2. Barton is forever boasting about the Silver Star he won for being a “successful killer of Gerrys. “I did a lot of chopping in the last war…” he brags (it’s interesting he doesn’t acknowledge Korea). In peacetime he has turned gun for hire with the President of United States as his current target. Whether he works for the mob (or better the National Crime Syndicate identified in the recent Kefauver Hearings) or as a specter, hired by a foreign government (located behind the Iron Curtain). We are never told.

Sinatra is amazing is his ability to unwind his character - in real time - from credible G-man conning his way into the lives of innocents to a full-on psychotic monster. Frank goes full throttle in his ease to violence and comfort in his sadistic cruelty. His smile when kicking the sheriff in his recently broken arm is uncomfortably reminiscent of Richard Widmark pushing the old lady in a wheel chair down the stairs in Kiss of Death.
Sterling Haden shares above the title billing, playing against his hard-boiled film noir type as the sheriff who is willing to sacrifice all for the life of this commander-in-chief. A red blooded American through and through.
Hayden’s career seemed to be back on track having ditched the notion that he was a communist sympathizer (after his real life WWII heroics in Yugoslavia – and metal from Tito). He made five films in 1954; most notably Johnny Guitar (d. Nichols Ray). It can only be described as a gender-bender of a western, with Hayden playing second banana to Joan Crawford; it’s impossible to tell who was more macho.
Standing six-feet five-inches tall Hayden towers over Sinatra when side-by-side but in close-ups and full frame shots Sinatra dominates until the inevitable climax.
Just as important as its strong thematic connection to The Manchurian Candidate, Suddenly demonstrates Sinatra’s desire to risk making movies with controversial subject matter. His next Oscar nomination was in 1955 for The Man With the Golden Arm and he very much wanted to make a movie about the execution of Private Slovik (the only American executed for desertion during the second world war) written by blacklisted screenwriter Albert Maltz in 1960. Wikipedia advises that as Sinatra was campaigning for John F. Kennedy for President, the Kennedy camp was naturally concerned, and ultimately persuaded Sinatra to cancel the project. Which is ironic in that it was JFK’s encouragement that persuaded Sinatra to make The Manchurian Candidate in 1962.
Since first watching it I have always been drawn to Suddenly. I’m not sure why. It may be how perfectly in time it follows the Kefauver hearings into organized crime and Sinatra’s real life relationships with key mobsters. Or it maybe because it anticipates the importance of the mob in electing JFK (with Frank as conduit). And there is the matter of the mob being involved in President's assassination. But mostly it's the urban legend that Oswald watched Suddenly on local television before that fateful day in Dallas. Isn’t that why the movie was withdrawn like The Manchurian Candidate isn’t it? That did happen didn’t it?


As a side show it’s interesting to note that Hayden actually won a Silver Star in the war and Sinatra never severed in the military.

Time Capsules, Curiosities and Neo-Noir – Ann-Margret before carnal knowledge.

Kitten With A Whip (1964, Douglas Heyes) ***

“ Maybe it’s a mistake to feel sorry for kids like that … maybe it’s a mistake not to…”

Capitalizing on the upward trajectory of Ann-Margret’s career and the heat from being paired with Elvis in Warner’s Viva Las Vegas that spring, Universal released Kitten With A Whip in November of 1964. Giving A-M top billing for the first time, albeit surrounded by a crop of television stars. A-M stretches her acting chops to play juvenile femme fatal Jody Dvorak; whose personality vacillates between pathetic waif victim of society to sexual temptress and extortionist blackmailer. We don’t see this Ann-Margret again until Carnal Knowledge in 1971.

Kitten With A Whip opens with the same panic of a girl running away from something, we don’t know what, shades of Kiss Me Deadly. This time it’s Jody Dvorak running away from a reform school where she has stabbed a matron and escaped.  She winds up at the house of Dave Stratton played by John Forsythe, fresh from wrapping production on 157 episodes of Bachelor Father. In the main Forsythe plays the part as if he was still playing Uncle Bentley – Eisenhower Republican, sensitive to social issues (especially the plight of misunderstood juveniles), early 1960’s suburbanite (with traditional values; who uses a straight razor in 1964 anyway?) – who is estranged from his wife and contemplating running for the United States Senate.

Strattan lives in a mid-century California Ranch-style house with early American décor. His home is replete with the classic stereo-as-furniture, playing music left over from Harry Mancini’s soundtrack from Touch of Evil. Good Samaritan Dave believes a little hospitality and empathy and understanding talk can mollify any situation.

That is until Judy’s posse shows-up. A trio of well-clad delinquent’s led by Peter Brown (long a stalwart of television westerns of the day) as Ron the sadomasochist member well connected and educated member of the trio. Skip Ward stars as the volatile bad-guy and Diane Sayer as the drugged out girl in tow (she even wears a beauty mark). Diane Sayer, who once played the only bad date Wally Cleaver ever had. And for added measure we have Richard Anderson (who replaced Ray Collins as the copy playing Lt. Steve Drum in Perry Mason) as Dave’s best friend.

Be it an early 1960’s expression of film noir or an exploitation film (with the necessarily quotient of violence) Kitten With A Whip delivers as a first class B-Movie movie punch. Poorly reviewed in its day, Kitten With A Whip plays well as a guilty pleasure and look at the sociology of the 1960’s before psychedelia. After all the film is based on an original Fawcett paperback from 1959, we couldn’t expect any less.

Film noir fused with social realism in a woman’s prison. And it’s not pretty.

Caged (1950, Robert Cromwell) ***

Eleanor Parker (as Marie Allen) earned her first of three Oscar nominations playing a “young and innocent” inmate in this horror show of a woman’s prison. Billed as, “The Story of a Women's Prison Today!” Caged conforms to the muckraking mold of the urban and social realism Warner Bros. films of the 1930’s and is the flip side of The Big House. Hope Emerson dominates, both literally and figuratively (earning an Oscar nod as best supporting actress), as the sadistic matron towering over the inmates as a modern day gorgon exacting tribute payments while enjoying the protection of the state’s political machine. From a doe-eyed innocent Marie Allan turns into a hard case who has given-up any hope of returning to her old life (“From now on what’s in it for me is all that matters. For that forty bucks I heisted I certainly got myself an education”). As powerful as the Mervyn LeRoy pre-code classic I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (“How do you survive?” “I steal.”) Standout performances from Agnes Morehead, Jane Darwell, Jan Sterling, Lee Patrick and Gertrude Hoffman (in a bit role as Millie, an elderly "lifer" who warns Marie to go straight) make this a true noir classic.

Comfort Food/Guilty Pleasures -- Howard Hughes and the Blacklist

The Las Vegas Story (1952, Robert Stevenson) ***

     Hoagy Carmichael plays the piano player at the Last Chance Casino  (… not the best place in Las Vegas but far from the worst…”) narrating the opening of this gem of a B-movie from RKO before he settles in to the generic “Hoagy Carmichael” character – they guy who was always friends with the girl, but never gets her in the end. But Hoagy does sing and perform two of his songs, the pop standard “I Get Along Without You Very Well” and one of his comic masterpieces “The Monkey Song”. The Las Vegas Story is worth watching for this alone. The main players are Jane Russell as a femme with a dubious past, a talent for singing and hooking up with various men – her current husband, a delightfully prissy and despicable Vincent Price and Victor Mature (who never looked more zombie-like).  The pulp dialog is priceless -- “What a beautiful picture, moonlight, sagebrush and my wife with a stranger.”And the story behind the screenplay credits is one for Hollywood history books.  Produced by Howard Hughes, the original screenplay was written by Paul Jarrico, who was brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify. This not only brought an abrupt (albeit temporary) end to his rising career as a screenwriter but a battle for screen credit as well.  Hughes, an ardent anti-communist wanted Jarrico’s name taken off the production which prompted threats of a strike by writers guild, but they buckled to Hughes.  This is well covered in Victor Navasky’s definitive book about the blacklist, Naming Names. The cast also features Brad Dexter (the often forgotten member of The Magnificent Seven) and the wonderful bull dog faced character actor Jay C. Flippen. Wonderful second-unit location coverage of early fifties Las Vegas; it is interesting to note that the main action takes place in two fictitious casinos, The Last Chance and The Fabulous.  The logo and type treatment of the later is unmistakably like that of The (Fabulous) Flamingo.  Come to think of it the movie contains three of Howard Hughes passionate fixations (helicopters, casinos and Jane Russell’s breasts). 

Time Capsules: God and outer space – "The vast astronomic distances which are God's quarantine regulations."

Conquest of Space (1955, Byron Haskin) **1/2

Producer -- George Pal (tom thumb 1958, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, 1964)
Director -- Byron Haskin (The War of the Worlds 1953, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, 1964)

Released in the thick of McCarthyism and the Cold War this was no alien as monsters science fiction thriller. This wasn’t a science fiction movie at all; it was a science fact mixed with a “give-me-that-old-time-religion” message. Much like its immediate predecessor Destination Moon this was sci-fi without monsters. It was a movie about travel in outer space and what happens to the brave souls who make the trip (with their God).

Opening v/o – “This is a story of tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, when men have built a station in space, constructed in the form of a great wheel, and set a thousand miles out from the Earth, fixed by gravity, and turning about the world every two hours, serving a double purpose: an observation post in the heavens, and a place where a spaceship can be assembled, and then launched to explore other planets, and the vast universe itself, in the last and greatest adventure of mankind, the plunge toward the...”

“The Wheel” is an international space station, but it is clear that the Americans are in charge and compose the crew with the exception of a token Russian (Ross Martin)as a scientist and a Japanese astronaut acting as an apologist for WWII (“Some years ago, my country chose to fight a terrible war …”) round out the international crew.

After completing the space ship the General and his crew learn they are going to Mars and not the Moon as originally planned. Despite Byron Haskin’s interest in science fact such a change in plans amounts to only a “hop, skip and jump” difference in distance. However the science fact part of the story has many of the personnel suffering from “space fatigue.” A select crew of five are picked to make the trip to Mars.

We now shift from the visual thrills of space exploration to a philosophical-cum-religious inquisition into the ethics of space travel: should Earth-born men really be venturing into the unknown, potentially “godless” universe? A debate as to what God wants when it comes to the limits of man’s wanderings – be they the four corners of the earth or can they extend beyond? Especially when it means saving man from the limitations of a planet Earth rapidly running out of “raw materials”.

Rather than running into Martians or other demonic aliens the crew deals with general leading the expedition who becomes a religious nut whose new views include that the Mars mission is an abomination, as it isn't mentioned in the New Testament (which the General keeps handy throughout the trip). This sets up the second half of the picture as a philosophical battle as to whether or not it is blasphemous for man to venture into outer space. And this dose of religion mixed with “space fatigue” cause the General to have a “nervous break down” now believing that man’s “exploration” really amounts to an “invasion” -- “God didn't want man jetting off to new planets.”

I’m reminded by the excellent science fiction and fantasy blog Moria how much religion George Pal pumped into his movies.

“Most of George Pal’s films had a strong religious undertow – Pal himself was a Catholic. In The War of the Worlds the ironic ending of the atheist H.G. Wells’s novel with the Martians being destroyed by the “smallest thing on God’s Earth” was transformed into a full-blown religious Passover with humanity praising the Almighty for their deliverance; while When Worlds Collide played the film’s Noah’s Ark allegory up for all it possibly could. Conquest of Space ends on a note of cautious optimism by again resorting to religion – the astronauts are stranded on Mars but on Christmas Day it begins to snow (amid ringing bells on the soundtrack) and plant life begins to sprout – “only God can make trees” one character notes – which provides the astronauts with their unexpected salvation.”

This heavy-handed use of religion (and Christianity in particular) is what makes this movie interesting as a time capsule.

Despite the presence of visible matte lines the effects are impressive and the use of Technicolor was a major asset when the audience was used to seeing science fiction movies in black and white. The visuals are particularly exciting when one remembers that in 1955 people were watching black and white television and many sci-fi movies of the day were also shot in black and white.

Consistent with movies of its day (and the pattern left by B-war movies) the crew is cast with notable faces from the genre, each playing their stereotypical role – talk about type casting.

Mickey Shaughnessy, (who at 35 is playing a man in his fifties with obliviously touched-up sideburns) as the tough as nails master sergeant described as being, “30 years in the army and still too brainless to obey an order” his character is a stowaway aboard the spaceship to bring” its captain his tooth brush”. Shaughnessary is practiced at playing his character for comic relief here his Irish brogue is less purposely convincing the more he speaks.

Ross Martin (The Wild, Wild West), Andre Fodor UN personnel. When we see his mother wish him a successful mission we know that he’s toast and will not be making the voyage home. We also have William Hopper (we know him best as Paul Drake in Perry Mason as Dr. George Fenton; the G-Man responsible for the trip and best of all, Eric Fleming (we know him from CBS-TV's long-running western "Rawhide" as the trail boss Gil Favor) as Captain. Here he plays son of the commander of the expedition General Merritt played by the venerable Walter Brooke.

Perhaps the best time capsule element is a movie that is being shown to the crew prior to departure with Rosemary Clooney singing “On the Deset Sand” (from an unidentified film).

At a time when American hegemony was a governmental hope (if not plan) Conquest In Space works hard to make every American believe that God is on our side.