No Sex Please, We're British... from Space: DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS, FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE

The following is based on something of mine originally published in the print zine Van Helsing's Journal, back when blogs barely existed, a 'zine from the great Harry Long, a very British blend of gallows' humor and urbane drollery (my piece, I mean). My grandmother was a daughter of the Revolution with several descendants fighting in that war, the war of 1812 and two hung in Salem (two escaped to less bonkers towns) as witches in the late 1600s so I guess I can 'pass' in a Darby pinch, and right now--flash forward--Hammer's black-and-white 1063 Bloch-chip NIGHTMARE plays behind me while I write this; the pained screaming of the heroine in the madhouse dovetails perfectly with some looney lady screaming like a possessed women on the stairs below my apartment. I love those kind of bonkers coincidences--they're absolutely mad, utterly bonkers. The film itself's rubbish (NIGHTMARE, I mean), as far as I can glean --the heroine's head is too wide. But Hammer's vampire stuff is good, in full-throated color, as seen in the other film on the disc, KISS OF THE VAMPIRE. You'd think being so good with that end of the fantasy spectrum, the Brits could handle sci-fi. But if I was queen of Mars and looking for willing earthmen to save my stale race, I wouldn’t look to England. A little 1953 sci-fi cheapie called CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (in 3-D) once proved America to be an ideal place from which a lusty moon matriarchy might order fit specimens. In fact, that film’s central theme, not exactly new in itself (a popular motif in pulps), prompted a slew of copycats: MISSILE TO THE MOON (1958), QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958), ABBOTT AND COSTELLO GO TO MARS (1953), even INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES (1963). All of them are classics, worth repeat viewings, except for... well, any of them. I do love CAT though, for all the wrong reasons (see: The Moon, Cat-Women, and Thou). After all, the sexy insinuations inherent in the formula are nigh irresistible and more or less write themselves: phallic rocket ships, sexy cat ladies in curvaceous craters, underground lairs represented by some cushions and a statue of the dancing Shiva, a giant spider, sandwich it betwixt some stock rocket shots and some hopeful young starlets willing to dress up in funny tiaras or black leotards with painted eyebrows - and then either raid the stock cue library or hire a newcomer kid like Elmer Bernstein, then just starting out, to score it.   

With all the remakes and rehashes of the formula, it’s no wonder that even the British would timidly try and climb aboard. And yet, it seems that the material is just not all that suited to the British nature. The two versions, of the tale--such as they are--addressed in this post, both fall into traps even the worst of the Yank versions avoid. As we shall see, the reason may be Britain’s shyness in the face of the almighty British Censors, or sex itself. But hang it all, why even start the grille if all you’re serving are the same old chips?

Let’s work backwards, getting the worst out of the way first: the 1956 Cy Roth opus FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE, a title is bandied about in discerning circles, as of the same mettle as ROBOT MONSTER or PLAN NINE. But it is nowhere near in their league; I suggest it's earned a spit purely because it's been so hard to find for so damned long. It seemed as if Michael Medved--who 'praised' it in THE FIFTY WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME was the only one who'd ever seen it. I personally was on the look out for it for decades, both on TV and video.

Once seen, it is untenable to even mention it in the same breath as ROBOT MONSTER, CAT WOMEN and PLAN NINE--those may be gaudy messes but are nonetheless compulsively fascinating, thanks to areasonably brisk tempo and the courage of truly gonzo convictions. Neither one is dull and both manage to be quite sexy in their offhand manner---full of robust music and wild flights of imagination. The best thing one can find to get excited about with the FIRE MAIDENS is the orchestral passage from Borodin’s “Stranger in Paradise" which accompanies the many ceremonial dances, sounding not unlike someone's listening to the radio in another room. One does tire of it rawther fast, however.

One thing FIRE teaches us, is there are levels within the idea of "terrible" in films and that all sorts of cheap effects, from visible wires to visible folds in the 'night' sky curtain, are forgivable as long as you avoid being boring. Within the accidental Brechtianism induced by poverty row necessity, we see a whole range of tricks and tactics we can learn for our own films: narration over stock footage, for example, to eat up huge stretches of time without ever having to take off a lens cap. So you would think FIRE MAIDENS would make up for its badness by being a textbook example of how to cut corners and take advantage of what one does have, except the absent-minded Roth apparently threw the movie away and kept just the corners. Nothing he does have seems to intrigue him, so he just tells the actors to take their time and quietly sneaks out for a cigarette.  

So... to kick things off, after watching some airport stock footage we get Luther Blair (Anthony Dexter)—an American—coming over to London to helm a space program. After a monotonous streak of London street stock footage, we have a lengthy scene of Blair and some cronies being sexist to a cute secretary. They’re planning a big space mission but to hear the boys talk you would think that what they’re really doing is planning a night out on the town with some potential investors: “Let’s just hope there’s some form of life!” Blair says, as if any mission to Jupiter’s moons would be written off as a complete failure unless they found flora and space age fauns. It would be funny if it weren't so tedious and vaguely offensive.

The next several miles of film are spent adrift in tediously repetitive montage to signify take-off: hands rest on levers, crew members look at instrument panels, people sit at their desks looking up at dials; consoles and flashing lights, buttons, hands on levers, crew members, dials, people reacting, desk surfaces, buttons, levers, instrument panels, button, flashing lights, buttons, etc. Sample dialogue: “All instruments check out; we’re approaching zero hour,” (I wrote it down). You begin to realize that you are now in zero hour yourself—a place of cinematic stillness from which no mind can easily recover. Whether or not the intention was some state of surrealist semi-conscious trance, the way it is in the work of Franco, Rollin, or David Lynch, the slow boredom lulls us to semi-consciousness; unlike their work, however, there's no awe, love, or even respect for either women or sex. As one of the disgruntled Earthlings says when a gaggle of women keep trying to fondle him, "OK - beat it, vamoose, skedaddle! Hit the road! Get lost!" (he's trying to be American) Dude, they don't understand your idiot slang-aroonie! He just wants to roll over and go back to bed; and maybe so do we.

In fact, considering the shortage of British science fiction to spring ideas off of for his 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I can’t help but imagine Stanley Kubrick at some time absorbing this dreary little film at some sleepy matinee and subconsciously associating science fiction with boredom and too many close-ups of buttons and dials (in case you forgot, there are whole sections near the middle of 2001, such as when Bowman and Hal square off, during which time even the most dosed of midnight movie audiences will nod off or sneak out). Perhaps there’s an unspoken intention in the minds of British matinee makers to put any children in the audience soundly to sleep, in order for their stressed-out parents to quietly sneak out to the lounge for a cigarette. 

The sublimated sex of the film reaches its pinnacle before we even see the fire maidens—it happens when the spaceship finally lands on the 13^th moon (in a shot lifted from Bert I. Gordon’s King Dinosaur). Of course the associations with a big Apollonian metallic tube landing on a soft Dionysian surface are long over-analyzed, but the way the stressed-out astronauts sit around for minutes just smoking their pipes contentedly, looking at each other like a bunch of cats who swallowed the canary, well, they hammer the point home, hard. It will be the last thing they do hammer. And hey, the moon turns out to be as manicured and pastoral as Kensington Gardens! And there are actual women, so the astronauts exit the craft and spot--about a mile away--some cute bird in a short skirt getting mauled by some spastic janitor in a plastic mask. Even from that range, one of the astronauts is confident he could “rescue” the girl with a shot from his pistol. (It should be noted that, in order to capture the astronauts’ perspective, we never see a close-up of the girl or monster, they stay way in the distance throughout the scene.) The captain--brilliant as he is—notes they might miss and hit the girl, so they wait and let maiden and monster slug it out. After about half an hour, one of the men hits on the happy idea of trotting over there to see what’s what. The monster runs off and we’re headed to the “ahem” palace.

We know we’re not in an American sex-and-space film when the next inhabitant of the moon who pops up is Prassus (Owen Berry) --a kind of Hugh Hefner meets one of those hammy Shakespearian Roman toga-wearing aliens on old Star Trek episodes (but with none of the flair of either)--who proceeds to lay a lengthy spiel on the astronauts in a self-bemused elderly tour guide tone, explaining the presence of "American"-speaking humans on this moon so far from Devonshire; with enough slow hamming to put a high school theater director into an angry coma, he declares his 'daughters'. to be from Atlantis. And adds they are all daughters of Aphrodite (making him a kind of icky demi-god?) and as we collectively wrestle with our feminist ire (all these hotties are--it's clearly stated--under his purview, he's the boss, not some queen as in CAT WOMEN or MISSILE TO and his way with them is patronizing, like they're all mentally-infirm scullery maids); they came over here way back when London was still just muddy druids and magical gnomes. Aphrodite's children must not perish from this 13th of all moons. I would wait for the next batch of fathers though, as these guys are mentally-infirm enough to derange a line all by themselves. Combined with the dim daughters of Aphrodite, even the most fervently creationist will feel their inner Darwin seethe.

At this point in the story I confess I fell into a doze which I awoke from just in the nick of time to see the old man finally wrap it up and the fire maidens come in and do their magic dance. Now if you’ve seen CAT WOMEN you know that the far-out mating dance the kittens do is the highlight of that film; it’s a beatnik interpretive group slink set to a nicely melancholic and very hip Elmer Bernstein flute-led jazz ---it's sexy, melancholic and narcotizing all at once. The fire maidens on the other hand seem more like a Catholic School marching band who made the mistake of huffing solvents right before the big school 'Spartan spirit' parade.

Confident that it could only get better now that the girls were around (though I heard the men try to escape rather than have sex with them - punters that they are), I still found myself hurling the disk across the room at this point, like Jack Palance in CONTEMPT. That’s an apt comparison as well, for if Lang’s film-within-a-film of the “Odyssey” turned out as boring as it looked from the dailies (all the statues with painted eyelids), it would be FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE. I know it breaks all film writer ethics for me to write about it since I missed seconds--maybe hours--in my mix of boredom, rage, and sleepiness, yet I saw all that may become a man; Who dares endures more is none. The most unpardonable of sins is that is that, aside from the tedious slog of blast-off footage (all those dials and hand on phones, lest ye forget), and the occasional appearance of the "monster"--it could be any gladiator / Hercules style movie from the era, only not as good, which says a lot, since very few are any good at all. At least, them being Italian, they dost get laid rather than just getting snarky (one snickering earthman mentions one of them is "last in line" for the attentions of one of the maidens, implying some grotesque SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE scenario though clearly it's just meant to make him 'pass' as a Yank stereotype, you know red-blooded moron?). In the end, the girl who tries to help them (and comes onto the captain - smart move) gets to leave with the men, like Alta at the end of FORBIDDEN PLANET. The rest would rather snicker feet than lie on a pretty lady's Ancient Rome salon-knockoff divan sipping drugged wine, especially if it meant having to endure Prasus Tourettes'-like Aphrodite peans.

To get the blue boredom out of my psyche I put in Robert Siodmak's timeless 1944 classic COBRA WOMAN once the MAIDENS were safely from my sight dispatched, and lo--I was mightily healed. Just looking at that headdress (below) restored my internal balance. The colors alone could restore faith even in a man who'd just seen MYRA BRECKINRIDGE. Man, a cigarette sounds awful good...

"Giff me the Cobra Jool!"

Released two years earlier but leagues of ahead of FIRE in cultivated cool, DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954) is still shitty but has its moments. Like the louts in FIRE MAIDENS (or the stuffed-lipper explorers in PREHISTORIC WOMEN, for that matter - not reviewed in this piece, but very similar), these tavern lads would rather die trying to escape than mate with alien women, but at least there's one cool dude, even if he is only ten.

PREHISTORIC WOMEN (1967) enough to scare any sensible Brit explorer back to Cambridge.

It’s based on a play set around a remote inn on the Scottish moors, ala Edgar Ulmer’s polemic-burdened but mucho expressionist MAN FROM PLANET X (1951).  This one does offer some drollery and there’s the presence of Hazel Court for "traditional” sex appeal to counterbalance the dominatrix masculine side of the statuesque Nyah (Patricia Laffan), the devil girl herself. She's here to grab some virile specimens to take home for breeding, but whey she'd go to a remote pub for such a task is a mystery.

As if trapped in the ruts of cliche,  a traveling old scientist sent by a clearly dismissive and downplaying government to investigate saucer reporting, snidely dismisses Hazel Court's mention of a flashing light in the sky, assuring her she either exaggerates or is just an idiot with no sense of size. He snidely climes this event “couldn’t possibly have happened,” even after it already did (he clearly knows nothing about empirical evidence); when Nyah tells how on her planet the sex wars were real and that the women won by wiping the men out with a “perpetual motion chain reactor beam” he condescendingly shakes his head, inferring, this chick is just some costumed hysteric. No wonder she is so unamused by this fog-bound stereotype-straitjacketed British cross-section. There's a few welcome faces like John Laurie as the Scot innkeeper, but the 'Americanized' reporter Hugh McDermott commits the double sin of being one, a narc (he rats out escaped convict--the beady-eyed, Garfunkel-haired Peter Reynolds to the rest of the gang) and a smug bastard to women. I find him even more offensive than Joseph Tomelty's Blue Book-style ridicule-and-marsh-gas professor (even staring right at the landed flying saucer he dismisses it, saying "we mustn't let our imaginations run away with us," and when Nyah mentions she's from Mars, he says "preposterous!" and later, concerning the invisible force filed around the pub "that's absolutely ridiculous" as if until he can believe it "with his own eyes" it does not exist). The rest of these dolts deserve total annihilation. If her planet's desperate enough to want to mate with men from this paltry assemblage, Nyah truly warrants our sympathy. For these men are mostly spared such a deserving violent death; and certainly not the attention of cute lasses like Court or Adrienne Cori as the tavern wench (who naturally goes for the fugitive, lest formula be too far transcended).

Luckily there is a young rascal of a lad, the wee Tommy. Normally I hate kids in these film but in this he gets to act in a way Howard Hawks would approve of, i.e. not a prick. Nyah's sagging spirit is mildly buoyed by his genuine curiosity and fearlessness, for his curiosity bypasses all the usual cliche'd stances, and for a brief minute they kind of bond and the film flickers into life. One starts to gather insights into the way the adult egos continually turn encounters with the alien into fights, the way their imbecile behavior quickly turns the potential for a close encounters into war of the worlds ("all inhabited planets have wars!" Nyah coldly announces). Maybe, the film briefly flickers to imply, we should make children our space ambassadors, for they remain open to the new and strange, shit like that.

The British are good at addressing generation gap issues, and here the movie could have made something of itself. But the script refuses to dally with anything other than pure trite cliché and we even lose faith with Hazel Court, who bashes the drinking of the idiot reporter even while she's the one who provides him with Brandy, ("it is a required taste," he notes. "And I've acquired it." But the film doesn't wish to get weird with having Nyah take Tommy along, even if she promises to "wait til he's older" or something. And little is made amongst the squabbling adult cast back at the pub of the fact that “wee Tommy” has returned unharmed from the ship.  The kid is not afraid of either Nyah or the robot and wants to see the inside of her ship, making him the first person who hasn’t reacted towards her with either patronizing suspicion, jealousy, cliche'd British posturing, or outright vehemence, and her steely countenance lightens just enough that you start secretly rooting for her. She is, in her unsexy way, pretty sexy after all, but it’s all too clear that the makers of this film are missing the point --they don't seem to 'get' the mythic current that, once tapped into, can make even the hoariest of cliches and effects roar to life. They miss the point because, as I noted earlier, they can’t shake their repression even in their fantasies --and if I may hazard a wild pop psychology guess I’d pin it all on their corporal punishment-ridden school system. When imagining chicks from Mars, they don't come out like Lambda of the cat women but a disciplinarian schoolmarm dominatrix hybrid with a manly profile. Deliciously butch, shouting her lines as if she’s correcting her understudy’s enunciation loudly enough to embarrass her in front of the rest of the cast, she sounds a bit like Bette Davis as Lady Bracknell from IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. Is that sexy? Not unless your childhood was of a really, really specific type.

Like mine.

Johnny knows the score.

The last chunk of DEVIL GIRL is spent with the men all arguing over who will be the one to 'sacrifice' his life by agreeing to go with Nyah in her spaceship back to Mars to lend his “ahem” participation to her planet's refurbishment. Everyone gets a shot, if you'll forgive the expression, but finally square shouldered hero tackles it by going full double-agent. What a sport! Like Jimmy Cagney pretending to be scared on his way to the electric chair in ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, he acts how any true American would, i.e. fuck all y’all, I’m goin’ to Mars and gettin’ my freak on. Only to--well--I can't spoil it. Suffice it to say, though, he's an ass. 

--

The sad feeling one comes away with from both these films, aside from the groan inducing tawdriness, is that when it comes to 50s sexual repression, the British were perhaps even more fucked up than us. While these films were being made, America was reading our Freud and Kinsey reports and sewing the seeds for what would be The Mad Men generation. Americans may have needed to hide out in a cave inside the moon to be able to have crazy bestial orgies without fear, but at least we more or less got to have them. The poor British, on the other hand, deep in the cave with us as they may be, freeze up, think of England, and get hostile, like a nervous virgin freshman at their first keg party who refuses to drink, all while saying they don't need it to have a good time, when it's clear they do and not only that, but they're bumming everyone else out, and already want to go home. Dude - we all know someone like that. We wish, pray they'll fucking take a fucking drink and loosen up instead of fuming in the corner, testy we don't all just gather round in a circle and bask in their pissy sanctimony. I can judge them now, because I am sober too... now, except I avoid the problem by staying home, and watching old sci-fi movies - which I saw originally while drunk, so I can get a Pavlovian echo - and anyway - who'm I hurtin'? The TV basks in my pissy sanctimony without one eye roll. But though I see PLAN NINE and CAT WOMEN at least once a year or so, if not more, and some lesser shit like MISSILE TO THE MOON and BRIDE OF THE MONSTER when those run out.. DEVIL GIRL, well, it's better than QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE, and unlike that trashy zero budget waste (which makes the mistake of winking through its material rather than playing it straight), DEVIL at least tries to be of good quality, which if you can't have 'fun' is at least something (FIRE on the other hand has neither quality nor fun). Also, I return to DEVIL a lot as I'm a sucker for foggy moors in rich black and white (there's no fog though) As in Ulmer's MAN FROM PLANET X, there's some groovy miniatures, but without that movie's Mason Adams torturing the alien for 'secrets' is so didactic and belabored it siphons the fun out (same with DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL - dude, I know nuclear war's a dick move, don't Stanley Kramer me - I came for kicks, pops, kicks!).

On the other hand, though it doesn't lecture or pander, but DEVIL GIRL does have a serious problem, one that speaks to a total misunderstanding of what makes sci-fi work. Shakespeare wrote in MACBETH, of a ravaged Scotland "almost afraid to know itself." Can this not serve epitaph duty on FIRE MAIDENS and DEVIL GIRL, two films where--even though surely no one will take it as instruction for real life--the characters remain afraid to step one inch away from their stock type's glum Englishness? Instead of celebrating (and gently laying) these strong man-eating, sexually brash and forthright babes of space, our dull British astro-ambassadors rear back in indignation and, thinking of queen and country and of boasting about their lustful appetites rather than just sating those appetites and shutting up about it, that would be too.... what? French? Know thyself, England, by which I mean your appetites. The hypnotized Albert notes that "we are all the slaves of a great and powerful civilization.... let us prepare for our rulers." These Englanders clearly take umbrage with someone landing on their shore and taking over their country via superior weaponized technology. You'd think they'd see the connection, the return of the oppressed, the parallel between Johnny the Robot's laser beam and Her Majesty's Naval Barrage. "None of this has ever happened before," the fugitive says to comfort his girl, but he's got a short memory. Or is that maybe the core of the British 50s space sex problem, that refusal to look below the surface of one's own native first world soil, lest the zombie claws of the colonized below pull them down, the amnesia of first world arrogance? Is DEVIL a movie about the coming of the.... whatever weird world's a higher power than the once so-mighty First. Let's raise a glass of vodka to them, in advance, for-- be it to God, the Queen or fiery sexual passion--surrender is the only victory. Some men only learn this the hard way and- if they ever stop wilting before eerily strong and mighty women, that way may finally come, no matter what their place or decade of origin may be. Courage, 1950s England! Arise, 1910s Themyscira! America now, Nostrovia! 

Portions of this review first appeared in Van Helsing's Journal vol. 2, 2001
NOTES:
1. (PS since this writing it's come out on an Olive Blu-ray. Meanwhile John Huston's FREUD is nowhere to found? Oh the mundanity!)
2. I went to the cinema in London back in '05 and they still had a smoking lounge with a bar. Not sure if they're still 'sigh' allowed.