PROJECT MOON BASE (1953)

In 1970, a trip directly from the earth to the moon is considered too dangerous for humans, but a three-person crew is about to take off from an orbiting space station on an exploratory lunar trip, taking close up photographs of the lunar surface to study the feasibility of setting up a moon base. The space agency is on guard for sabotage that might be carried out by, as a title card puts it, "the enemies of Freedom" (i.e., Russians). As it turns out, such enemies are planning such sabotage by kidnapping one of the crew members, a Dr. Wernher, and replacing him with an exact lookalike whose mission is to take control of the lunar ship and ram the space station, destroying it. Meanwhile, there is tension brewing as Gen. 'Pappy' Greene is pressured to replace the chief pilot, Major Moore, with Col. Briteis, a female. This decision doesn't sit well with either Pappy or Moore, who is bumped down to co-pilot. They may be chauvinists, but as it happens, Briteis (pronounced "bright eyes" by everyone) acts a bit like Gidget, full of teenage spunk, constantly pouting and whining. At one point, Pappy scolds her, telling her she's too big for her britches, and that she's a spoiled brat who needs a spanking. The ship takes off and Wernher tries to wrest control from Briteis but is overpowered by Moore. But the saboteur's actions cause them to waste fuel and they have to make an emergency landing on the moon. When communications with the space station fail, Moore and the chastened Wernher leave the ship to set up a radio relay on the moon's surface. Wernher falls from a moon cliff and dies, and Pappy lets Briteis and Moore know that emergency supplies will be dropped off soon and they are now the first official lunar residents. Of course, for the sake of PR, they really should be married, so the President (also a woman) performs a ceremony from Earth, and Moore and Briteis become a happy couple, ready to anchor the coming moon base.

In a happy coincidence, the Artemis II was heading for lunar orbit as I watched this so this seems like a timely review. One makes allowances for early 50s sci-fi space movies as the genre was relatively new, but even so, this has not aged well. Apparently shot in ten days, it was originally intended as a pilot for a TV series (the teleplay was by sci-fi pro Robert Heinlein) but those plans were canceled and some new footage was shot to pad it out to a bit over an hour. The sets generally look cheap though some effects are nicely done; there are shots of people on the space station walking on the ceiling and sitting on chairs on the walls, which of course brings to mind Kubrick's 2001 (pictured at right). Scenes on the moon look fairly realistic. Even the space station, the first one shown in a movie, looks good. Aside from the blatant sexism in the portrayal of Briteis and the reactions of the men to her, the most bizarre thing here is the wardrobe. The crew wear snug t-shirts, little skullcaps, and the unsexiest shortie shorts you've ever seen—though interestingly, they do get the spacesuits right for the external action. The acting is strictly TV level; in fact, one of the better performances comes from Hayden Rorke, best known as Dr. Bellows in I Dream of Jeannie. Donna Martell (Briteis) is saddled with a terribly written character and she becomes the potential feminist icon you love to hate. Ross Ford (Moore) has little to do and, sadly, doesn't look all that appealing in his tight tees (though Martell does). The only humor here is used to poke fun at the female colonel, though one of the last lines, when Moore, seeing  that needed supplies have finally landed, says, "Briteis, it’s Christmas!" But the worst thing in the movie is the short appearance of a character named Polly Prattles, an obnoxious reporter who comes off more like a gossip columnist. Only recommended for sci-fi buffs interested in the genre's history. Posters for the film call it Project Moonbase, but the film itself uses Moon Base as two words. At top left are Ross and Martell. [YouTube]

ORPHEUS (1950)

The poet Orpheus is at a poet's café in Paris, feeling ignored by the newer, hipper poets (I'm tempted to call them "beatniks" though that concept didn't exist in 1950) because he's too commercial. The hot young poet Cégeste shows up drunk and stumbling on the arms of a woman known only as the Princess. He gets into a brawl and is hit by two motorcyclists in black leather. Her chauffeur Heurtebise puts him in the back seat of her car to take him to the hospital and she asks Orpheus to come along as a witness. During the trip, the view of the landscape turns to a photographic negative and we hear odd radio transmissions ("Silence goes backward faster"; "The bird sings with its fingers") that Orpheus comes to think are beautiful if very obscure poems. Orpheus discovers that Cégeste is dead and they head to the Princess' isolated home where Cégeste is laid out on a bed. The Princess waves her hand in the air and he comes back to life. With Orpheus watching, the Princess, Cégeste, and the two motorcyclists walk through a full-length mirror into what we find out is the underworld. The Princess is death personified. Orpheus cannot follow and the next time we see him, he wakes up in a quarry with Heurtebise standing near the car. The chauffeur has been instructed to take Orpheus back to his wife Eurydice and stay with him. Though Eurydice has been worried by his absence, she also seems disturbed by his return as her friends in the League for Women don't approve of Orpheus, and he refuses to explain his absence. She is also, we discover, pregnant. Soon, Eurydice is struck and killed by the black leather motorcyclists. Heurtebise offers to take Orpheus through the mirror underworld, but he must decide who he is in love with: Eurydice or Death.

This beautiful but often obscure film is a recasting of the Orpheus myth, in which Orpheus is allowed to go to the Underworld to bring back his dead wife Eurydice under the condition that, on their trip back, he doesn’t turn around and look at her. He does. She goes back to the land of death and he is literally torn apart by female followers of Dionysus during an orgy. This version dispenses with the finale, and indeed gives Orpheus and Eurydice a happy ending, with a less happy one for the Princess of Death. I've seen this film a few times over the years, and it's best not to read it as an exact replica of the myth, but as a dreamy fantasy that pulls elements from the myth to create a whole new narrative. It remains a movie full of ambiguity and mystery, and those elements will stymie some viewers. Roger Ebert called it that rare film that is made for "purely artistic reasons," and if you can leave yourself open to letting the visuals and the moods wash over you and let yourself think about it rather than interpret it, you might enjoy the experience. Jean Cocteau wrote and directed, and used some amazing special effects that, while perhaps seeming primitive today, are still effective: reverse motion, slow motion, film cuts, obvious rear projection. The utterly bizarre trips to and from the underworld are indeed quite otherworldly, and all of today's CGI probably could not achieve such an effective evocation of mood. The nonsense radio messages, Cocteau said, were inspired by resistance messages sent over the radio in WWII, an explanation that does not erase the effectiveness of the strange transmissions. In what is truly an art film, the acting is not the most important element, but the actors are mostly fine. I find Jean Marais as Orpheus (above left), the weak link in the cast, giving a surface performance as though he was just following the director's instructions. But Maria Caseres (Death) and Francois Périer (Heurtebise) bring some emotional depth to their mostly symbolic roles; Maria Dea is fine as Eurydice—not an especially sympathetic character—and Edouard Dermithe makes an impression in his limited role as Cégeste. I rarely felt emotionally engaged with the characters, but the visuals and the atmosphere and the odd stylistic touches (on screen and in script) make this worth watching as perhaps the archetypal art film of the 1950. Pictured at right are Périer and Marais. [TCM]

CHARLIE CHAN AT THE WAX MUSEUM (1940)

Based on the testimony of detective Charlie Chan, Steve McBirney is sentenced to death for murder, but he manages to shoot his way out of the courthouse and vows to get revenge against Chan. He heads for Dr. Cream's Museum of Crime, a wax museum with statues of infamous criminals, because Dr. Cream has a secret career: performing plastic surgery to give new faces to fugitive criminals. Meanwhile, for a radio show broadcast from the museum, Chan meets with Dr. Von Brom to debate the Rocke case. Rocke was put to death for a poison dart murder based on testimony from Von Brom, but Chan maintains that Rocke was innocent and the real killer was his partner Butcher Dagan, who was supposedly killed but might still be around. As the time of the late night broadcast nears, folks gather at the museum joining Chan, Von Brom and Dr. Cream, including Lily Latimer, Cream's assistant; Tom Agnew, the radio host and director; Edwards, an engineer; Mary Bolton, a reporter who is also dating Agnew; Carter Lane, a lawyer for Rocke's widow; and a simpleminded old watchman. We see a mysterious woman sneak in whom we suspect is Mrs. Rocke, perhaps come to see justice done for her husband. Finally, Chan's snooping #2 son Jimmy shows up to help his dad, though he mostly just gets in trouble. We see that Chan is being set up to be electrocuted at the debate table but Von Born gets it instead—except that on investigation, it's discovered that his death was actually caused by a poison dart. Could Butcher Dagen be among them?

This entry in the Chan series from 20th Century Fox is a notch above the norm. One reason is the effective setting of the shadowy wax museum at night. After the courtroom opening, the rest of the film is set solely in the museum and plays out mostly in real time. As in most wax museum movies, the statues provide a nicely creepy atmosphere and can also be mistaken for real people, and vice versa. A storm outside and flickering lights inside add to the eerie ambience. The dark single setting also helps hide the B-movie budget. This was the first Chan film with a running time of about one hour, and most of the rest would follow suit, indicating lower budgets and lower exhibition expectations. Sidney Toler and Victor Sen Yung are old hands by now as Chan and Jimmy, though Jimmy is an exceptional doofus here, and the supporting cast is so-so, the standouts being C. Henry Gordon as Dr. Cream and busy character actor Marc Lawrence (who kept acting into the 21st century) as McBirney. Marguerite Chapman and Ted Osborn are adequate as the romantic couple, as is Michael Visaroff as Von Bron. Hilda Vaughn doesn't have a lot of dialogue but has the right look for the mysterious lady trespasser. The exposure of the ultimate villain was a surprise to me, but the Chan films were not known for truly playing fair with clues or background information. As you might predict, there is a wax statue of Chan which, of course, gets mistaken for the real person at least twice, including in a fun final shot in which Jimmy gives his dad a good swift kick in the rear, thinking he's kicking the statue. Pictured are Gordon and Toler. [DVD]