Gravitational Distortion in 70mm: Hitchcock and Kubrick in VistaVision, Cinerama, on Blu-Ray

Summer means barbecues and blah blah but also giant outdoor screens with buggy picnics; and for the indoor kids: lots of intense air-conditioned journeys into beloved classics via the miracle that saved us all: HD widescreen TV + Blu-ray remastering, and in each case the ultimate choice for repeat big screen pristineria: the 70mm negatives of classic Hitchcock and Kubrick.

But what about the movies themselves? You've seen 'em all before, a thousand times, does all that popping color and definition make a difference worthy of double, triple, quadruple dipping?

Oh, Johnny-Oh. Of course it does.

Vertigo

NORTH BY NORTHWEST, REAR WINDOW, and VERTIGO always held up even on full-screen (though I always had my doubts about the latter), but now with the full brilliant intensity of VistaVision (which was 'taller' 70mm) captured on Blu-ray, the precarious angles and dangling off roofs, the plunging hills of San Francisco, the detail in all the little apartment backyard windows, and the presidential noses all make sense in a whole new way. On a big HD screen we can imagine the plummet straight down through Midge's window in VERTIGO, how it would look (above) on I-Max 3D; we feel the bottom drop out in our spines when looking down at the street or the rocks below Mount Rushmore in NORTH. IF w imagine the original audiences going "whoa" and closing their eyes when beholding these staggering drop offs on a three story 70mm VistaVision screen (but not getting motion sick from too much quick camera movement and rapid cut. The big screen explains the slow glacial lack of edits and close-ups.)

North by Northwest (walls as censor-and-gravity-defying beds.)

Meanwhile smaller spaces and angles take on vast dizzying nonlocality in Hitch's framing: which direction is up vs. down (and how the two get easily confused) factors heavily in NORTH BY NORTHWEST (as the title might indicate). The collapse of the bed in Eva Marie Saint's train compartment, for example, illustrates Hitch's using the power of a giant screen to play with audience's sense of gravity (and thus do a little pirouette around the censors, dreadfully afraid of seeing couples lie down atop each other). Though Grant and Saint are pressed against the train compartment wall during their big clinch, the vertical effect becomes almost horizontal. The way the roll slowly around each other while kissing against the wall feels like they are lying down in bed. It's only that the bed has become the size of the wall. Gravity has shifted. For awhile, the angles of the frame, and the angle of Marie Saint's eyes, are the only things stationary. Her eyes become the center of the spinning compass, as she and Grant twist around, moving down, and then up, the wall; a simple close quarters love scene is turned--through Hitch's savvy anticipation of the effect of VistaVision's giant screen--into a kind of smokin' hot amusement park ride.

North by Northwest (tire = sudden rupture of screen/distance)

The planes dissolve-
(small razor --- big face)
the dwindling safe spaces and the large open field
(no shields or stairs to the sewers).
The immediate kiss-off.
Roger transforms again into regular suited CK Dexter Haven,
shaving with her tiny razor
She makes the call, and it's all arranged, the desolate fields.

Flatness reins - the geometry of the image reduced to a child's conception of the horizon line (sky a blue band at top, ground a brown band at bottom.)

Without corners to hide in, mice feel terribly exposed.

"Big face, small razor" North by Northwest

"That plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops," notes the average joe on his way to wherever. He's the harbinger - a sign that from now on things will be done where they are not done. Lying down in the crops becomes like standing and leaning against a protective wall, like lying in bed with Saint, in reverse.

The plane and Cary now mirror again the plunge to the earth;
the plane comes down in triangles. The more triangles are created in this landscape, the more chances to hide. Eventually Cary all but draws his way out with angles, and Hitch makes sure math is obeyed, if not gravity.  The plane eventually has no choice but to collide into a truck. What a plane can do by buzzing down on a guy in a field no one knows, it's a dumb way to do it (when a simple drive-by would have been easier), marking the decline of Mason's villainous upper hand. Only once or twice do we even get a machine gun noise, and then, it's after the fact, as if he just takes some parting shots as he leaves, nothing like the inescapable damage done by an actual strafing WWI biplane.

North by Northwest (directional lines invaded)

But the plane explosion marks the turning point - R.O.T (the "O" stands for "nothing") will play  the peevish lover. And then he'll even play dead (his very next role) from then on, be free of roles (except as 'himself,' since he's agreed to keep up the disguise of the undercover agent. In other words, once he assumes the mistaken identity, he validates the villain's previously wrong presumption). Just as Cary, if he'd been really that drunk and pointed downhill in his car headed towards a cliff SHOULD have gone over the side, and he should have been killed on the road. He's beginning to reverse the polarity. From now on - with the explosion of the plane - he's baptized in disillusionment - he's on the offensive.

North by Northwest (Grant loses equilibrium)

An earlier example of the gravitational distortion was lost for years thanks to the limitations of the small screen. Consider the scene in the precinct when a drunk Cary Grant is being led into night court at the local police station. Staggering around, the cop supporting him and leading him over to the bench. As he staggers to one side he sees another cop bend over to tie his shoe - and so Cary starts leaning over too, as if he presumes the bent over cop is actually standing up and it's Cary who is upside down! He's trying to compensate by turning his perspective upside down, not unlike how one might compensate for double vision by covering one eye. It's the sort of small detail Cary and Hitch just toss away -there's no cutesy musical quotes around it, no close-up of Cary's mugging face, and Bernard Herrmann is no Mickey Mouser --it's just folded in, a gift to notice only on the big VistaVision screen, or in the future, when TVs are wide and image as lustrous as brand new (2). 

Big faces...

By now our Thornhill is a master of corners, and screen traversement (North by Northwest)

I always loved North by Northwest, but some other big screen gems in the Hitch cannon---Vertigo and To Catch a Thief in particular--used to bore me senseless. With analog video's faded colors, the giant 70mm frame was cropped mercilessly, the long shots of San Francisco and the French Riviera seemed far away and dull, like something that might be shown by a grandparent some 7th grade social science teacher.

But then - seeing To Catch a Thief for the first time on Blu-ray, via my big HD 'deep black' home screen via a quality HD TV of decent size, digitally restored from a vivid VistaVision 70mm negative, was literally a revelation, as in a transformative religious experience. It was hardly the same film at all

To Catch a Thief - stills via DVDBeaver and 1000 Frames of Hitchcock

To Catch a Thief on VHS was a bore; on DVD it was okay; but on this remastered Blu-ray, man, it is one of the 'essential' vacation duplication movies in my roster. I watch it every winter on my 60-inch Sony Bravia and every summer on my 60-inch Sonia Bravia, and I feel like I'm there, having taken a running dive through my 60-inch Sony Bravia into the sunny waters of a magical alternate France where everyone speaks English and I can roll with a sunbaked Cary Grant in that crazy gray sweater and red cravat combination as he gingerly avoids Grace Kelly's smoldering but weirdly child-like perversity, as well as that annoying little scamp Brigitte Auber (1). We all know the one he should have hooked up with is Grace's badass mother [Jessie Rose Landis] but such was the way of the world... sigh.

The ending with all the stuffy period costumes and the dissolves through the long, endless dancing, gets a bit draggy even so. Endless lords and ladies all gussied up like you keep hoping for Cary's old gang to stop catering and dress like revolting peasants and guillotine the lot. But the slow leisurely pace is far less grating on a big beautiful Blu-ray where the colors of every flower pops and makes a personal connection so deep you can smell the roses, and taste Grace Kelly's expensive lipstick. All in all, it really gives you the symptoms of what it's like to cater an event like that, or play in the band, or DJ: the endless standing around, waiting to go home, the fantasy of being able to take your shoes off, prop 'em up on the coffee table, and watch old Universal horror movies while drinking til dawn. That fantasy of inevitable delight is here well-visualized by Cary's hair-raising rooftop chase,  bathed in intoxicating greens, making full use of VistaVision's harrowing downward plunges.

To Catch a Thief

Speaking of GraceKelly, I used to have the same problems (faded colors, pan and scan, etc) with Hitch's Rear Window (1954). I used to (i.e. since taping it around age 14) wince at the notion that this elderly anemic hobbled little gray-haired apple-haired gray-cheeked 'decent' all-American schmuck Jimmy Stewart kept trying to talk super rich hottie Grace Kelly out of dating him, ranting about the rough and tumble life a globe-trotting photographer, and that she'd have to tag along with him on his journeys, as if wives accompanied soldiers into battle, like they were handcuffed together. I felt like Grace Kelly was really slumming, dealing with old gramps here, when in other movies she was picking the far more worthy Cary Grant. Why on earth would she be courting this geriatric homebody artiste-type and why would he be insane to try to talk her out of it?

I would watch this film frequently for I had it on the same tape that had Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), Naturally, I'd compare them, and imagine what Bill Fields--who was willing to marry the loaded Mrs. Hemoglobin (the ever-imperious Margaret Dumont) in order to put a nest under his little niece Gloria Jean--would think of Jimmy's reticence. Sir, you impugn this lady's austere character!

But time makes fools of us all, and I ended up feeling semi-trapped too in a similar relationship, from 2003-07--she an uptown successful professional girl who loved make-up and Diana Von Furstenburg dresses and all the finer things, etc. So I 'grew' into understanding LB's reticence and now, on the big screen, or via high quality Blu-ray Sony Bravia or whatever, I can get the effect of uncanny sexual fear generated by Grace's heedless adoration and that it's totally intentional. On the small screen she was beguiling - but on VistaVision, looming over sleepy LB Jeffries, 30 feet tall, looming above the audience she's like a combination Vogue cover and the Angel of Death about to sweep over a battlefield.

any similarity to Raymond Burr is purely subliminal (Rear Window)

 Hitch frames her as a vampire appearing out of the darkness; Stewart below her, shadowed, crippled, shriveled, semi-asleep (symbolically neutered) and somewhat fear-frozen. Her sheer proximity on a 70mm super-tall movie screen, face right up in extreme close-up, like a gigantic devouring vampire giantess beaming down lovingly but hungrily at a child she's about to drain, and us in the audience, and I can relate - a feeling like being tickled or looking down from a very high structure (!)

The Gigantic space-invading Mother Moab (Rear Window)

The best he can do to dissuade her is to rant about elephants and dusty African safaris, as if every wife had to accompany every travel photographer on every sojourn, when in reality, it's clearly the reverse. She's ready for the jungle - it is he who dreads her world. He dreads being trotted out to the opera and being bored at glib advertising parties, charity balls, and who can blame him?)

The other main benefit of the big screen Blu-ray 70mm enhancement of course is the clarity of the window boxes, the other apartments across the courtyard. On the small TV they were visible but unimpressive. But... Imagine you're seeing them on the big VistaVision screen: the figures in the small boxed windows approximately the size of you, in the audience looking up, as if you're snooping on real apartments across from the screen, like if you vaulted out of your chair you could land right in that hottie's window. In the reverse direction, there's Grace Kelly moving out of her moab-size 'immediacy' in LB's apartment, climbing up into the apartment of the suspect, a parallel to your own 'entering' the 3D massiveness of the screen -- like she crept out of the film and into the audience, or the reverse. Suddenly there's no difference, and it's spooky.

Climb on up and rescue the red-headed damsel (even in the 1950s, uptown NYC spinster/divorcees preferred short red hair.)

With this enhanced added effect, the dramas in the windows have a new added sense of lost beauty that is is, when the rain falls or the night is late, clearly indebted to the paintings of Edward Hopper. The above scene of "Miss Lonelyhearts" eating alone, for example, is so sad because she's unaware of our empathy (and is too dumb to just take off her fancy clothes, put her feet up, crack open a bottle of wine and some ice cream, and watch TV all night, like a real American). We can't reach her but she's there, framed expertly in the golden Hopper light against the ominous darkness. In earlier versions, even the older DVD, she was still far away - like a tiny newspaper illustration, with Jeff the life size character.. But now, in glorious deep black HD, we can step into these far away windows as well as Jeff's apartment. We don't see Jeffery as much as see through him - we're as trapped as he is (him by his own leg in a cast; us by the legs of those closer to the aisle in our row) and his gaze is ever shrinking into these far away windows. The more you look at these people in these little dioramas, the more your vision shrinks to tunnel focus, like cell phone addiction - so the larger real world becomes terrifyingly large.

Thorwald exits the frames; enters theater / Stewart's domain (Rear Window) like the truck in North by Northwest

So when the threat--the imposingly Nordic-named Lars Thorwald (Burr)--finally seeks him out and enters Jeff's apartment it's like he's a towering giant, an ogre. He's come out of the frame from the back, and worked his way around behind us in the theater, and he is gigantic. Jeff is like a frightened child menaced by a giant evil thug. He has in a sense now shrunk down to the size of one of his windows. He's become that which he spies on. (He can only pray someone across the way looks through his window). By now Jeff has become the total cinematic viewer stand-in, the type who hides in the dark and prefers to deal with reality through a small window rather than face the giant unruly beings like his girlfriend and this monstrous yet sympathetic figure. As a viewer it's unnerving because we can imagine being Thorwald as well as Jeff. We all hope we aren't being spied on from across the way; Jeff's only saved from being branded a stalker by his relative lack of focus, he's a restless channel flipper, whomever has their curtains open and is home is fair game. He's interested in Miss Torso (an intentionally grisly bit metonym) but not enough to get his blood up to a level that reassures Thelma Ritter.

another steep drop (Vertigo) and one of the first and only shots completely outside the apt

The sudden drop off from inside Jeff's apartment looking out to outside looking in is the next big moment after the sudden lack of window separation when Thorwald finally enters. In trying to throw him out the window, he's outed, literally, regarded by all the neighbors he spied on, rupturing the screen/audience barrier (and another steep drop - not as high but scary due to precarious leg healing (back to the bone mend drawing board and all that motionless for nothing - and again, the honeymoon must wait - isn't that in the end what Jeff was afraid of. Nothing like two broken legs as an excuse to not get bounced around),

Moving ahead --- to 2001 via 1968

This super clear, nearly-3D effect of the super 70mm clarity has other benefits, long forgotten after decades and decades of cropping, consider the wraparound giant screen of "Cinerama" and Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). With its clarity enhanced, the colors restored via 70mm (or in this case 65) negative, at least Kubrick's stately stereo side framing strategies begin to make more sense, especially as we compare his angles and stillness or slow glacial movement with, say, How the West Was Won and other films shot for 'Cinerama,' and roadshow wrap-around screens, where, as I said, sudden cuts and big close-ups don't work well, just as the long static medium shots never worked well on cropped home screens.

(from top: How the West was Won (x2), 2001 (x3), This is Cinerama)

Consider the way the astronauts flank the porthole of the escape pod during HAL's lip-reading scene.) The 'pure' Cinerama of say This is Cinerama (below) isn't quite the same but as you can see, the 'fisheye' wraparound effect is largely the same in Kubrick's framing (HAL's fisheye lens vision being the perfect analogy to the wraparound effect). As the sides of the wraparound frame are invariably closer to the audience, and--ideally--nearly vanishing into their peripheral vision, it makes sense that they are invariably closer to the camera, larger, and the center of the action always in a kind of middle shot being slowly advanced towards. If you reverse it, and put a close-up in center frame and then distant background on either side, the fishbowl effect gets more pronounced, not unlike the reflections in the space helmet visors.

2001 was shot in Super Panavision 70, a process which involved principal photography on a 65mm wide, 5 sprocket hole high film frame (standard photography is on 35mm wide 4 sprocket hole high frame). This was projected back from a 70mm print, the extra 5mm being two 2.5 mm magnetic soundtrack strips "outboard" of the sprocket holes... In the original Cinerama installations, the film was projected on a deeply curved "louvered" screen which wrapped the image around the audience, sweeping them into the image. The Super Panavision version of Cinerama had an aspect ratio of 2.21:1 (the three-film and "rectified" Ultra Panavision versions of Cinerama were noticeably wider with an aspect ratio of 2.59:1). - Thomas E. Brown

Cinerama screen as background wall for moon shuttle - 2001

We see the Cinerama logo in 2001's end credits over and over, but never could have expected we'd benefit decades later. Could they have known back then we'd be reaping the benefits of that clarity in the 21st century from the comforts of our hovels? I bet Kubrick had an inkling. Certainly he fills the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY frame with reflections of wide home theater screens (above).

It explains so much about the boredom factor involved with 2001, as well as the travelogue nature of Vertigo and To Catch a Thief as discussed above. Quick edits and jarring close-ups in such gigantic formats would leave audiences dizzy and probably vomiting. Thus, in Kubrick's elegant compositions, we have images of stately wide shots with the focus of the action usually medium center and larger (close-up) images framing the sides and in the lower foreground that our eye can use somewhat like the edges of our peripheral vision. This gives viewers the immersive effect of being about halfway inside the screen, moving ever forward towards whatever is in the background center (the entirety of the film follows outward/upward movement - man's evolution as a steady outward stream of awareness, an ever-forward glacial gliding).

The early "Dawn of Man" scenes carry an--I'm sure intentional--Natural History Museum diorama vibe. Shot mostly on sets with the rocky ground ever on the bottom of the screen - 2001

The subtitle of the film "A Space Odyssey" makes more sense when considering this original wraparound 'event' presentation format. For 2001 is both more (way more) and somewhat less than the average 'thinking man's' sci-fi movie from the 60s (this being the age of Heston, and the Social Message). It's also evocative of one of those forty minute IMAX films shown in museums for a small additional ticket cost, about the history of balloon flight or African geese migration (the 2001 version being at a very forward-thinking planetarium). In other words, it is both a trippy narrative and covertly NASA-driven Cinerama spectacle. Years of seeing it in full frame have left it seeming merely glacial and Surely Important. But now, even if we're not seeing it in Cinerama, just knowing that it was meant to be seen that way helps contextualize the structuring of the frame and the slow, deliberate pacing.

We're not just watching a movie, man, we're on a goddamned ride. 

NOTES:
1. one of the few dislikable 'kid sister' characters in Hitch's ouevre - see Diane Baker in MARNIE 
2. if you noticed it already, on, say, a VHS tape or on normal analog TV, hats off! You're sharp.
--

Suggested Cont. Acidemic Related Readings:

SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (from 10/11)

EYES WIDE SHUT: Paters Horribilis: Harvey, Hookers, and a Man Called Pollack (from 3/10) 

All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives: Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA

The Illuminati, Hypnosis, Paranoia, Schizophrenia, Kubrick and Tom Cruise (DP -5/16)

Caretaker sparkle - Room 237

PSYCHO-poetics ("a raving thing") - 12/1/12

Excuse me, Miss. But haven't we died somewhere Before?" -9/30/10

Acid Sight/Sound Symphonies: FANTASIA (1940 - rereleased in 1969), 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968)

Make up your mind control: 33.3 Ways of Reading EYES WIDE SHUT

Eric Jonrosh's Spoils of the Red Desert

Vanishing Caloric Density: QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)

Before her there was only Peggy Hopkins Joyce. After her came all of cable TV. And now our first lady may be a secret Soviet 'handler' for a mole Raymond Shaw-style presidential sleeper agent blah blah, but who cares? She looks marvelous, darling. That bitch can wear a dress. Has a first lady ever been this glam?

In such an age as this, can we really afford to forget about Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Barely two years dead, seldom seen outside a scarce handful of cult movies (and a few forgettable 'good ones' like We're Not Married) it's easy to forget that her unique brand of 'empty' celebrity was once unique in pop culture. Well, we forget her at our own risk: she's the preface chapter to all of trash TV today. But she herself was not trashy. Along with her sisters and mother, she was Hungarian and a socialite and she got rich divorcing rich old men husbands and got famous for being famous without having anything to be famous about, which has been such a constant for so long now it's not even a novelty.

And yet, there's no one remotely like her today because she had that high-toned class that usually was seen in society pages rather than heard on game shows. She came from a time when TV was campier but less shrill, with relatively little of our current reality show 'loudest voice wins' 'diamonds-that-shine-like-rhinestone' ugliness. Instead, the blurriness of analog color TV signal and the Vaseline on the lens catching her every diamond sparkle, Zsa Zsa drifted along the talk show airwaves like a fabulous pillow feather caught in a cold Nordic draft. Witty enough to be engaging, beautiful enough to be beguiling, but nothing else, we jokingly imagined her as the harbinger of the TV future, the equivalent of what the food industry calls vanishing caloric density, her melt-in-your-mouth hungry ghost illusion left us with nothing, not even the illusion of fullness - only the vague epiphany that fullness itself was an illusion. She knew to play herself dead-on straight, like she didn't get the joke; she was able to be that paragon of social high-toned class that Joan Rivers, in her acres of furs, was a sly riff on. But Zsa Zsa knew she was playing a 'type' as stereoed-in as Charles Nelson Riley or Rip Taylor, yet it worked because she pretended she didn't know it. We were left to fathom what percentage of her schtick was pretense, and it's that which made her interesting. We could keep it up as long as she could.

The epitome of composed class and elegance: gowns and lashes for the ladies and gays, impressive cleavage for the straight boys, she was the sort of lady you bring to Vegas on your arm and know she won't embarrass you by getting hammered and pestering you to go upstairs, and if she has any 'needs', she'll make sure they're met, in austere Eastern European style (via some dashing parking attendant from Brazil who conveniently speaks no English). Her vanity and insecurity over her leggy competition might drive you to a nervous breakdown (as it did to the director of the film we're discussing today) but you don't have to worry about her mental health: you could bounce a truck off her old world European composure and worry only about the truck.

Television today has set the bar for glamor is so low it's down in the sub-basement. "Reality" stars sip Napoleon brandy mixed with Mountain Dew and end up splashing it on each other to signify a fight that will keep us watching past the next add for butt augmentation --but that's inevitable. That's science. It has to do with intelligence, education and the bourgeois pretentiousness of intellectuals, writers who never notice how their 'talking down' to audiences makes less educated audiences desperate to feel smarter than someone, anyone. While it's annoying being surrounded by idiots, maybe it's worse being an idiot surrounded by smart people. Reality TV is the chance for even idiots to feel superior. Happy now, smart person, knowing the success of Honey Boo-Boo and the election of Trump is partly y'all's fault? 

Problem is, those shows about dumb yokels are made by smart people, and the contempt they feel for their subjects is hard to hide, and contagious, and addictive. Brainy Harvard snob writers eventually start to show their contempt too broadly, like the smirky New York intellectual Walter Matthau in 1957's A Face in the Crowd (left), writing the corn pone slop in Lonesome Rhodes' show like he's doing anyone a favor when in reality his cynicism is what's dragging the world down around his ears. Watching that movie you start to think yeah, Lonesome Rhodes is a monster, but I don't want to punch him in the face as bad as I want to punch you, Matthau. This type of character, so common in the late 50s-early 60s, that thinks a pipe, white skin, glasses, a suit, college education gives them dominion over women, children, the 'working class,' and dogs. They don't respect the savvy craftiness of street smart 'hicks' or the intuitive 'soft touch' of women (though they presume their lascivious attention is always welcome). Their father can help get them any job they want and they presume they deserve them. These privileged 'wits' end up enforcing a straight white male intelligence on their non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-college educated subjects, who naturally suffer in strait-jackets of passive aggressive 'dumbing down' dialogue, the sort that used to be so common it was a kind of invisible normal that might make you slowly go insane but you were never sure why. 

It's cuzz city slicker douchebags with them pipes keeping us thinking each other is super dumb by writing our thoughts for us on TV, is why! Fight the real enemy. This asshole:

Slap the pipe out!
(from top: Matthau, A Face in the Crowd; Anthony Eisley, Wasp Woman

Another example: Anthony Eisley of 1959's The Wasp Woman who continually treats his boss--the CEO of his company--Janet Starlin, like a child who needs constant supervision lest she sell the empire for a magic bean. With his unlit pipe and bougie bow-tie it's only natural we pray a certain wasp stings him rotten.

Think I'm just free-associating? Our current shitty national situation, Zsa Zsa Gabor, empty fame, snobby Harvard writers --what do they have in common? QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958).

This is CinemaScope

As a fan of bad 50s horror and sci-fi movies (especially Mesa of the Lost Women and Plan Nine) as well as the wry work of Ben Hecht (who wrote the story, not that it's very original) and Charles Beaumont (who adapted it), I am supposed to automatically love this Queen, this presumptive sci-fi shaggy dog classic, this veritable remake of the story filmed first in 1953 (as the far 'superior', Cat Women of the Moon) then also in the same year (1958!) but in black-and-white, as Missile to the Moon. 

 (from top) the heavenly beatnik jazz dancer troupe of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON; the celestial moon goddesses of MISSILE TO THE MOON; the tired front line of broads from QUEEN 

I love Cat and like Missile but loathe Queen. Meanwhile those films never show up on TCM when its time to fill some campy sci-fi slot in their schedule. Probably because it's in color and has Zsa Zsa Gabor. But I'd rather watch the surly sniping of Kip (Victor Jory) over Helen (Marie Windsor) being with dopey Laird (Sonny Tufts) instead of him, and the way they all play it totally straight, Jory's prima donna macho so 'itself' it becomes poetry, like watching Shakespeare act out his 14 year-old kid's metal album. The winky 'hey gang!A rocket is a phallic symbol nyuk nyuk' of Queen is the real enemy to bad movie lovers. I want to slap the pipe out of its smug Walter Mathau Face in the Crowd-mouth.  I like both its writers and love the film from which Queen 'borrowed' its wardrobe (the uniforms and a sparkly minidress from MGM's sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet) and it's got babes and a giant spider (there's also a giant spider in Missile and in Cat Women and even Mesa) but most of the time it's just Cinemascope-length assemblages of under-directed actors standing around on opposite ends of a crumbling high school theater stage, ever ready for either a attendance roll call or old-school rumble that never happens. The film plays like a box of cake mix, unopened, with an egg broken over it, left it a cold oven by a director who's too busy hiding in his trailer to avoid one of Zsa Zsa's on-set rages to light the pilot. Instead he lets the soundstage fill with gas, like Monty Clift under a Place in the Sun canoe. Maybe Hecht and MacArthur are just too intellectually snotty to take this seriously, lest their Algonquin friends accuse them of reading Weird Tales instead Ezra Pound. So they embed a satyric wink so overwrought not even a near-sighted bourgeois patron of the arts could miss it.

The plot you know even if you don't: a shipload of smirking virile Earthmen head to a planet of all women where they help the good leader (Zsa Zsa) overthrow the bad one (Laurie Mitchell [who played a similar role in Missile to the Moon]) whose mask is even uglier than her ugly face. Va-Voom! Lots of girls in terrible MGM costume drama hand-me-downs getting freaky, guys makin' moves, and the captain tackling the biggest lay of his life.

sharp eyed fans may recognize Davis in Alta's 'decent' frock from F. Planet

Sounds like I'd love this film if it let me. But it loves its own smirky self too much to let anyone else share. Some of the girls are great (like Lisa Davis (right; below left) who rocks great lipstick and smoldering Gillian Anderson eyes) and the writing seems a decent framework for a more straight-faced mature approach (which would allow the magic of camp to cohere better). The problem is in the misogynistic direction and frat boy acting by the men, that pipe puffing smug-snarkiness where (SWM) actors and director think themselves too smart for their material so they think adding some bawdy audience winking will help put it over, which shows how wrong they are. Such smirky douche bag superiority has poisoned the film to never be a true cult favorite except in the smirkiest, douchiest, winkiest, most patriarchally self-important of ways. (The title + the star = a tourist version of camp, and not one to make a lifetime fan of it).

What makes the 'good' bad versions of this same plot (Cat Women of the Moon in particular) work so well as enduring 'camp' classics on the other hand, is the intent to do something straight and good but without the know-how or budget or the talent to make it, but with a genuine love of strong women. When these films are good we get the genuine eccentricity of lower rung Hollywood really trying to make nothing into something and of genuinely liking women. Unknowns and outsider artists mix with actors shunned or forgotten by the Hollywood elite and up and comers ready to try. They all take this last or first chance grab and nobly fight to stay in character as the set collapses around them. These oddballs and has-beens and non-starters are--to we classic horror / sci-fi fans--our family. They're the equivalent of the Bad News Bears, or the bar full of flea-bitten drunks in The Iceman Cometh, they're waiting us for us to come watch them again with Hicky eyes anew, to buy them drinks so they can live through the alcohol that is our eyes. They get that it's all over in well under 90 minutes, win or lose but so is the effect of an average double highball. Only the drunks survive, because thirst never dies. And neither does DVD. 

Maybe this is why (white male) barflies and has-beens tend to have more respect for women and minorities, since the men in these Z-grade films are as disenfranchised and thus less afraid they'll lose anything by portraying women as the badass goddesses they are. I know for myself, alcoholism humbled me down to the roots, made me forever grateful and in awe of the women who rescued me. And that's why we drunks, drag queens, punks, and other outsiders that make up the bad film-lover community aren't going to be drawn to such puerile contempt for either women or the sci-fi and horror genres. And thus no character in Plan Nine leers at Vampira and says some inane shit like "my coffin or yours, baby." No one in that cantina says to Tarantella in Mesa of Lost Women, "I bet you got a real sticky web." If there were such quips these films would be as ignobly remembered as this Queen. It's the celebration, the worship, of female strength, that makes them endure with stoic grace in the face of incompetence. It's there in John Waters, it's there in Russ Meyer, it's there in Roger Corman. It's not there in Queen of Outer Space. 

The 'space women need men' subgenre always has a giant spider - Analyze its symbolic meaning, write down your answer, then look at the oeuvre of artist Louise Bourgeois to see if you're right!

Only a few elements in Queen from Outer Space take the outsider/sublime approach vs. the Matthau-in-Face in the Crowd attitude, and one of them---believe it or not--is Zsa Zsa Gabor.



No matter what happens, she plays it dead straight. She should have been the evil queen- as the title and billing suggests, with her beauty being the mask and the ugly scarred face appearing after the face cracks off because she's too busy making out with the captain to moisturize. Instead, as the chief scientist and leader of the resistance, she brings that same feathery class to bear she'd bring to any 'real' social event only here it looks like the event happened five years ago and no janitor has stirred therein to sweep up. And the event was an afternoon ladies-only coffee clatch fashion show with a vague Robin Hood theme.

If it's not going to offer anything else, the casting of Zsa Zsa was brilliant touch just for marquee value alone, making Queen of Outer Space live in high camp infamy, a touchstone name easily recognized by programmers who know nothing of the genre. But it's not worth the camp adulation, for it is the kind of self-hating sci-fi that feels the need to leer and roll its eyes every five minutes.  They don't get that it's not 'fun' to presume a planet of all women is going to roll over the minute some douchebag puts on a moth-eaten blue powder and struts in like the kingdom can now relax - a man is here to take charge. It's offensive, man. You can't put women in masks deformed enough to scare Picasso out of the brothel (left) and expect them to thank you for it. You can't think some young captain bucko can topple an empire just by toying with the affections of a mask-wearing broad on Venus and have it not be so misogynist I could just scream! You can't!

Grandma, what uneven eyeholes you got

Real camp would go the opposite way - it heaps a dozen dead male spacemen at the feet of its evil goddess. Great camp celebrates strong, badass broads. It loves them. It even gives them a magical beatnik free jazz dance to quietly haunting Elmer Bernstein flute music. For Queen the contempt is so thick they don't even have the decency to put some ornamental Vishnu statuary around the place, nor to attach the painted boards that make up the evil queen's mean-spirited rocket launch control platform, the kind of thing that would earn a frown from any high school drama coach. But to not even bother to make the eyeholes symmetrical on the glittery masks the queen and her coterie wear? Unforgivable even in elementary school.

Well, either way - if we don't like it- we have two others just like it for solace, each worse than the other and far better in their worseness as a result. Today, maybe the times have changed - we've been to the moon. We know there's no babes there. Or if there are, they're fast asleep (or as Rutledge says, their "condition: not dead, not alive"). Alien women are here, instead, on Earth, and their masks are human, but just barely. Sometimes I pass one on the street - they have deep light blue dazzling eyes and blonde hair, impossibly elfin. And I send them a telepathic message of the sort one passes to celebrities spotted in a crowd ("I know who you are, but I won't blow your cover by saying hello") The alien babes I spot don't answer me, but that's show business. Maybe I'm not smart enough to be worth 'sending' to. My genes aren't worth harvesting, so no cool sexy abductions or long snogs. I am not mad or jealous and I'm not out to topple any kingdom, certainly not a matriarchy, even if it's run by a puppet doofus via his hot Russian handler. I'll write whatever I have to in order to earn my sanity, to feel observant enough about the shit I watch that I somehow contribute to the collective evolution of dude-kind. Pass me my pipe and let's get the show started, and then cancelled! And take me with you when you go back to space, long as I can bring a DVD player, can count on constant normal gravity, and Cat Women of the Moon! 

It's because I know you won't bring me that I don't want to go. Hail Alpha! 

Greetings from the Bilderberg Jamboree

See also:
CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)
MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
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Acidemic #8 The Brecht / Godard / Wood issue