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Synopsis:
An audience consisting of representatives of all American news
services listens in amazement as Dr Ralph Fleming (Morris Ankrum)
announces that within mere minutes, a manned rocket, the RXM,
will be launched into space, its object the moon. Dr Fleming
introduces the rocket’s crew: expedition leader, ship designer and
physicist Dr Karl Eckstrom (John Emery); Eckstrom’s assistant,
chemist Dr Lisa Van Horn (Osa Massen); Colonel Floyd Graham (Lloyd
Bridges), the pilot; astronomer and navigator Harry Chamberlain
(Hugh O’Brian); and engineer Major William Corrigan (Noah Beery Jr).
Dr Eckstrom addresses the audience, explaining details of the
rocket’s design and its flight plan. The reporters are then
permitted to interview the crew. When one of them questions the
inclusion of a woman, Dr Eckstrom quickly interjects that it is Dr
Van Horn’s pioneering research that has led to the development of
the ship’s experimental fuel, without which the mission could not be
undertaken. The time for the ship’s launch is reached. Dr Fleming
and Dr Eckstrom share a reflective moment, marvelling that after so
many years of planning and work, their dream is about to be
realised. The crew boards and prepares for the lift-off. From the
observation bunker, Dr Fleming, his team and the reporters look on
in awe as mankind’s first manned rocket hurtles into space.... The
flight proceeds as planned until the ship reaches escape velocity,
and its tail section is jettisoned: a collision between the ship and
the tail is narrowly avoided. Eckstrom makes the final possible
radio report to Earth; Fleming listens in mingled excitement and
apprehension as his colleague’s voice fades into nothingness.... As
the ship travels into the unrelieved darkness of outer space, the
crew members find themselves dealing with the effects of reduced
gravity. Floyd Graham tries to flirt with Lisa, but she is
unresponsive. Frustrated, Floyd questions why a woman would want to
involve herself in space travel in the first place. Before Lisa can
answer him, a strange grinding noise echoes through the ship. The
next moment, all power has been lost. Bill Corrigan pressurises the
motor-room so that he and Floyd can inspect the engines, but they
find nothing wrong. Eckstrom concludes that the problem must be the
fuel mixture. He and Lisa sit down to re-check their calculations, a
process that ends with the two of them in disagreement. Eckstrom
insists upon using his own figures, dismissing Lisa’s urgent plea
that they try both sets of calculations on the grounds of a lack of
time, and ignoring her warning that the experimental fuel can behave
unpredictably. Floyd and Bill reconfigure the fuel tanks. The
crew-members brace for the re-start, but are unprepared for the
ship’s reaction to the new fuel mix. Uncontrolled acceleration
throws them violently across the cabin, leaving them unconscious,
and the RXM travelling through space at unchecked
velocity....
Comments:
After the false start of
The Flying Saucer, fifties science
fiction proper got underway with the June 1950 release of Rocketship X-M – although that’s not how things were intended to
be. By rights, by justice, the most significant era in the history
of cinematic science fiction should have kicked off with the purest
of all the films of that great decade,
Destination Moon.
George Pal’s seminal space flight film was, however, no ordinary
production: “Two Years In The Making!”, as its own advertising art
put it; costing over half a million dollars, then a remarkable sum
for a comparatively small production company like Eagle-Lion; hiring
scientific advisors in order to ensure its authenticity; and the
subject of a LIFE Magazine cover story in April of 1950, the making
of Destination Moon was An Event – and one that ultimately
became the victim of its own artistic commitment. As the creators of
Destination Moon moved slowly, painstakingly, towards the
completion of their uniquely serious-minded film, a B-movie producer
named Robert L. Lippert heard opportunity knocking. Rushed into
production and costing less than a fifth of its inspiration, Rocketship X-M
made it into cinemas twenty-five days before Destination Moon, shamelessly taking a free ride on the ballyhoo
surrounding its infinitely more prestigious competitor. (As star
Lloyd Bridges has admitted in interview, a large part of the paying
public was confused as to which of the two “space films” was which,
and Robert Lippert made no effort to enlighten it.) Destination
Moon had all the success that its makers could have hoped for:
it was profitable, it won the Academy Award for its special effects
and, most importantly of all, it opened the public’s mind to the
real possibility of space travel. What’s more, the film found itself
supported and defended by a small army of critics, who took the
makers of Rocketship X-M to task for so blatantly riding upon
their inspiration’s coattails. However, for Robert Lippert, tallying
up the profits from his exercise in exploitation – and in basic
monetary terms, Rocketship X-M was more successful than
Destination Moon – these head-shakings and finger-wavings must
have been so much water off the back of a very contented duck.
The right stuff,
circa
1950
Philosophically,
Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M could hardly be
further apart. The former is a solemn and measured work, offering up
a meticulous examination of each step in the process by which
mankind might – and in due course, would – walk upon the
moon. Each of its story aspects is there as the result of full and
careful consideration on the part of the film-makers of the perils
that might really confront the first space explorers. Plenty of
perils confront the characters of Rocketship X-M, too, but
for the most part they are used as nothing more than cheap shocks.
While Destination Moon spends nearly a third of its
running-time examining how and by whom a rocket might be built – and
paid for – Rocketship X-M skips blithely past the realities
of its situation, opening with its crew being interviewed by the
press just prior to boarding the RXM – and I do mean just
prior: they are still chatting with the gathered reporters
eleven minutes before take-off!
(While this
abbreviated way of dealing with momentous events is fairly silly,
this section of the film does contain one of my favourite scenes, a
touch of genuine emotion, when Ralph Fleming and Karl Eckstrom
contemplate the culmination of all their dreams and so many years of
work. “You remember, when we started, what they called us?” says
Eckstrom, and Fleming responds promptly, “Young crackpots!” “Yes,
and what are we now?” muses Eckstrom. “Maybe just....crackpots.”)
Part of the press
interview sees Karl Eckstrom demonstrating the design of the RXM
and its proposed trajectory – and here we have one of the rare
moments where this film manages to outdo its model. One of Destination Moon’s few real errors lies in the design of its
ship, the Luna, which is a sleek, finned, single-stage rocket
bearing little resemblance to the multi-stage vessels that would
finally take man to the moon. (Copycat spaceships would,
nevertheless, appear with monotonous regularity throughout the
fifties, and no wonder: incorrect though its design may be, the
Luna is gorgeous.) Rocketship X-M gives us a craft
that is in essence a giant fuel-tank, and which comes with a tail
section intended for jettisoning once its fuel is exhausted and
escape velocity has been reached. In the overall context of the
film, the design of the RXM is startling in its practicality.
No credit for this goes to the film-makers, however: the design was
cribbed wholesale from a LIFE Magazine article published the year
before.
The rocketship
marks the beginning and the end of Rocketship X-M’s
scientific accuracy. Given that it was their own insistence on
taking their time and getting everything as correct as possible that
allowed Rocketship X-M to make it into cinemas first, what
must the makers of Destination Moon have felt when confronted
by the tosh served up by their upstart rivals?
Our problems start
the moment the RXM’s tail-section is jettisoned: having been
forcibly propelled in one direction, the tail somehow manages to
turn back upon itself, and almost wipes out its parent ship. Having
survived this mysterious close encounter, the crew-members report in
to mission control for the very last time, radio contact with Earth
proving impossible once the RXM has left the atmosphere. Our
intrepid explorers then tuck into the very first meal ever consumed
in outer space – sandwiches – before learning that the RXM is
destined to be acted upon by some very selective gravitational
forces: jackets, seatbelts and harmonicas – yes, harmonicas – tend
to go drifting off around the cabin; other loose items are
mysteriously unaffected, as indeed is the crew. A little later, the
RXM experiences a truly historical event, the very first
meteoroid shower in fifties science fiction. These heavenly bodies –
which look suspiciously like lumps of candy-coated popcorn – go
hurtling past the RXM with a roar so loud, it wakes up the
sleeping crew-members and drowns their exclamations of alarm. (Well
– all except for Floyd’s cry of, “Meteorites!”) And then
there’s the little matter of the RXM’s engines cutting out
for no reason – at which point, despite having reached a reported
velocity of more than 21,000 miles per hour, the ship – just –
stops.
And so, for that
matter, does the film.
Cut lunches....of the FUTURE!!
Whether or not the
scientific content of Rocketship X-M would have been less
dubious had the film been longer in production is debatable: plenty
of “serious” works get just as much wrong, after all. In any case,
it is less the prevalence of sloppy science than the lack of any
real story structure that betrays the hurried way in which this
project was thrown together. Clearly, the film-makers knew that they
wanted to launch their characters into space, which they do very
briskly. They also knew what events would comprise their film’s
climax – or as it turns out, climaxes. Between these two extremes,
however, lies an extended period during which Rocketship X-M
simply sits there twiddling its thumbs. It is here, in the absence
of any particular story to tell, that the film tries to build
suspense with its homicidal tail section and its “meteorite” shower,
and amuses its characters, if not the audience, with some whacky
gravitational high jinks. For the rest, Rocketship X-M
chooses to fill the remaining dead air with character scenes – and
what character scenes!
It’s a toss-up as
to which of our competing space films a modern audience will find
harder to take in the character department. It is fair to say, I
think, that Destination Moon has barely any characters at
all, at least in the usual sense of that word: it is peopled by
individuals so determinedly realistic, they end up being not just
unmemorable, but occasionally downright dull. The one exception, a
textbook case of going from one extreme to the other, is Dick Wesson
who, as the film’s Odious Comic Relief©, is nothing short
of excruciating. Rocketship X-M, whether by design or
coincidence, features an OCR© as well, with Noah Beery
Jr’s Bill Corrigan putting in a concerted effort to make Texas the
second-most hated place in the science fiction universe, right after
Brooklyn. Hugh O’Brian’s Harry Chamberlain is, only too obviously,
the team’s weak link. Sure enough, when trouble strikes it is Harry
who frets out loud about the strain upon the oxygen and fuel
supplies; Harry who ponders, after the meteoroid shower, whether
sudden death might not have been preferable to their threatened slow
extinction, lost in space (so to speak). Not that any of this was
necessary: from the moment that Harry’s lower lip quivers as he
waits for the RXM to take off, the experienced space film
watcher just knows he won’t be making it home. Karl Eckstrom,
scientist and expedition leader, is not without his points of
interest, as we shall see; but it is with respect to the remaining
two characters and their interaction that Rocketship X-M
bestowed, for better or for worse, a permanent legacy upon the
science fiction films to follow.
(Oh, who am I
kidding? It was for worse. Worse, worse, WORSE!)
There are no
significant female characters in Destination Moon. Set in
“the present”, that is, in 1950, and striving for realism, such a
notion was simply out of the question. Less concerned with realism –
and with an eye, perhaps, on a broader box office – Rocketship
X-M gives us Dr Lisa Van Horn, the fifties’ first female
scientist, as well as its first female space traveller.
Unfortunately, these days Lisa is remembered less as a cinematic
pioneer than she is as the party on the receiving end of some
perfectly skin-crawling sexism, a fitting to way to open a decade
that raised such things to an art form.
The most famous,
not to say infamous, exchange of dialogue in Rocketship X-M
is provoked by Lisa’s refusal to giggle childishly over the effects
of weightlessness, as her male companions do. Floyd Graham’s
reaction to this is, in effect, to take offence at her very
professionalism. “Don’t you ever think about anything but work?” he
demands, before adding the inevitable rider: “How does a girl like
you get mixed up in a thing like this?”
Justly nettled,
Lisa retorts, “I suppose you think women should only cook,
and sew, and bear children?” At which, Floyd leans in and, with a
smirk that must have registered at least a 10.5 on the Smug-O-Meter,
inquires, “Isn’t that enough?”
"I mean, how long do you think you can keep up this pretence of
being smart, brave, qualified and competent?"
Isn’t that
enough? Curious words, I would have
thought, to address to a woman with whom you are travelling through
outer space in a rocketship. Evidently in Floyd Graham’s world,
completing a doctorate in advanced organic chemistry, inventing a
synthetic fuel that makes interplanetary travel possible and
qualifying for the space program are just things that a woman does
to fill in the time before she catches a husband.
Horrifyingly,
Floyd’s Neanderthal courtship displays (which, as perhaps in this
day and age I need to clarify – I’d love to think I do, anyway – are
supposed to make him attractive) are not all, nor indeed the
worst, of what Lisa has to suffer through, the creators of this film
having seen fit to send this unfortunate woman into the depths of
space with not one, but two – count ’em, two – male
chauvinists, the second being Lisa’s boss, colleague and supposed
supporter, Dr Karl Eckstrom. Disgusting as Floyd Graham and his
chest-beating is, at least he’s honestly porcine. Eckstrom,
on the other hand, is a closet chauvinist, the kind who, preening
himself mentally all the while about his progressive attitudes, no
doubt, makes bold public speeches about Lisa’s contributions to and
qualifications for the mission, but who, the moment she expresses an
opinion of her own or even, God forbid, contradicts him,
instantly shows the cloven foot. And the little curly tail.
Crisis point is reached when the two scientists begin to
re-calculate the proportions of Lisa’s experimental fuel, in order
to re-start the rocketship. Comparing figures, the two find
themselves in disagreement – which of course, at least in Eckstrom’s
opinion, means that Lisa made a mistake. Knowing full well
that she did nothing of the kind, Lisa is compelled to protest,
pointing out the potentially fatal consequences of a miscalculation,
and trying to convince Eckstrom that they should try both sets of
figures.
“You can’t be
arbitrary about imposing your will when these people’s lives are at
stake!” she insists.
Now, consider that
speech. In the mouth of any of the film’s male characters, it would
be brave, candid – and right. In Lisa’s, however, it’s merely
a sign that she’s letting emotion enter into it.
Oh, yes. Eckstrom’s
already played that card, one of the aces in the male deck. Before
long, he’ll play the other one. Here, oddly, Lisa feels obliged to
offer an apology for expressing her concern over the fate of her
colleagues, one which Eckstrom, in full-on gloat mode, assures her
is unnecessary: Lisa was just momentarily being a woman. But
to Eckstrom’s annoyance, Lisa cannot quell her doubts and continues
to argue with him, forcing him to play his trump card. When she
cites the sometimes unpredictable behaviour of the fuel and the fact
that they have never tested experimentally the use it will now be
put to, Eckstrom stops her dead in her tracks with a snide, “Woman’s
intuition?”
And so Lisa shuts
up. And Eckstrom gets his own way. And the RXM, fuelled
according to Eckstrom’s calculations, goes careening forward in a
state of uncontrolled acceleration, knocking its crew into an
extended period of unconsciousness, and heading straight towards
disaster....
"I don't suppose you know a five-letter word for 'jackass'?"
And it is here, I
think, that we recognise one of the most interesting things about
Rocketship X-M: its ambivalence about its female lead. At our
first glimpse of Lisa, she is proving to be the only member of the
rocket crew whose blood pressure is normal pre-take-off; later on,
she will be the first to recover when the crew-members are knocked
unconscious. “The weaker sex,” comments Floyd admiringly; he will
also refer to her, not quite so admiringly, perhaps, as “the brains
department”. It is Lisa’s research, we learn, that has made the
space flight possible in the first place. And importantly, she
understands not just the benefits, but the limitations of her work.
There is never a moment when the film comments on the outcome of
Lisa’s clash with her boss – we never get the satisfaction of a
squirming Eckstrom saying something like, “Gee, Lisa, hope I wasn’t
out of line with that crack about ‘woman’s intuition’....” – but the
fact remains that Lisa is right and Eckstrom is wrong, and his
bull-headed dismissal of her work and opinions does exactly what she
most fears: it propels the crew of the RXM into direst
danger. Bowing to the cinematic conventions of the time (and not
just of that time), Rocketship X-M foregrounds the Lisa-Floyd
interaction, so it is not surprising that this is what viewers tend
to remember. (And yes, much as it pains me to say so, the two do end
up in a clinch before the film is over.) Look beyond the
conventionalities, however, and you will find some surprising
attitudes on display here. In an era when far too many female
characters in science fiction films were there just to scream, faint
and be rescued, Rocketship X-M does things a little bit
better.
It is not only in
the handling of its female lead that Rocketship X-M goes in
some unexpected directions. Our first hint of this comes after the
meteoroid shower, which Bill Corrigan describes laughingly as
“heavenly flak” – only to stop laughing and reflect that perhaps he
has spoken truly in jest. “Say....maybe someone doesn’t want
us to get where we’re going?” What is implied here is made explicit
after the crew reconfigures the fuel proportions and consequently
loses control of the RXM. As the rocketship accelerates
uncontrollably, the five are thrown across the cabin and
collectively knocked out cold. They recover an indeterminate period
of time later to find that not only are no longer in the vicinity of
the moon, but that they are approaching Mars!!
Some cynical
commentators have suggested that the RXM’s sudden journey
from the moon to Mars has less to do with the unexplored properties
of Lisa’s fuel than it does with a series of legally threatening
letters sent to the producers of Rocketship X-M by the
producers of Destination Moon. (And in truth, there are so
many points of similarity between the two films in their early
sections – right down to the OCR© with the harmonica and,
heaven help us, the sandwiches – that you don’t have to be
particularly cynical to suspect that somehow, someone connected with
Rocketship X-M got a peek at the script of Destination
Moon.) To do the writers of Rocketship X-M as much
justice as we can, it is clear that they well aware of just how
ludicrous this plot twist was, and that they did everything they
could to cover it. They stress the experimental nature of Lisa’s
fuel and its “unpredictability”; they never reveal just how long
everyone has been unconscious (“It must have been....days,”
breathes Eckstrom); and they include many solemn pronouncements
about “unchecked velocity” and “infinite motion”. But it is Karl
Eckstrom who has the final word upon the subject: “There are times
when a mere scientist has gone as far as he can; when he must pause
and observe respectfully while something....infinitely
greater....assumes control.”
Yes, indeed: the
RXM has made it all the way to Mars as the result of divine
intervention....
Quite a number of
science fiction films of the fifties have a religious aspect to
their stories. Sometimes these are quite subtle; sometimes, a film
will do everything short of having God stand up on a soapbox and
shout at humanity through a megaphone – and in the case of films
like Red Planet Mars, that remark is scarcely even an
exaggeration. But regardless of attitude, it all started here, with
Rocketship X-M.
(Actually, there’s
a peculiar aspect to the instances of divine intervention in this
film, namely that they tend to strike whenever Floyd is trying to
make romantic headway with Lisa. Thus the ship’s engines cut out
inexplicably during the “how did a girl like you - ?” sequence,
while the meteoroid shower strikes in the middle of Floyd waxing
lyrical on the effects of moonlight. In both cases it’s as if God
was listening in on those conversations, and decided that She didn’t
like the way they were going.)
"I
knew
we should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque...."
In the belief that
they have been led to Mars for a reason, the crew lands on the
planet and sets out to explore. This is the most fondly remembered
aspect of Rocketship X-M, in which a touch of the mysterious
is given to the overly familiar locations of Death Valley and Red
Rock Canyon through the simple – and inexpensive – expedient of
shooting everything through a red filter. And this is also where
this low-budget, essentially commercial production wins itself a
slice of immortality: for our space travellers make a discovery on
Mars, that of a ruined civilisation, its crumbled remains covered in
a pall of radioactivity.... We’re so used now to thinking of the
fifties as the decade of the atomic scare film that it is easy to
undervalue what Rocketship X-M does here, but make no mistake
about it: in 1950, this was daring stuff. And the film takes it one
step further: Mars is still populated. Its men are hairless,
radiation-scarred primitives; its women are blind (a shock
revelation which is rather spoiled by the neatly arranged hair,
plucked eyebrows and lipstick of our “atomic mutant”.
Well, the
inhabitants of Mars may have devolved, but that doesn’t make them
any less dangerous; and it is a depleted crew that staggers back to
the RXM. The survivors do manage to take off again – and it
is then that all that unanticipated fuel consumption finally catches
up with them....
While the screen
credits of Rocketship X-M list only producer-director Kurt
Neumann as its screenwriter, with additional dialogue by Orville
Hampton, it is now known that the screenplay was also worked upon by
Dalton Trumbo, in the period of time between his conviction for
contempt of Congress, and the failure of his appeal against that
conviction the following year. This fact, in conjunction with the
short pre-production period of Rocketship X-M, which perhaps
allowed insufficient time for a smooth fusion of the conflicting
ideas emanating from the various writers, may go some way towards
explaining the strange mixture of philosophies to be found within
this film, which serves to keep it interesting even when it isn’t
particularly good: the inconsistencies in the characterisation of
Lisa, for instance; or why, having gone to so much trouble to warn
the people of Earth of the dangers of nuclear war, God seems
determined to make the delivery of that warning as difficult as
possible; or how what started out simply as a low-budget
exploitationer meant to cash in on its more prestigious rival ended
up being one of the grimmest of all the fifties science fiction
“message” films.
And then there’s
that ending. Oh – that ending....
It may be hard to
believe in this era of cable TV, internet downloads and collector’s
edition DVD releases for everything, but there was a time,
not so long ago (well – I like to think it wasn’t all that long ago)
when many films, most films, were difficult to see. In those
days, not just before the DVD, but prior to the advent of the VCR
and inexpensive sell-through videos, if you missed a film upon its
first release, there was a chance that you’d never see it at all.
Oh, you might have been lucky. Maybe the film you were dying to see
would show up on TV on a Saturday night, or a Sunday afternoon – or,
more likely, at three o’clock in the morning, at which point it
became a matter of willpower and endurance. Nor was there really
such a thing as “film studies”. Books on movies, particularly
B-movies, were rare indeed. There were no TV shows devoted to new
movie releases, no saturation advertising, no product placement
ties-in, no internet sites intent upon revealing every single detail
about a film months before it got anywhere near a cinema. All of
which meant, among other things, that you could go to see a film
without knowing very much about it, and actually get a surprise.
But of course, you
try and tell the young people of today that, and they won’t believe
you.
Way back when,
there used to be a little revival cinema in my home town, now sadly
defunct, that ran science fiction and horror double- and
triple-bills at least twice a week – and where, consequently, I
spent a disproportionate amount of my free time. Many of the films I
now love best, I saw there for the first time. Granted, the quality
of the material available was often less than optimal. Many a time I
ended up sitting through a faded Eastmancolor print where
everything was as pink as the Mars sequence in Rocketship X-M;
or where, obviously, mismatched footage from different copies of a
film had been hastily spliced together, possibly with sticky tape;
or where a familiar production became a whole new viewing
experience, courtesy of having its reels projected in the wrong
order. (They did that with Attack Of The Crab Monsters, as I
recall.) It was at that cinema, perhaps twenty years ago, perhaps
even more, that I first saw Rocketship X-M, on a double-bill
with – I think – Conquest Of Space. I knew very little
about either film, going in, except that they were fifties science
fiction – which was enough. And so I sat there in the dark, wincing
at Bill Corrigan’s Texas “humour”; wondering idly whether a sharp
knee to the groin would be enough to wipe the smug expression from
Floyd Graham’s face; indulging feelings of gratified sisterhood when
Lisa Van Horn turned out to be right, and Karl Eckstrom wrong; and
totally unprepared for what this film would serve up in its
final act. At this distance, I can barely remember anything of
Conquest Of Space – if it was in fact
Conquest Of
Space – but I have never forgotten Rocketship X-M....
Rocketship X-M
is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a great film. Destination Moon is, I think – but it is also an artistic
cul-de-sac. In achieving exactly what it set out to achieve, that
film left nowhere for its followers to go. Rocketship X-M, in
contrast, precisely by virtue being such a heterogeneous hodge-podge
of underdeveloped ideas and conflicting attitudes, would end up
influencing a whole decade’s worth of science fiction. Let’s stop
for a moment and consider the achievements of this low-budget little
film, shall we? It was the first serious science fiction film of the
fifties; the first to put mankind into space; the first to land him
on another planet; and the first to show us aliens. It was the first
to give us a relatively accurate vision of planet Earth from outer
space – that is, if you can overlook the seam! – and possibly
not just the first, but the only film ever to do this without
automatically giving us a fixed view of the Americas! It was the
first film to include a woman amongst its space pioneers, and to
suggest that she might be entirely qualified to be there – even if
it does finally beat a nervous retreat into a more conventionally
romantic standpoint. (At least, unlike two later films that come
immediately to mind, Rocketship X-M never suggests that
Lisa’s main qualification is her weight differential.) And
significantly, it was the first, not just to use “the bomb” as a
plot point, but to have the nerve to be negative about it. Less
importantly, yet no less notably, as things turned out, Rocketship X-M was the first science fiction film of the fifties
to use a Theremin on its soundtrack. And last but not least (anyway,
I don’t think so) – it was the first to feature Morris Ankrum
in a supporting role – and he gets some very fine and touching
moments, by the way. (Indeed, so early on in the game was this, he
was yet to acquire the general’s uniform in which, or so it now
seems, he was to eat, sleep, breathe, fight and make love for the
rest of the decade.) It’s easy enough to see the faults in
Rocketship X-M – they are many, and they are manifest – but to
my mind, no film that, however unknowingly, can boast such a
remarkable collection of seminal touches can simply be dismissed. It
may not be a patch upon many of the productions it would eventually
inspire, but neither is it an entirely negligible work.
Want a second
opinion of Rocketship X-M? Visit
1000 Misspent Hours – And Counting.
Click
here
for some Immortal Dialogue from this film.
----28/5/07 |
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