Algunos autores extraterritoriales

There is often less danger in the things we fear than the things we desire.

Four Sided Triangle (1952)

There’s a whole new breed [of women] that feel they’re just as smart, just as courageous, as men, and they are. They don’t like to be over-protected. They don’t like to have their initiative taken away from them.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

Like the Western, war and gangster stories, science fiction developed as a male genre. Although its writers were occasionally female (C.C. Moore, Judith Merril and Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example) its audience was overwhelmingly male (Warner Jr 1969: 24–6; Merrick 1997: 59–

61). This may be partly explained by sf’s emphasis on male-coded technology–space ships, robots, time machines and all the other ‘boys’ toys’ which distanced the genre from the domestic and feminised sphere (on the gendering of scientific knowledge and discourse, see Keller 1985). It was indeed the relationship between man and machine rather than between man and woman that was key–not simply, or even necessarily, to the popularity of an sf text, but to its status within the genre. The consideration of technological progress and its implications for social arrange-ments became a distinguishing characteristic of ‘serious’ science fiction.

But as fast as the genre pressed its claims for legitimacy as serious discourse on the future, it was undermined by a less cerebral sub-literature of ‘pulp’ sf which traded as non-scientific sensation and fantastical space opera (Harbottle and Holland 1992; Nicholls 1979: 485, 559–60).

By the early 1950s this pulp literature was becoming a repository for male imaginings which went well beyond technological speculations to sexual fantasy of the most exotic kind (Harrison 1977; Nicholls 1979: 536–9).

It would have been easier for the legitimisers of the genre if ‘serious’ had been easily distinguishable from ‘pulp’, but as the mass commodification of popular literature gathered pace much the same iconography and garish design were used to ensure the marketability of both generic strands (Aldiss 1975).

When the generic conventions of sf began to be employed in the construction of films in the

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early postwar years it was primarily the pulp tradition that was drawn upon. The predominance of invasion narratives among this wave of films is conventionally attributed to the preoccupation with the twin threats of communism and nuclear war (Warren 1982/86; Biskind 1983: 102–44;

Sayre 1982: 191–214). However, when we examine pulp sf cinema in Britain we discover that a third threat dominates its narratives–the threat from women.

Although British cinema can offer no representation of this threat on the scale of Allied Artists’

Attack of the 50 Ft Woman (1958), a significant number of films combine female monstrosity and otherness with male erotic spectatorship. These ‘sexy alien’ movies clearly mix fear of female sexuality with excitement about its possibilities.

‘A woman! you must be joking’

Britain’s fledgling sf cinema of the 1940s was quick to seize upon the potential of technology as a solution to male sexual frustration. In Bernard Knowles’s fantastical comedy The Perfect Woman (1949), a dotty professor (Miles Malleson) models a female robot on his niece (Patricia Roc) and hires Nigel Patrick and Stanley Holloway to try out the machine. Malleson insists that ‘she must be put through the most rigorous tests’ to prove that she is indistinguishable from the real thing.

‘I call her the perfect woman’ he tells the expectant road testers, ‘she does exactly what she’s told, she can’t talk, she can’t eat, and you can leave her switched off under a dust sheet for weeks at a time.’ Olga the Robot appears to have no domestic function and is designed as a decorative toy for the male. Her fetishistic underwear clearly signifies her erotic promise and renders her creator’s assertion that, strictly speaking, she has ‘no sex’ entirely unconvincing. The implicit fantasy of a fully compliant sex machine is intensified when niece Penelope decides to imperson-ate Olga, provoking Nigel Patrick to remark that ‘if he makes them as well as this, there won’t be a single home without one’ (see figure 9). In the end, however, the film only flirts with transgres-sion. While Olga the proto-sex machine runs amok at the mention of the word ‘love’, Penelope, the real woman, wins a marriage proposal and, in spite of playing the obedient robot, remains in control of the situation.

As well as giving expression to male domination fantasies The Perfect Woman indexed anxiety about the growing assertiveness and expanded expectations of women since the Second World War. Attempts to remake women as compliant love objects were again evident in two films made by Terence Fisher in the early 1950s. In Stolen Face (1952) a Harley Street plastic surgeon (Paul Henreid) remodels the face of a female convict to the likeness of his lost love, a concert pianist (Lizabeth Scott), with predictably disastrous consequences. Like The Perfect Woman, the film gives a technological twist to the Pygmalion myth, this time adding fears about class mobility to its anxiety about female independence (Rigby 1995). Four Sided Triangle is more unequivocably a science fiction film. Here, Fisher reworks the Frankenstein fable as a three-way love story. Two scientific prodigies grow up loving the same girl, Lena (Barbara Payton). As

Figure 9 ‘A fully compliant sex machine’: Miles Malleson adjusts Patricia Roc’s fetishistic garb in The Perfect Woman (1949).

Source: Courtesy of the British Cinema and Television Research Group archive

children, the boys pay homage to Lena and compete for her approval, but as adults only one can marry her. When Robin (John Van Eyssen) finally wins Lena’s favours on her return from a spell in the United States, Bill (Stephen Murray) becomes determined to harness his scientific bril-liance to his erotic obsession. His and Robin’s masculine science has already usurped the femi-nine role by creating a ‘reproducer’ to duplicate matter; now Bill adapts a machine designed to

‘transform the world into a place of peace and plenty’ to replicate Lena for his own use. The replicant’s body is Bill’s to possess, but ironically her romantic memories, like Lena’s, are of Robin. Bill cannot control or colonise the mind he has created and the Lena duplicate dies in the attempt to empty her memory of past attachments.

Based on a novel by William F. Temple, Four Sided Triangle is a complex discourse on science, humanity, religion and gender which, like Frankenstein, warns against men’s attempts to use science to flout the God-given laws of biology. Less obviously, the film associates the blasphemies of science and gender transgression with transatlantic influences. The strongly Americanised Lena, played by a notoriously promiscuous Hollywood actress (Payton 1963;

Johnson and Del Vecchio 1996: 78), returns as a sex bomb to the humble barn in rural England where Bill and Robin conduct their experiments and it is her desirability which perverts the altruism of the British scientists. But ultimately Four Sided Triangle shows not so much the

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perniciousness of American possessive individualism as the futility of attempts to control and manipulate the new postwar woman.

This independent postwar woman was to reappear in Fisher’s next science fiction picture Spaceways (1953). In Four Sided Triangle, platinum-blonde Lena had acted as a laboratory assistant, donning trousers to occupy the male work space. In Spaceways the arrival of dark-haired Dr Liza Frank in her fully-fashioned white overall is heralded by the concern of the male scientists that if they use up any more hydrogen hyparoxide ‘there may be no blondes in the world’. But if Barbara Payton’s Lena was primarily an object of others’ desires, Eva Bartok’s Liza is very much an agent of her own. Although General Hays greets her with ‘a more charming mathematician I could hardly imagine’ she not only quickly proves herself a capable scientist and a full member of the lab team, but also eventually demonstrates her bravery, keeping her cool as her space rocket careers out of control. Admittedly, her devotion is ultimately more to her beloved colleague Stephen (Howard Duff) than to her profession, but her decision to risk death to help the man she loves lifts her into the heroic category usually reserved for men (on representations of female scientists in American sf films, see Bansak (1996) and Smith (1996)).

The character of Dr Liza Frank may have incorporated aspects of conventional femininity, but she remained a disturbing presence in the male preserve of experimental science. An even greater disturbance is apparent when Michelle Dupont (Gaby André) is introduced to her new colleagues in The Strange World of Planet X (1957). They already have very definite expectations:

Brigadier: I forgot. I was to tell you that your new assistant is a woman.

Dr Laird: A woman! You must be joking.

Gill: He has to be joking.

Brigadier: I’m afraid not. There’s no one else available to operate this computer of yours.

Dr Laird: But a woman, this is preposterous. This is highly skilled work.

Brigadier: She’s very highly qualified, Doctor.

Gill: Yeh, I know the type, frustrated angular spinster, very dedicated to her calling, without a sense of humour, bossy and infuriatingly right every time.

Their expectations are quickly disrupted, however, first by the sight of Michelle’s legs as she enters the frame and then by the realisation that she is French. ‘Is there anything beside your name?’ Gill (Forest Tucker) asks her. ‘Oh yes,’ she replies ‘Bachelor of Science (beat) and Mademoiselle.’ The Otherness of female scientists like Liza and Michelle is further emphasised by the casting of European actresses, just as the desirability of Stolen Face’s and Four Sided Triangle’s love objects had been underlined by the casting of Hollywood stars. The Strange World of Planet X struggles to manage the contradictions embodied in a mademoiselle whose knowledge can supply vital technological breakthroughs and who can as easily turn scientific

discourse into sexual innuendo: ‘Oh I see you don’t understand this machine,’ she taunts Gill.

‘Each circuit is capable of use over and over again, if it has a few micro-seconds to clear itself.

That means you can have as many surges as you like in banks of three.’ But Gill, as a male scientist largely impotent in the face of the threats created by his own experiments as well as Michelle’s sexual voracity, is unlikely to be able to handle her circuits successfully. When, at the end of the film, she is trapped in the web of a mutant spider for which an arrogant male science-in-the-service-of-the-military is responsible, her salvation (and humanity’s) relies on the intervention of an extraterrestrial benefactor. Smith, the alien, makes it clear that the Strange World of the title is the one created by unscrupulous scientific ‘progress’, but it might equally apply to the increasingly strained realm of gender relations in postwar Britain.

In each of the films discussed so far, problems for male protagonists stem from their inability to exercise full control over the women who are introduced into their environment. From The Perfect Woman to The Strange World of Planet X the space that women occupy becomes increasingly public, reflecting the growing presence of women in the British labour force during the 1950s. Over that period, the ratio of women to men in paid employment increased from approximately 1 in 4 to 1 in 3 in spite of strong cultural pressures in favour of domesticity (Hill 1986: 16). The tensions created by this contradiction are apparent in these films just as they are in the contemporary Quatermass television series (Leman 1991). Like the work of Richard Matheson in the period (Jancovich 1996: 129–66; Wells 1993: 181–99), these are texts which highlight the inadequacies of a male-coded scientism, questioning its assumptions of superiority and recognising that deepening crisis of masculinity which has often been noted by writers on postwar film culture (Biskind 1983; Krutnik 1991; Thomas 1992). If none takes its scepticism about masculine power as far as Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), each in its own way acknowledges both the confusion created by female independence and the intractable Otherness of women from the male perspective.

UFO: unearthly female obsessions/ultimate fetish object

The impossibility of containing women within the domestic sphere and their ascribed categories of wife and mother supplies an important source of tension in British sf film; but the uncon-strained woman was more than a challenge to masculine control. She was also the object of sexual interest. However, as Vivian Sobchack (1985) has argued in relation to American sf films, these fantasies of sexual desire untempered by the disciplines of marriage and domesticity and their concomitant fears of impotence are frequently displaced onto non-human objects. But we are not talking about bug-eyed monsters here. Taking their inspiration from literary works like Catherine Moore’s Shambleau (1933) and Philip J. Farmer’s ‘The Lovers’ (1952), and from American

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space movies like Flight to Mars (1951), Britain’s pulp sf films of the mid-1950s began to feature humanoid extraterrestrials with all the signifiers of femininity and desirability. Jacqueline Pearson, commenting on the Otherness of the female in male-authored sf has remarked that, when it comes to sex, men and women ‘meet as aliens’ (Pearson 1990: 17). British films like Devil Girl From Mars (1954) and Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956) offer literal examples of inter-planetary miscegenation.

The Danzingers’ Devil Girl from Mars, directed by David Macdonald from a screenplay by James Eastwood and John C. Maher, is by far the more entertaining of two alien encounter films released in 1954. The other, Burt Balaban’s Stranger from Venus, a low-rent reworking of the seminal American film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and featuring the same leading actress (Patricia Neal), has a male alien visiting Earth, the ‘delinquent planet’, to maintain the peace of the galaxy. Where he visits is not entirely clear. It may well be some Poverty Row vision of Canada imagined by the German screenwriter and American director, but it hardly matters as the action is claustrophobically confined to a small inn. The best that can be said for the film is that its threadbare mise-en-scène and sloppy writing give it a strange feeling of dislocation; but if we want to see what pulp pleasures it is really possible to wring from an isolated inn and a mysterious alien we need look no further than Devil Girl from Mars. It has a greater sense of the kitsch and the bizarre than any other British film of its decade. Even the reviewer for the Monthly Film Bulletin (June 1954), in a remarkably early piece of camp criticism, was captivated:

Settings, dialogue, characterisation and special effects are of a low order; but even their modest unreality has its charm. There is really no fault in this film that one would like to see eliminated. Everything, in its way, is quite perfect.

The essence of the narrative is as simple as it is preposterous–a Martian woman and her robot visit a remote Scottish inn and attempt to abduct healthy male specimens–but the film’s sub-plots, sub-texts, S & M iconography and hilarious dialogue make Devil Girl a triumph of trashi-ness (see figure 10).

With tongues firmly in their cheeks, the film’s scriptwriters assemble a cast of broadly drawn

‘types’ to await the arrival of their Amazon Queen from outer space. The men are all standard genre figures–McDermott the tough American newshound, Professor Hennessey the objective scientist, Jamieson the Scottish innkeeper, Tommy the plucky little boy, and Albert, who, with a nod towards It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), is an escaped convict being harboured by a barmaid. In addition there is the faithful disabled retainer, who exists presumably to demonstrate to visiting aliens what an unhealthy specimen looks like and is first in line for vaporisation in their eugenics programme. But it is the women who really run this show which, as Kine Weekly (6 May 1954) noted, combines ‘ingenious stunt offering and artful women’s stuff’. First there is Hazel Court’s Ellen, a sleek metropolitan model who is renouncing her corrupt city ways and getting back to nature. ‘I’m twenty-six,’ she tells Michael, ‘and in all these

years

Figure 10 ‘A triumph of trashiness’: Nyah (Patricia Laffan) terrorises Scottish men with her raygun and S&M gear in a cult film Devil Girl from Mars (1954).

Source: Courtesy of the British Cinema and Television Research Group archive

I haven’t done a single thing I really wanted to do.’ She is ‘just a stupid girl from the big city, dazzling the natives with clothes she gets for nothing’. And what does she want now?–‘spend more time in the country, find the right man, have children’. As a prodigal daughter Ellen is one custodian of the film’s conservative values, the other is the redoubtable Mrs Jamieson (Sophie Stewart). Largely unfazed by the arrival of a spaceship in her back garden, believing that ‘the proper authorities will be here directly to take it away’, she has ‘trust in the Lord’ and, in the great tradition of British cinema’s matriarchs, absolute faith in the restorative properties of a cup of tea.

As other authors note in this volume, one can read British alien invasion films as re-runs of the Second World War, and Mrs Jamieson certainly rekindles the indomitable spirit of the Blitz.

When McDermott introduces her latest guest as ‘Miss Nyah, she comes from Mars’, her response is the stoical ‘Oh, that’ll mean another bed’. The centre of the film, however, is the Devil Girl herself. Patricia Laffan cuts a magnificent figure as the cruel dominatrix from the planet of war.

Her obedient robot may look like a fridge on legs, but Nyah has stepped straight from the pages of a fifties fetish magazine. All leather cap and cowl and stiletto boots she is a creation of kinky

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costumiers ‘Atomage’ as much as a creature of the atom age. As simultaneous cultural nightmare and erotic fantasy she embodies all the threats and possibilities of ascendant female power. ‘What do you know of force?’ she taunts the men who are obliged to submit to her mind control. ‘Force as we use it on Mars... I can control power beyond your wildest dreams.’ A fascist femme fatale, she has come to turn the men of Earth into sex slaves and she will brook no opposition. She imperiously declares that she ‘will select some of your strongest men to return with me to Mars’.

‘And if they don’t want to go with you?’, asks Carter. ‘There is no “if” ’, she replies. It is clear that what she represents is nothing less than the extinction of patriarchy. A Martian future would see men’s phallic power reduced to the mere servicing of matriarchal needs. Like the telescopic phalli on which Nyah’s spaceship rests, men’s importance would be purely functional. Nyah’s account of Martian history is a prophecy for Earth:

Many of your Earth years ago, our women were similar to yours today. Our emancipation took several hundred years and ended in a bitter, devastating war between the sexes. Women became the rulers of Mars, but now the male has fallen into decline. The birth rate is dropping tremendously, for despite our advanced science we have still found no way of creating life.

The arrival of Nyah is a revelation, not simply of extraterrestrial life, but of the quiet revolution

The arrival of Nyah is a revelation, not simply of extraterrestrial life, but of the quiet revolution