Arthur Hilton’s poverty-stricken Cat-Women of the Moon is one of the earliest examples of 50s science fiction’s obsession with interplanetary matriarchies (see also Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), Devil Girl from Mars (1954), Fire Maidens of Outer Space (1956), Queen of Outer Space (1958) and others). It’s also one of the most blatantly sexist. During World War II, with America’s men away fighting overseas, women started to work in factories, in offices and on the land in jobs traditionally taken by men and when peace broke out they decided that they quite liked the freedom such employment brought them and were reluctant to back to being baby factories and home-makers. For years after the end of the war, men were clearly finding this first sprouting of gender equality all too much to bear and it was a fear that surfaced frequently in science fiction films that cast women as evil, manipulative creatures out to render men unnecessary. It also helped that these films played into the fantasy of an entire civilisation of men-hungry Amazons just waiting to pounce on any passing astronaut.
Cat-Women doesn’t waste any time. After a brief opening voice-over that sounds uncannily like one of Rod Serling’s monologues from The Twilight Zone which wouldn’t debut for another six years (though without any of the poetry or even sense of meaning), Moon Rocket 4 takes off for the moon. The crew of Moon Rocket 4 – which clearly has the number 63 stencilled on the side – consists of Captain Laird Grainger (Sonny Tufts), navigator Helen Salinger (Marie Windsor), first mate Kip Reissner (Victor Jory), radio operator Doug Smith (William Phipps) and crewman Walt Walters (Douglas Fowley). They reach the moon successfully and after tangling with a pair of giant spiders in a cave discover the last eight female survivors of an ancient civilization. The black unitard wearing Cat-Women (it’s never really made clear why they’re called “cat-women”) initially appear friendly but their leader Alpha (Carol Brewster) is planning to use Moon Rocket 4 to take the last of her people to Earth having discovered that their underground city is running out of air. The ending is madness – the heroes rush off screen and dispose of the Cat-Women off camera! Marie Winsor told Tom Weaver that this was due to the fact that shooting ran over schedule and budget and the originally written ending was simply discarded. Amazingly this old tat was shot, at lest in part in in 3D though God alone knows why.
Ridiculously cheap – at one point the moon seen outside the viewing port is clearly a map with meridian lines all too visible. As indeed are the wires holding up the ridiculous moon spiders – and full of ridiculous technobabble, Cat-Women of the Moon would have been hilarious had it not been so dull. It plods on relentlessly through its dreary story with no thought for the sanity of its poor viewers, lurching from one ill-conceived scene to the next, all held together by some of the most ridiculous dialogue ever written. Its grasp of science is extraordinarily bad even for a film of this calibre – at one point Grainger claims that the moon has one permanently dark side and another permanently in the light, a fact so wrong that it would have been obvious to anyone who ever watched the waxing and waning of the moon each month.
Inevitably, it’s appallingly sexist – women are not to be trusted, human or lunar it seems. “You’re too smart, baby,” quips one of the astronauts. “I like ’em stupid.” He’s in luck, Any woman willing to share their live with neanderthals like these must be very stupid indeed. Of course it wouldn’t be a space Amazon film without a lengthy and vaguely embarrassing dance routine and yes, there it is. The Cat-Women prance about in their body-hugging black leotards leered at by the astronauts in a sequence that will sorely test the patience of even the most devoted of “bad film” cultists.
Cat-Women of the Moon is so cheap that the rocket’s control room looks like someone’s office and the entrance to the engine room is just a few sheets of corrugated steel with a trapdoor in the floor. Dressing consisted of whatever set decorator Fay Babcock could find lying around the studio at the time, including a very obvious film reel glued to the wall. In fact the control room was on loan from the same year’s Project Moon Base, the spacesuits had previously seen service in Destination Moon (1950) (they turned up again in Flight to Mars (1951) and Project Moon Base), the meteorite looks not dissimilar to the same one seen in the same year’s It Came from Outer Space and the interiors of the moon city are standing sets left over from The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938).
The performances, no-one will be surprised to learn, are entirely dreadful. Former western a B-thriller star Tufts is hopelessly miscast but he and the rest are hampered by a terrible script and a five-day shooting schedule that didn’t allow any room for luxuries like retakes. The Cat-women themselves are billed collectively as “The Hollywood Cover Girls” and look lovely but have no noticeable acting skills whatsoever. Not that they really needed them – they just needed to look good in those leotards and slink around for the viewing pleasure of the predominantly young male audience who were likely to turn up for this sort of thing.
Elmer Bernstein – mis-credited as Elmer Bernstien in the opening credits – cooks up a flute-heavy score that’s just too good for this nonsense. In his book Film and Television Score 1950-1979, Kristopher Spencer quotes Bernstein who said that he has become persona non grata in the studios at the time thanks to the McCarthy witch hunts: “Robot Monster and Cat-Women were done during a period when I was under a political cloud and those were the only films I was offered to do. But I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of trying to help a film, and I had as much fun working on those films as I did on The Ten Commandments.” He gives the film a lot class than it really deserves. It’s a dreadful film, virtually irredeemable and the producers were lucky to get someone as classy as Bernstein to grace their tawdry bit of old nonsense.
The EOFFTV Review 