CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

This movie rates as a cine-mythic "one-off," in that none of the primary creative contributors ever again came up with anything quite as memorable as this collaboration, the risibly titled CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. The raconteurs involved in the direction, production, and writing racked up a lot of credits, but most of those credits are remembered only by hardcore period enthusiasts (though one of the writer-producers also had a producer-credit on KRONOS). Said writer-producer Jack Rabin had a long career in the special effects department, which is somewhat ironic given that the extremely paltry FX of CAT WOMEN often cause the film to be ridiculed and thus dismissed.

I'm not overlooking a lot of CAT WOMEN's real failings. Though it's got a fairly detailed script dealing with 1950s sexual politics, the writers frequently throw in "jolts" just to keep things from slowing down too much-- two separate meteor bombardments, a couple of lame looking giant spiders, and a scene where the titular "CatWomen" attack the astronaut-protagonists, even though the assault ought to sabotage their long-range plans. But these sort of narrative glitches don't detract from the main story, yet another take on the War Between Men and Women.

It takes quite a while for the titular femmes fatales to show up on-screen, though the viewer eventually learns that they've got their claws into Earth's lunar expedition from the outset. Of the five astronauts that venture into space, four--  Laird, Kip, Doug, and Walt-- are men who seem to be in some branch of the military, while the lone female, Helen, appears to be a civilian navigator, though she like the others wears regulation khaki garments. Though initially the viewer may be impressed that a woman has made it as an astronaut in a 1950s film, it's later revealed that the Cat Women have manipulated Helen from their hidden refuge on the moon for some years. The moon-girls want Earth's rocket, and the only way they can get it is to have one female aboard as a "sleeper agent." All through the voyage to the moon, Helen evinces strange foreknowledge of the expedition's destination. Eventually she guides the bemused males right into an underground moon-cavern, complete with a breathable atmosphere and hot-and-cold-running Cat Women (so called by Kip, for no explicit reason, unless it's because all seven of the lunarites are sleek and slinky).

The writers devoted a fair amount of attention to the background of the cat-suited aliens. At some point the moon had both an atmosphere and a civilization. But the moon, not unlike the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, began to lose its air. Some survivors were able to seek refuge in a domain with an artificially created atmosphere, but only by eliminating most of the population through genocide. This left the moon inhabited by just seven females-- four without names, while the others decided to use the names of Greek letters, Lambda, Beta and Alpha (Alpha being the leader, of course). Lambda is the youngest, unable to remember what the males of her species looked like-- though there's no knowing how old any of them are in total years, since they all boast phenomenal mind-powers. One may be tempted to wonder if they're immortal, since they didn't seem to worry much about having any males for reproductive purposes. 

Immortal or not, all the Cat Women want to emigrate to Earth and take over the planet by telepathically controlling Earth-females, since for some reason they can't control the minds of men. (Maybe this is another reason for the Cat Women having got rid of the moon-males, as well as the reason Alpha speaks of breeding only "girl children.")  Having used Helen as their "catspaw" (heh) to get the males into their web of sin, the slinky succubi try to wring the secrets of operating the rocket out of them. (They never really explain the reason for their abortive physical attack on the guys, but Kip in particular never trusts the moon-maidens.) Walt proves the weakest link, in that Beta gets the info she needs from greedy, gold-mad Walt and then kills him. Doug and Lambda fall in love, but they're not fated to settle down and raise moon-kittens, for Lambda is slain as a traitor to the Space-Amazon cause. In the none too exciting climax, Kip manages to shoot Alpha and Beta before they can board the ship with their thrall Helen, and the surviving astronauts return to Earth, implicitly leaving the four unnamed Cat Women to their doleful fate.

In order to explicate the mythicity of the Cat Women, I leaped over the three audience-identification characters who are also comprise one of Hollywood's favorite tropes, the romance-triangle. In one respect, the narrative comes close to being an older man/younger man/younger woman trope, in that Helen at first seems to be interested in the experienced expedition leader Lord (I mean Laird) but was actually manipulated to pursue him by those mean Cat Women. Her true interest is the more dynamic Kip, and all this does sound like the Oedipal struggle-- except that the actor playing Kip, Victor Jory, was actually older than the Laird-player, Sonny Tufts. For that matter, Marie Windsor, who played Helen, was no spring chicken either, being in her middle thirties. 

Still, though neither Laird nor Kip is particularly appealing as a romantic icon, Kip is the quintessential manly male. At one point he becomes so frustrated by Helen's divided loyalties that he seizes her roughly-- which is just enough male-on-female contact to briefly dispel the mental thralldom of the Cat Women. However, Kip like the other males is too dim to realize what's going on, and Helen becomes a catspaw again, manipulating Laird and Kip against one another and (as noted above) almost helping the main two moon-cats to abscond with the rocket. Still, even if Kip and Helen aren't the ideal romantic couple, there's more sexual tension than in the average male-female pairing in 1950s science fiction films, and so CAT WOMEN provides a nice variation on the "men vs. women" theme.