Back in the 1980s, conservatives began holding up the 1950s as a utopia. A peaceful, united nation full of happy nuclear families resembling 1950s sitcoms (mom at home, dad at work, kids respectful, all white), never troubled by civil right protests, anti-war protests, feminist protests, gay-rights protests — well you get the idea.
This vision of the past was a delusion, nostalgia laced with resentment at the Uppity Negroes, Angry Feminists and others demanding equality. In reality, America in the 1950s saw itself besieged: women had too much authority, blacks were pushing for integration, homosexuals were everywhere, communists were subverting society, movies had too much sex, rock and roll had too much sex, and juvenile delinquents were running wild. Most terrifying of all, the Soviet Union had the bomb. If the Cold War turned hot or if the Soviets launched a first strike, everything was over.
Red Planet Mars (1952) offers a solution: Martians are Christians, Jesus is real, what more do we need to unite the world?
We open with radio expert Chris Cronyn (Peter Graves) and his wife/assistant Linda (Andrea King) visiting an observatory doing groundbreaking work photographing Mars. Cronyn has been using a hydrogen valve developed by Nazi scientist Calder (Herbert Berghof) to power up a radio for communication with Mars; he’s getting signals back from the red planet, but nothing he can translate yet.
The observatory’s photos confirm that Mars holds intelligent life. South of the massive polar mountains the photos show crisscrossing dark bands which can only be canals; the black patches where the canals meet must therefore be Martian cities. This is treated a a Big Reveal, even though Mars’ supposed canals were old news before John Carter set foot on Barsoom. That night’s photos, though, really blow Cronyn’s mind: the dark bands now reflect light and the polar mountains are gone. The only possible explanation is that the mountains were glaciers and the Martians melted them in a couple of days to irrigate the planet. Imagine what their technology could do for Earth!
When they return home, however, Linda asks her husband not to check for messages that night, or maybe ever. She tells him that as the mother of two boys she feels their family’s on top of a volcano that could erupt at any second, a volcano caused by well-meaning scientists like Chris. Einstein thought splitting the atom to create limitless energy would help the world; instead, humanity lives with the threat of nuclear annihilation (Einstein did not split the atom but this movie is big on alternative facts). Chris’s efforts to contact the planet symbolic of war won’t end any better.
In between these scenes we see Calder monitoring Cronyn’s communications efforts with his own hydrogen valve-powered equipment. Calder works for the Soviets who busted him out of American prison (the US recruited a number of Nazi scientists for its own research rather than lock them up, but that wasn’t common knowledge). His commie supervisor wants to know why Calder hasn’t contacted Mars first; the Nazi replies that as the valves will let him and Cronyn pick up each other’s communications, it’s better if he eavesdrop on Cronyn than vice versa.
Fiction in this era routinely treated Nazis and communists as interchangeable: both hate America, both are evil, therefore it was natural they’d work together, like the fanatical Nazi scientist who becomes a fanatical communist in 1951’s The Whip Hand. Calder, unusually, hates his Soviet paymasters just as much as he does the Americans. Like the real Nazis who worked for one side or the other in the Cold War, his motivation is self-interest, not ideology.
Back in the US, one of Cronyn’s sons suggests improving communications with Mars by sending them the first few digits of pi and seeing if they respond. When they send back the next digits in the sequence it confirms the messages are not just some accident and enables Cronyn and a Washington codebreaker (Cary Walter Sande) to crack the entire Martian language somehow. News we’re talking to Mars makes Cronyn a worldwide celebrity; even in Russia, a greybeard and his peasant family listen closely to the reports coming over the Voice of America.
While Cronyn realizes Mars sharing its technology could make great swathes of Earth’s economy obsolescent overnight, he’s confident we’ll adapt. It doesn’t occur to him that the affected business sectors won’t feel the same. When the Martians reveal they live for 300 years, for instance, the life insurance industry stops writing policies — imagine paying annuities for more than a century (collecting premiums for more than a century should balance that out, but nobody considers that)! Likewise, the efficiency of Martian food production and energy generation sends farmers, coal miners and mine owners into a panic and triggers eventual strikes. America’s economy collapses; Russia’s leaders gloat they’ll be able to end the Cold War without firing a shot.
The government decides to shut down the radio link before Cronyn can make things worse. One last message gets through though, answering Cronyn’s question about how the Martians avoided destroying each other with their advanced technology. The alien reply is that seven generations ago their great spiritual leader taught them the highest value was to “love good and hate evil.”
An astonished Linda realizes this is the exact message Jesus gave his followers in the Sermon on the Mount (alternative facts again). That can only mean Jesus preached to the Martians too! Heck, seven generations of 300 years each means he’d have been preaching right before or after his time on Earth (no, it would be around 150 BC but why worry about such niggling details)!
At her urging, the government releases this game-changing news and America becomes reborn in an orgy of religious joy and hope. The film generously awards non-Christian religions a participation trophy, explaining that as “love good and hate evil” is the core message of every religion, everyone gets to share in the spiritual rebirth. This negates the idea the Martians could only have learned this philosophy from Jesus, but there you are.
Over in the Soviet Union, the greybeard turns out to be the lost patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church or something like that. He and his family dig up his old vestments for him to don only for government troops to mow them down. It’s too late for that now, though — the fire of freedom consumes the USSR and the atheist tyranny’s doom is assured (anti-communist propaganda of the era emphasized communism being godless made it even more horrible).
As the world heads toward a quasi-Christian utopia, Chris tells Linda she was right all along (actually if he’d stopped his experiments like she wanted, none of this would have happened). Then Calder arrives at their lab to become the serpent in the new Eden. He reveals that the messages that destabilized the American economy were fakes he fed to Cronyn’s receiver, hoping to destroy the world as Germany was destroyed. And it would have worked, too, if not for you meddling kids — er no, if Cronyn (Calder assumes) hadn’t caught on and replaced his fakes with the equally fake messages of peace, love, and harmony. But that will end as soon as Calder explains it was all a scam.
Unable to convince Calder the messages were real, the Cronyns try to blow up the lab’s hydrogen supply rather than let the Nazi bring on the second fall of man. Calder prevents them, then the receiver starts recording another message — and clearly neither he nor the Cronyns has sent it. Furious, Calder blasts the receiver which ignites the hydrogen, sending the Cronyns up to heaven on a fiery chariot (as someone puts it later). The New Eden will flourish undisturbed and in the film’s final moments a family friend tells the grieving Cronyn kids how lucky they are — “You’re their sons.” Yes, I’m sure that made them feel better.
According to Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies, this film adapted a British stage play in which all the messages were a hoax. Warren speculates the inspiration was the successful 1951 film The Next Voice You Hear, in which God addresses the world by radio. Whether that means the Red Planet Mars production team shamelessly exploited a trend or sincerely believed they had something to say worth hearing doesn’t make a difference. Either way the film is heavy-handed, slow, talky and rather boring.
A shame: it’s ideas should have made Red Planet Mars so bad it’s good. Instead, it’s so bland it’s boring.
#SFWApro.
