A Moon, Cat Women, and Thou

One of the 'golden turkey' classics (Medved wrote of it in awe), CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953) begs little but indulgence. It doesn't ask for respect, forgiveness or love, that's why you forgive, respect and love it, like a play put on by your children. Shot in 3-D in the middle of the night on cheap sets by the most depth-perception-challenged director in history (Arthur Hilton), CWOTM features cat dancing; spacesuit donning and doffing; a giant spider; mystic trances; plotting; hypnosis; and lots of sleeping.

Ah to sleep, long time, for there is no 'late' sleeping on the dark side of the moon. There is no sunshine day for your mom to complain you're wasting. There are just stars, and those who once were even less than that. See how they doze on lounge chairs in their aluminum siding-walled space ship. See how they doze amidst the columns and splendor of the secret cat lair. Shhhh! They waken and overhear a conversation. The two alpha human males fight over Helen... if you can call it fighting.

Diggers of Brecht, Godard, Wood, Ulmer and Franco should know that this is it: the pure stuff, the 'stank, bra. Irresistible in its grade-Z charm; missing--thankfully--any sense of self-awareness or wit, MOON manages to forget more about male-female relationships than the entire rom-com genre will ever remember.  It's poverty row's graveyard shift, AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL: MOON EDITION, and-- whether convulsing in alcohol withdrawal, or fuzzily fading in and out of stoned consciousness--'tis like some strange oxygen-enriched air magically adhering to the dark side of the moon for only you and your asleep, annoyed lover to breathe.

It's a movie so cheap that half its action scenes occur off-camera, described secondhand by actors who've just run back down the cavern between the spaceship (interiors only) and underground cat woman lair. The presence of a giant spider on strings pops up to wake you with Helen's screams if you were about to fall asleep and you were. You could laugh at the spider's strings, but why? The humor in the film comes from something far deeper: the mythic dissonance between the sides of the moon and sides of the brain--the moon/women/Eros cats vs. earth/sun/Apollonian astronauts, and it all goes down with a quiet Zen emptiness thanks to renowned composer Elmer Bernstein's inexplicable presence on the soundtrack. He delivers a low-key snake charmer flute score that puts it all at a whole other level. You end up not laughing but falling into a mythopoetic dream trance when that beatnik flute starts working.

Bernstein's touch saves the film from utter disintegration into abstract off-off-off Broadway theater, but even then, disintegration is imminent. And wait, there's a few more touches. Look for example at the poverty of the dark side of the moon cat cavern lair below:

 

Simple. Poverty-stricken. Beautiful. A psychic palm reading in some terrible alternate reality, here no one washes their hair and the future is unwritten, just improvised off the back of the screenwriter's cocktail napkins. And UFO enthusiasts should dig that thing on the wall in the upper left. It looks just like a primitive sculpture of the face of a reptilian grey! 

An accident? Intentional? Just some weird trinket rummaged from the discarded prop bin in the alley behind the sound stage?  There are no accidents in bad 1950s science fiction. I can imagine that face being added in the dead of the night by covert military disinformation specialists to throw paranoid fans off the scent... or not.

On the intellectual side, if I understand Antonioni, Godard, and Bergman today, it's only because of movies like CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON, which taught me to love the seams of the simulacrum; the glue on the aluminum siding spaceship; the lounge chair beds right by the instrument panels. Watching it I get the feeling as if space is a giant slumber party where someone is always awake and someone is always asleep, keeping the crew rooted in a place neither unconscious nor conscious. 

Cinema and viewing, especially late night semi-conscious viewing, is just like that! 

And in watching the characters throwing themselves into the path of the spider, you feel unmoored from the limits of narrative and into the 4th wall freedom of post-modern awareness.

 

Above is another cool shot of some people sleeping. Doesn't it just make you want to sack out on a cold night like this? And of course, Helen. She sleeps like a champ:

Marie (NARROW MARGIN) Windsor plays her! (everyone in the cast has to shout her name for some reason: "Helen! HELEN!!") As a woman she's susceptible to the mind control of the cat women. She's the navigator and guides the men to the dark side, and then plays the humorless Victor Jory against the incompetent leader (Sonny Tufts) so she can learn all the crewmen's secrets and telepath the data back to Alpha (Carol Brewster), the lead cat lady. Only Victor has the power to free her of cat women domination, just by twisting her arm (she likes it r-r-rough, like an Eartha Kittwoman). And she likes to sleep... around!

I like that too, and I like that there's no exterior footage in CAT WOMEN. There are no daytime shots, mismatched day-for-night driving scenes that go on for two reels; no sense of grass or earthy values. It's soothing to my Swedish blood to imagine a world where the sun never comes up and the planet is populated only by cat girls who--for all their guile--are so much more sympathetic than the brain-dead Tufts or the suspicious, reptilian Victor Jory who never doubts his own moral rightness as he punches out women right and left (he'd be a great candidate for Summers' Isle)--or the nakedly greedy and self-serving Walt (Douglas Fowley) or the blank-as-candy Doug (William Phillips), who somehow earns the love of Lambda, ah sweet Lambda (Susan Morrow).

I first got into this movie while drunk in Seattle living with a girlfriend who was beautiful and already fed up with my sloth and debauchery after three months of unemployed cohabitation. Lambda could have been her sister, same kind of deer-in-the-headlights sweet clueless brunette cool and aquiline profile. Man oh man. I was so in love and all I could do was treat her mean and contemptuous until she left me. Then for years after, I watched CAT WOMEN to remind me of her.... "Lambda...." Seattle may as well have been the moon now that I was an east-coaster forever. The perfect Pacific Northwestern pre-Twilight fantasia was born. Like Seattle, CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON has no sunshine but does come with sparse and mismatched garage sale decor, a beatnik coffee house aesthetic gone wrong, a sense of smug sanctimony clouding its once-beautiful blankness, and once you leave you can never go back and the comforts of Sonny Tufts are small condolence.

It's been a long time since I was in Seattle, and New York has no room for CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. In my personal constellation, Lambda's archetypal resonance has dimmed over the decades, and thanks to David Icke I recently learned  the truth about the moon (the moon is not your friend), but I took this film to PA earlier this month and it got me through. It's the kind of film that can get you through almost anything, except... maybe... itself. But isn't life a lot like that... in PA? or WA? or NY? or anywhere on this stupid 3-D earth?