Rocketship X-M (1950)

In a Fantascene article, Academy Award-winning special-effects expert Robert Skotak describes this astonishing otherworldly image from Rocketship X-M (1950): “[Jack] Rabin combined a hard-line matte of the foreground pinnacle with live-action scenes of the spacemen filmed at Palm Springs. He blended [Irving] Block’s painting of nuclear blasted buildings with the actual real-life terrain by means of a softline type matte.” Courtesy Wade Williams Distribution.

 

Summary:

Describing the ship and the project to reporters.

Only minutes before the Rocketship X-M (Expedition Moon) is to take off to the moon, its very existence is announced to a roomful of reporters. The crew of five (four men, one woman) take off flawlessly and they chat among themselves, and survive a meteor storm (without any problem), until a mishap having to do with the rocket fuel mixture causes them to accelerate and blank out. When they regain consciousness, they are within hailing distance of Mars. (It is left unclear whether this interval of interplanetary travel was a matter of hours or months.) It seems the fuel problem sent them off-course. They land and discover a vast desert and the ruins of a once vital civilization. They study the wasteland and conclude the Martians had wiped themselves out through nuclear war. Descendants of those Martians (half naked, scarred, and brutal) kill two of the crew by tossing boulders on them. Two other members of the crew and a wounded third make it to the ship and take off. But, they don’t have enough fuel to land and there follows a tragic ending. The space expedition program director stalwartly announces the commencement of the X-M 2 project.

 

Left: A colorful Belgium poster. Right: Note how this lobby card emphasizes "Expedition Moon" in order to waylay unsuspecting film-goers who think they'll be seeing Destination Moon (see below)

 

Important Notice:

Please think of this post on 1950’s Rocketship X-M as a continuation of the post on 1950’s Destination Moon. Here is the link to Destination Moon.

The history and development of George Pal’s Destination Moon and Robert L. Lippert’s Rocketship X-M are inextricably tied together. Yes, Destination Moon would surly have been made and released if there had been no Rocketship X-M, but Rocketship X-M would never have even been a glimmer in any producer’s eye without Destination Moon. And thereby hangs a marvelous tale! That tale is told in detail in my post for that seminal, groundbreaking film Destination Moon—Prelude to Mars.

In short, the producer named Robert L. Lippert who then specialized in quick, cheap exploitation films, noticed that the movie then in production titled Destination Moon was receiving vast amounts of almost unprecedented press coverage in the nation’s important family periodicals, as well as in specialized technical and fiction magazines. Naturally, the thought occurred to him that if he whipped together a similar movie about a rocketship, much of the public would be none the wiser and go to his movie instead of the Pal movie, or perhaps both. His logic was successful beyond measure.

It so happened that not-too-long before Lippert's revelation (1) longtime producer-director Kurt Neumann had offered him a script about a trip to Mars, which was populated with dinosaurs, and (2) Jack Rabin, who owned a special visual effects company, had brought him an idea about a trip to the moon. Though Lippert was not interested in either pitch at the time, he changed his tune and he decided he’d be an idiot not to take advantage of all this free promotion for Destination Moon. He then brought on board Neumann, Rabin, and Rabin's FX partner Irving Block, and combined their ideas.

 

And around then, serendipitously, Life magazine published in its January 17, 1949 issue a sumptuously illustrated article titled “Rocket to the Moon” that included much detail about how such a rocket could be outfitted. Neumann, Block, and Rabin derived much useful information from that article and modified whatever they needed to insert into their developing story. Many of the article’s details and illustrations, including the unique outside design of the rocket showed up vividly on the screen. In so doing, Life magazine proved to be central to the development of both early space adventures.  See Destination Moon.

 

However, renowned space and astronomical artist Ron Miller, has this to say about that article: "There is a kind of sad irony about part of Rocketship X-M's [production]. The producers tried to give the movie a little sound scientific foundation by basing the spaceship on the one illustrated by Noel Sickles for an article in "Life" magazine. They even went to some lengths to paraphrase the article in a lecture presented near the beginning of the film. the sad part is that the science in the (uncredited) magazine article was just awful....and the film carefully repeats all the errors."

Matte painting of rocket from the film by Irving Block

Illustration of rocket from the Life article

While Destination Moon had been in production for two years and was costing more than half a million dollars, Lippert created Rocketship X-M with $94,000 and a shooting schedule of 18 days. In fact, he made it so fast that it arrived in theaters a full month before Destination Moon! Lloyd Bridges, one of the stars of Rocketship X-M, has said, “With Rocketship X-M we did beat our competitor, Destination Moon. And they paid a lot more for their production. We kind of took advantage of the publicity they were putting out—people weren’t quite sure whether they were seeing that picture or our picture.” [quoted from the prequel to this article, my Destination Moon post].

Both films were huge popular and financial successes, twin factors that brought into existence the science-fiction movie boom of the 1950s and 60s.

Comments:

I first saw Rocketship X-M on a small black and white TV in the mid–50s. Then, a couple of years later, I saw Destination Moon for the first time on the same TV. The difference was that Rocketship X-M irritated the heck out of me. Even at the age of ten I was knowledgeable about film visual special-effects, and I was seriously insulted by the shoddy way that the filmmakers first provided fabulous matte paintings of the nicely designed rocket on its launching pad and then substituted stock footage of a V-2 rocket taking off. That really offended me. Did they really have the gall to imagine that I (and other movie goers) wouldn’t notice? In point of fact, the perfectionist in my ten-year-old self tended to focus on the film’s deficiencies.

V-2 shots irritated me as a child!

On the other hand, I knew George Pal’s Destination Moon was his first venture into science fiction and the film was irreproachable and practically perfect in my mind.

The version of Rocketship X-M that I watched often on TV was the theatrical cut (less whatever arbitrary cuts local TV stations made to insert commercials and to fit the movie within set time slots). In fact, Rocketship X-M was one of the first to make the transition from movie theaters to the TV set. This was a mixed blessing, as there were precious few science fiction movies being shown on TV at the time, but even still, the multiple V-2 stock inserts weren’t any less offending.

It has been argued that Lippert and Rocketship X-M director and co-writer Neumann used stock footage of the V-2 taking off because they didn’t have enough time to do better effects and still beat Destination Moon to the box office. Yet, Kansas City, Missouri, film exhibitor and noted archivist Wade Williams has said, “The reason Bob Lippert used the V-2 footage in many of his films is because he had a good friend who was the commander of White Sands Missile Base and was furnished 35mm negatives.”

Four aspects of Rocketship X-M made it stand out from the low-budget B western, noir, and other genre films of the period: (1) Lippert, wanting to get some serious names attached to his film, was able to get Ferde Grofé, the classical composer of The Grand Canyon Suite to compose a sweeping and majestic score that was orchestrated by Albert Glasser conducting a 35-piece orchestra that included the then relatively unknown eerie-sounding instrument called the theremin; (2) Lippert and Neumann were able to attract to their project Academy Award winning director of photography Karl Struss, who had lensed many prestigious pictures featuring Charlie Chaplin, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Fredric March, et al.; (3) talented screenwriter Dalton Trumbo came on board to help shape the second half of the script, which was set on Mars (uncredited due to his being blacklisted during the McCarthy era); Trumbo replaced the original script’s dinosaurs with a war-shattered desert terrain populated with sad, radiation-scarred primitives; and (4) though a black and white movie, all of the scenes on Mars—actually Red Rock Canyon near Death Valley, California—were tinted reddish orange to offer a more visceral, sensational sense of the Red Planet.

The red tint while on the surface of Mars was quite successful.

Regarding his use of stock V-2 rocket footage, assuming Lippert was in fact patronizing his audience, it may be he was right to do so; the film went on to make a great deal of money. Apparently audiences back then were more forgiving than me. Maybe audiences didn’t notice the substitution, or maybe they didn’t care. More importantly, in general, as Glenn Erickson has said in his Deep Roots (deeprootsmag [dot] org) review, “The science of Rocketship X-M is beyond all hope.... Unlike Destination Moon, every known rule about space travel is broken.... But in 1950, Rocketship X-M’s boffo box office was the first proof that Science Fiction success wasn’t dependent on scientific accuracy.” Thereafter, real science was hardly ever considered or addressed as the science fiction film juggernaut of the 50s rolled relentlessly onward.

Then the film was shown less and less often on TV as color programming was introduced in the late 1950s. Stations trashed their copies of the film, as it was universally believed that nobody was interested in black and white movies on color TV anymore. Eventually Rocketship X-M vanished altogether from the airwaves.

For convenience, let’s call this version of Rocketship X-M, the one viewed from 1950 through the mid-to-late-60s both in the theaters and on TV, “Version One.”

Wherefrom comes Version Two? In 1969, Wade Williams (see above) began to wonder why he wasn’t seeing his favorite science fiction movie on TV anymore. It had been years since he’d seen it. He made up his mind to solve this problem. His inquiries kept leading nowhere, almost as though the movie had simply ceased to exist, which only stoked his fire to find the film. Long story short, Williams spent six years tracking down the film in a convoluted quest that brings to mind Raiders of the Lost Ark. But he succeeded finding the film’s disparate film elements in various locations, reassembling it, and acquiring all the movie’s legal rights into perpetuity, thereby rescuing Version One, the original theatrical version.

Yet despite his great love for the film, he was troubled by the same V-2 stock shots that had troubled me as a child. But now he was in a position to do something about it. In the premier 1979 issue of Cinemagic magazine, writer David Hutchinson tells us what happened next, and how “Version Two” was born:

"Late in 1977 Williams made contact with some effects artists in Hollywood who he hoped might be interested in what was certainly an unusual plan. Wouldn’t it be fun, he suggested, and interesting to improve this old little-known space adventure story by throwing out some effects footage, reshooting it, maybe adding some new scenes and making it available to the public again?

 

In fact, Williams’ plan succeeded beyond his dreams. In due course, after countless hours of passionate preparation, his team, consisting of both science fiction movie fans and visual effects professionals—including Bob Burns, Kathy Burns, Mike Matney, Michael Minor, Dennis Muren, Tom Scherman, Bob Skotack, David Stipes, and Harry Walton—created 11 new visual effects shots to replace the offending shots in the original. This was a monumental effort for so few people and they all multitasked, helping with rocket design and creation (since the original no longer existed), costume design and matching, prop design and matching, complicated effects shots requiring much planning, measuring, and model building, and a weekend in Death Valley battling 40 mph winds.

ABOVE: Positioning the newly built RXM so that it would seamlessly blend with the Death Valley terrain. This involved building a raised pseudo-terrain platform and phony rocks positioned exactly. When all done. the effect was perfect. Click on photo to enlarge. LEFT: The Rocketship X-M “version two” team made 11 new shots to replace shoddy shots in the original. One new shot involved seeing the X-M crew emerge from the spaceship. This was partly accomplished by dressing five members of the film team in look-alike costumes. Top: The original still from which costumes and props had to be copied. Below: The new costumes made by Bob and Kathy Burns. Left to right the intrepid explorers are Bob Burns, Elaine Edford, Wade Williams, Irving Lipscomb, and Ben Mossman after disembarking from the rocket.

This entire story of this enhanced version (Version Two), thankfully, is documented in detail in the 1979 Cinemagic magazine noted above and Starlog magazine #7, August 1977. To this writer’s taste, these changes are all for the better. However, if anyone is desperate to see the original V-2 footage from this movie, they need go no farther than the movie’s trailer, which is included in the VHS and DVD.

Lippert and Neumann were able to stretch their $96,000 budget cleverly, for example, the interior of the rocket is decked out in a crowded but convincing array of instruments—which served double duty: in fact, the very next theatrical voyage to Mars movie, Flight to Mars, borrowed and used the exact same rocketship control room!

The scenes of the X-M crew’s exploration of Mars are extremely well executed and succeeded in being riveting and thought-provoking. Further, Irving Block’s several wonderful matte paintings of a long-deserted Martian city blend seemingly effortlessly into the Death Valley landscape. Additionally, Lippert and his staff must have been inspired from above to tint the Mars scenes red. The effect—which of course I never had a chance to see on black and white TV—is uncanny, especially as seen in Wade Williams’ and Image Entertainment’s 2000 DVD.

Of course, there has been the inevitable criticism that the original should not have been tampered with. Williams counters with the fact that the original movie (Version One) is available in 16mm and 35mm. Version Two is available on Laserdisc, VHS, DVD, and possibly soon Blu-ray. 

Also, Williams in association with Starlog magazine way back in 1977 were able to locate a pristine recording of Ferde Grofé’s score, which they published as a now-rare LP (left) which is again available as a limited edition CD.

Since Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M were born joined at the hip, and because there destinies were intertwined, I would suggest that my post on Destination Moon should be read in conjunction with this posting.

Rocketship X-M (1950)

USA. June 1950. Robert L. Lippert Productions. BW with some tinting. 1.37:1. 77m. CREDITS: Director Kurt Neumann. Producer Kurt Neumann. Screenplay Kurt Neumann, Dalton Trumbo (uncredited). Executive Producer Murray Lerner. Score Ferde Grofé. Musical Director Albert Glasser. Theremin Dr. Samuel Hoffman (uncredited). Director of Photography Karl Struss. Instruments and Technical Equipment Allied Aircraft Co. Special Photographic Effects Jack Rabin. Matte Artist I. A. Block. Editor Harry Gerstad. Production Design and Art Direction Theobold Holsopple.

CREDITS FOR REVISED FOOTAGE (1979): Bob Burns, Kathy Burns, Mike Matney, Hal Miles, Michael Minor, Dennis Muren, Tom Scherman, Ron Seawright, David Stipes, Robert Skotak. Kerry O’Quinn, Harry Walton, Wade Williams, Elaine Edford, Irving Lipscomb, Ben Mossman.

CAST: Col. Floyd Graham Lloyd Bridges. Dr. Lisa Van Horn Osa Massen. Dr. Karl Eckstrom John Emery. Maj. William Corrigan Noah Beery, Jr. Harry Chamberlain Hugh O’Brian. Dr. Ralph Fleming Morris Ankrum.

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https://www.amazon.com/Mars-Movies-Thomas-Kent-Miller/dp/0786499141