She Blinded Me with Science: Women Scientists and Doctors in ‘50s Sci-fi Films

We don’t normally think of the 1950s as a time of women’s empowerment. After World War II, Rosie the Riveter was given her pink slip and told to go home and have babies. Popular magazines were full of advice to single women on catching a man -- a 1958 McCall’s article, “129 Ways to Get a Husband,” suggested, among other things, reading obituaries to find eligible widowers or having your car break down in “strategic places.” (!!)

"Thanks for all your help Rosie. Go ahead and
clock out -- your last check is in the mail."

On TV, it was a time of Father Knows Best and the saintly stay-at-home mom exemplified by June in Leave It to Beaver. In the movies, working women were often depicted as lost souls to be pitied rather than strong role models to be emulated. Across the popular culture landscape, motherhood was extolled as a woman’s greatest fulfillment.

An interesting exception to the rule was the B sci-fi movie. Capable, courageous female scientists and doctors popped up time and again to help battle giant radioactive monsters or menaces from outer space.

Undoubtedly, the presence of women in lead roles added a romantic angle that had potential appeal for adult audiences. The women spent almost as much time fending off the awkward advances of their male colleagues as battling monsters (more on that below).

Perhaps too, their presence was a subtle acknowledgement that while men got us into this atom age radioactive mess, women were needed to help get us out of it. Whatever the motives, conscious or unconscious, these unassuming films went against the cultural grain and set the stage for the normalization of women’s achievement outside of home and family.

The following list of profiles in B movie courage only scratches the surface of strong female characters in ‘50s sci-fi. This time around I’ve limited it to women scientists and doctors with key roles -- even at that, it’s a selective list. Not included are the pioneering female astronauts, or, for that matter, the “ordinary” single women, wives and mothers who faced extraordinary sci-fi threats. I’ll take those up in future posts.

Along with each character’s resume and screen accomplishments, I’ve included a “cringe moment.” This was the ‘50s after all, and being subjected to chauvinistic acts and comments was the price women paid for inclusion in the monster fighters’ club. These vignettes serve to illustrate how far we’ve come, at least as far as the depiction of “normal” male-female relations in popular culture is concerned.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
Name: Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond)

"Hey mister, I've got a bone to pick with you!"

Resume: Hunter is an assistant to Prof. Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway), world-renowned paleontologist, and an accomplished scientist in her own right.

Biggest screen moment: Nuclear scientist Tom Nesbitt (Paul Hubschmid) approaches Elson and Hunter with a wild story of seeing a huge prehistoric creature unleashed by a polar atomic test. Elson is completely dismissive, but Lee keeps an open mind, showing Nesbitt illustrations of dinosaurs to try to identify what he saw. After a fishing trawler is capsized by what witnesses insist was a sea serpent, Lee suggests they show the set of pictures to one of the survivors in a sort of creature line-up. When the sailor picks the same dinosaur as Nesbitt, Elson becomes convinced, and they arrange an expedition to track down the monster.

Biggest cringe moment: When Nesbitt and Hunter are alone discussing what he might have seen, he awkwardly tries to flirt with her:
  “Funny, a girl like you, a paleontologist…”
  “What’s wrong with paleontology?”
  “Classifying old bones…”
  “Old bones? If we didn’t study the past, you wouldn’t know anything about the atom. Dr. Elson says the future is a reflection of the past…”

Additional notes: After her role in Beast, Paula dived into TV, guesting on dozens of shows, including One Step Beyond, Perry Mason and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  She also appeared in two of the more obscure B sci-fi films of the ‘60s, The Flight that Disappeared (1961), and Hand of Death (1962; with John Agar).

Them! (1954)
Name: Dr. Patricia Medford (Joan Weldon)

Resume: Along with her father, Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn), Pat is part of a scientific team sent by the Dept. of Agriculture to help the authorities in New Mexico investigate a series of mysterious deaths in the desert near the White Sands atomic test area.

"I told them it was a bad idea to have a picnic
out here in the middle of nowhere!"

Biggest screen moment: When they find the underground nest of giant ants, special agent Robert Graham (James Arness) and State Trooper Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) launch phosphorus grenades at the nest to drive them underground, and then lob poison gas canisters after them. To make sure all the ants are dead, someone has to rappel down into the nest to check. Pat insists on going with them. When Graham states emphatically that “it’s no place for you or any other woman,” she is equally emphatic:
  “Look Bob, there’s no time to give you a fast course on insect pathology, so let’s stop all the talk and get on with it!”
  Her presence is indeed crucial, as she discovers that two young queen ants hatched and flew away before the nest was bombed. If they're not found and dealt with, it could be the beginning of the end for humanity.

Biggest cringe moment: Arriving in New Mexico on a military transport plane, Pat’s dress gets caught as she climbs down the ladder from the cockpit, revealing some leg. Standing on the tarmac, Graham and Peterson are ogling her.
  Peterson: “She’s some doctor, huh?”
  Graham: “Yeah, if she’s the kind that takes care of sick people, I think I’ll get a fever real quick.”

Additional notes: After Them!, Joan (who is still alive as of this post), acted in only a relative handful of movies and TV shows before retiring in the late ‘50s.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)
Name: Prof. Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue)

Prof. Joyce inspects the lab equipment as Pete makes his move.

Resume: Joyce is the head of the marine biology dept. at The Southeastern Institute of Oceanography, and in the words of her screen colleague, Dr. John Carter (Donald Curtis), the “outstanding authority on marine biology” in the country.

Biggest screen moment: Joyce and Carter are brought in by the Navy to examine a huge piece of irradiated tissue that was caught on the fins of an atomic sub during a mysterious encounter in the middle of the Pacific ocean. After extensive examination, the team concludes that it came from an octopus, but one so huge as to be beyond belief. Their theory is borne out as ships begin disappearing and a man on a beach is crushed by some enigmatic thing. After there is no doubt about the threat from the colossal octopus, Joyce, Carter and Cmdr. Pete Matthews (Kenneth Tobey) head up a task force to deal with the threat. When depth charges fail to kill the beast, it emerges from the depths to wrap its tentacles around the Golden Gate Bridge. In the situation room, Joyce calmly and authoritatively tells a Navy Captain to go to red alert.

Biggest cringe moment: Earlier, when the scientists are still trying to determine the source of the tissue, Matthews corners Joyce in the lab. She responds by egging him on:
  “When you’re driving that atomic submarine of yours, do you have much time for romance?”
  “Even if I did have the time, where would I find the opportunity? You know, women aren’t allowed aboard a submarine.”
  “Poor boy, I thought the Navy was equipped for every contingency…”

Additional notes: In addition to It Came from Beneath the Sea, Faith starred in 3 other sci-fi movies released in 1955: Cult of the Cobra, The Atomic Man, and most memorably, This Island Earth (in which she also played a scientist).

From Hell It Came (1957)
Name: Dr. Terry Mason (Tina Carver)

"Hmmm, I can't tell for sure, but I think part of the
problem is that knife sticking out of its chest."

Resume: Mason (no relation to Perry) is a member of a medical team sent by the “International Foundation” to a group of South Seas islands to investigate health hazards caused by atomic testing, and to treat the sick natives.

Biggest screen moment: With the help of colleagues Dr. William Arnold (Tod Andrews) and Prof. Clark (John McNamara), Mason digs up an unearthly, weirdly human-looking tree that has suddenly sprouted near their encampment. The natives warn them that it is the dreaded Tabanga, which has grown from the body of a young native man unjustly accused of murdering his own father, and executed by authority of the local witch doctor. A ceremonial knife is buried in the monster where its heart should be.
  Back at the lab, Terry finds the monster has a pulse, but it’s weakening. Disregarding Arnold’s suggestion to let it die, she makes an executive decision to stimulate its heart (?) with an experimental serum of her own making -- a decision she will soon regret.

Biggest cringe moment: Arnold is mad about the good doctor Mason, and wants to make her his wife and take her back to civilization. He pleads with her:
  “Terry, will you stop being a doctor first and a woman second? Let your emotions rule you, not your intellect.”
  “Bill, I live by my intellect and my reason. If I let my emotions run away, I wouldn’t be any good in my work.”
  Undeterred, Bill embraces her and they kiss. He asks her if she loves him.
  “I don’t love you.”
  “Then why did you kiss me back?”
  “I don’t know, my metabolism… it’s unconscious, involuntary…”

Additional notes: The same year as From Hell It Came was released, Tina also appeared in The Man Who Turned to Stone, about a group of scientists who stay young by draining the life out of unsuspecting women.

The Giant Claw (1957)
Name: Dr. Sally Caldwell (Mara Corday)

Sally and Mitch go alien bird hunting.

Resume: Caldwell is a mathematician and systems analyst who, at the beginning of the movie, is working with electronics engineer and test pilot Mitch MacAfee (Jeff Morrow) to calibrate new polar-based military radar systems and detect blind spots.

Biggest screen moment: When Mitch sees a UFO “as big as a battleship” shoot past his plane, no one believes him because the thing didn’t show up on radar. However, as more planes start crashing and reports come flooding in, it’s apparent that something big and dangerous is cruising the skies over North America.
  Sally comes up with an idea to check photographs from weather balloons, and sure enough, a huge, buzzard-like bird shows up in a batch. After analyzing one of the monster's feathers found in the wreckage of a plane, physicist Karol Noymann (Edgar Barrier) concludes that the creature is from another galaxy, and has an anti-matter shield around it that makes it impervious to all weapons. (!!)
  Caldwell uses her math expertise to help figure out a way to negate the shield. But her biggest “bad ass” moment comes when she and MacAfee discover the alien bird’s nest in a remote part of French Canada. There’s an egg in the nest, and they have to destroy it before another space buzzard hatches to terrorize the world. She picks up a rifle and aims. When MacAfee gives her a quizzical side-glance, she says matter-of-factly, “I’m from Montana…”

Biggest cringe moment: After they both survive a mid-air collision with the Giant Claw, MacAfee and Caldwell are called back to Washington. On the red-eye flight back east, MacAfee suddenly leans over and kisses her as she’s trying to get some shuteye. Caldwell is unusually composed:
  Caldwell: “Where did that come from?”
  MacAfee: “Left field maybe.”
  Caldwell: “I like baseball… Speaking of baseball and left field, somebody warned me you made up your own rules.”
  MacAfee: “Whoever said that is no friend of mine.”
  Caldwell: “But he’s a friend of mine.”

Additional notes: Mara Corday’s other sci-fi role in 1957 was in The Black Scorpion. She teamed up with Richard Denning, playing an American geologist, to battle giant scorpions freed from their underground lair by a series of earthquakes.

Slip Slidin' in Time

The Atomic Man (aka Timeslip; 1955)

With the ongoing Japanese nuclear crisis, radioactivity is once again front-and-center in the news and in the public mind throughout the world. We root for the courageous Japanese people and the heroic workers risking their lives to stabilize the crippled reactors, while at the same time wondering, "can it happen here?" And we hope that out of tragedy a new understanding and a healthy prudence emerge concerning technologies that can be very beneficial, yet very dangerous when best laid plans go awry. Such thoughts and anxieties inevitably seep into the broader popular culture.

NPR recently ran a piece about nuclear anxieties as reflected in movies over the decades: "Movie Mutants Give a Face to Our Nuclear Fears." The piece quotes historian Bill Tsutsui as saying that in the wake of the United States' atomic bombings of Japan at the end of WWII and the H-bomb tests in the Pacific in the 1950s, the public at large did not understand nuclear power or radiation: "Radiation needed a face in the 1950s, and the giant ants in Them! and the monster in Godzilla provided a horrible external representation of what that could be."

Another, more modest sci-fi thriller that tried to put a "face" on radiation in the '50s is The Atomic Man, from UK's Merton Park Studios. The film delivers its screwy, nuclear-powered plot inside of a mystery-thriller wrapper. Add to the mix a hard-boiled, wisecracking reporter lifted straight out of a 1930s crime potboiler, and you've got one of the decade's more unusual, if not particularly spectacular, B sci-fi thrillers.

Mike Delaney (Gene Nelson) is a down-on-his-luck reporter (is there any other kind?) who's gotten on his boss' bad side and been assigned to cover the opening of a clinic. Nosing around the magazine offices, he spies a fellow reporter's photo of a mystery man who's been shot and fished out of the harbor more dead than alive. The man in the photo is surrounded by a weird glow, which no one can explain. Naturally, he senses a big story.

On the operating table, the mystery man's heart stops, and the medical team is unable to revive him. As they prepare to clean up, the supposed dead man's eyes open wide, terrifying a nurse. Now, not only is he a mystery, he's a medical miracle as well.

Meanwhile, the ever curious Delaney is sure he's seen the man before. He searches the magazine's photo library and comes up with a dead-on match for the gunshot victim-- a photo of famous nuclear physicist Stephen Rayner (Peter Arne), better known as "the Isotope Man." With his photographer assistant and girlfriend Jill Rabowski (Faith Domergue) in tow, he contacts the police with his find. They agree that the victim is the spitting image of Rayner. There's only one problem-- when the police and Delaney visit the London institute where Rayner is supposed to be working, they find that the scientist is quite well and mystified by his resemblance to the hospitalized man. However, Delaney is still suspicious-- the man claiming to be Rayner has a couple of bandages on his face. His explanation that he was rear-ended in an automobile accident and he went through the windshield doesn't sound quite right…

Even though he's been canned from the magazine, Delaney is convinced he's onto the scoop of the century. The Rayner double recovering in the hospital gives strange, seemingly incoherent answers when the doctors and the reporter try to interview him. Suspecting a brain injury, the doctor orders an X-ray, which is completely clouded, as if another radiation source were interfering with the equipment. Delaney becomes convinced that the man's symptoms and the strange cloudiness of his photos and X-rays point to radioactive contamination. A radioactive man who looks exactly like a world-renowned nuclear physicist can't be a coincidence!

"Pile On!" A technician fires up the nuclear reactor.

Now doubly suspicious of the man claiming to be Rayner, Delaney trips him up with a question about the real Rayner's past. Additional clues gleaned from Rayner's double lead Delaney and Jill to a South American company that supplies a good portion of the world's tungsten and a shadowy man named Vasquo (Vic Perry). Delaney learns that Rayner was working on creating elements (tungsten?) in the lab using atomic power. Putting two and two together, he begins to realize the depths of a conspiracy that not only endangers Rayner's lab and its work, but possibly the whole of London itself!

The clever sci-fi hook in all of this is a side plot involving a very unique form of time travel. It seems that the real Rayner, whom Delaney describes as a "living A-bomb," owes his life to years of exposure to radioactivity (?!) After another fruitless interview at the hospital where Rayner responds to questions with nonsensical answers, Jill observes that "it's as if he's answering our questions before we've even asked them!" Delaney proves that is exactly what is happening by playing back a tape of the conversation and having Jill read the questions exactly 7.5 seconds before they were asked-- the amount of time Rayner was clinically dead on the operating table. Rayner is living 7.5 seconds ahead of the rest of the world!

Delaney manages to consult with top scientists, including a "psycho-neurologist" (Dr. Marks, played by uncredited Carl Jaffe with a heavy accent). The good doctor treats us to one of the more unusual scientific theories expounded in a B movie of the '50s -- something about Rayner's radioactive state keeping his brain alive while his heart stopped, and his brain whipsawing into the future as he was brought back from clinical death (see the clip below).

The crackpot science underlying much of The Atomic Man -- especially the notion of a nuclear scientist being routinely exposed to high doses of radiation in his work and surviving -- is a mark of the naive 1950s. After all, this was a time of open-air H-bomb tests presided over by military brass and scientists who clearly did not yet grasp the extent and the danger of fallout. Come to think of it, maybe naive scientists of that era really did expose themselves to vast amounts of radiation, knowingly or unknowingly!

Several reviewers have faulted Atomic Man for not making more of Rayner's intriguing time-slip. To me, the plot device is a sort of Hitchcockian MacGuffin that baffles the protagonists and ratchets up the suspense, preventing them from discovering the conspiracy until it's almost too late. While certainly not up to the level of even average Hitchcock, Atomic Man is still fast-paced and reasonably well-acted. As for Gene Nelson's anachronistic wisecracking reporter complete with rumpled porkpie hat-- you can either accept it as an homage to a classic 1930s-era character, or let it ruin the movie for you (I recommend the former). For me, Nelson's performance added much needed life and humor to the film.

Nelson began his performing career as a dancer, touring with the Sonja Henie ice show before joining the army in World War II. The peak of his acting career was the role of lasso-twirling cowboy Will Parker in Oklahoma! (1955). After that he concentrated on directing films and TV, working up to the late 1970s on series like Fantasy Island and Quincey, M.E. He died in 1996.

Faith Domergue is well-known to fans for her roles in two sci-fi classics made around the same time as The Atomic Man: This Island Earth (1955) and It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955). Like many actors and actresses of the era who didn't quite make it on the big screen, she went on to guest star in quite a few TV shows in the 1960s. Outside of sci-fi fandom, she's best known for her affair with a much older Howard Hughes, who lured her away from Warner Bros. and signed her to his RKO Studios in the early 1940s. Faith's affair with the multi-millionaire is given a few minutes of screen time in Martin Scorcese's biopic The Aviator (2004; Kelli Garner plays Faith).

All-in-all, The Atomic Man is a neat, noirish thriller with a unique sci-fi subplot. The film can be viewed online at the Internet Archive; a DVD-R copy is available from Sinister Cinema.

Dr. Marks carefully explains how atomic scientist Rayner managed to slip 7.5 seconds ahead in time (take notes-- there will be a quiz later):