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.

The Ronald Reagan Memorial Killer Tree: Tabanga

Now Playing: From Hell It Came (1957)

Pros: Screwy yet strangely disarming South Sea Islands premise; A crazy rubber-suited monster that earns an A for effort
Cons: Dull patches of exposition; Clunker lines of dialog; The island natives look like a random assortment of extras with tan makeup and ridiculous costumes

You don't see much in the news these days about killer vegetation (at least not since Ronnie Reagan revealed in the 1980 presidential campaign that malicious trees polluted more than automobiles). The green-environmental movement has pretty much covered up the shocking truth that even though most plants and trees are rooted to the ground, many of them bear a grudge toward those of us in the animal kingdom who can move around at will, and a select few would even do us harm given the opportunity. We're all familiar with plants like cacti that have developed spines, or better still, the many varieties of flora that have brewed up internal poisons to discourage animals and humans from eating them.

But plants aren't always on the defensive. What American kid growing up in the 1960s wasn't fascinated by the ads for Venus Fly Traps in the back of all those comic books? Little did we know that the venerable Fly Trap has many cousins in the plant kingdom. According to Wikipedia, there are more than 630 carnivorous plant species that "attract and trap prey, produce digestive enzymes, and absorb the resulting available nutrients." Yum!  Science tells us that reports of actual man-eating trees are mere legends and fabrications, but then, I'm not gonna go looking for the deadly Madagascar Tree or the South American Ya-te-veo just to prove it can't grab and digest something my size.

Show of hands-- who all ordered one
of these when they were a kid?

I've had my own encounter with a malevolent cactus, and it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. Some years ago I was hiking in the Grand Canyon. Toward the end of the day, with my feet sore and aching, a low-lying prickly pear leaned out and stabbed me with one of its spines straight through the mesh of my hiking shoe and right under the nail of my big toe. My hiking buddies just chalked it up to me being clumsy, but I swear that thing was gunning for me! (After the hike, the toe became infected and I had to have the nail removed. Yeah, bummer!)

As you might expect, all this malignity on the part of the plant kingdom has attracted Hollywood's attention from time to time. The reigning Queen of B movie carnivorous plants is still Audrey, the beloved flesh-eating creation of Seymour Krelboyne (Jonathan Haze) in Roger Corman's legendary quickie, Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Two years later, a ferocious meteor storm seeded earth with ambulatory killer plants in The Day of the Triffids (1962). Lost worlds and unexplored planets have also featured their share of man-(and woman-)eating plants: for example, the plucky heroine of The Land Unknown (1957) has an encounter with a hungry primordial piece of vegetation (almost the least of her worries in a land brimming with pterodactyls and T-Rexes).

Deadly walking trees are somewhat rarer in vintage B films, but they do exist. Night-walking, acid-secreting trees transplanted from Antarctica give the U.S. military (and Mamie Van Doren) all kinds of trouble in The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966). And then there's the dendrological nightmare from Hell, the Tabanga.

Poor Kimo (Gregg Palmer) is about to know real heartache!

From Hell It Came opens in dramatic fashion with the natives of an unnamed South Seas island gathered around handsome Kimo (Gregg Palmer), who is tied spread-eagled on the ground. The tribal elders, medicine man Tano (Robert Swan) and Chief Maranka (Baynes Barron) have accused Kimo of the most heinous of crimes -- killing his own father, the old chief. Kimo strenuously denies it, accusing Tano of poisoning his father in order to make his ally Maranka the new head honcho. But even Kimo's wife, the duplicitous Korey (Suzanne Ridgeway) feigns ignorance of such a plot. The elders also accuse Kimo of being too friendly with the Americans visiting the island, who they think have brought the plague and "devil dust" (fallout from H-bomb tests) to their once peaceful home. Before the executioner can plunge the ceremonial knife into Kimo's heart, the passionate young man declares "I shall come back from Hell and make you pay for your crimes!"

The Americans are William Arnold (Tod Andrews), a medical doctor, and Prof. Clark (John McNamara), an anthropologist. They're on the island to study the native culture, battle the plague and deal with the effects of the radioactive fallout that's accidentally blown in from an H-bomb test site hundreds of miles away. They realize that the evil, ambitious Maranka and his flunky Tano poisoned Kimo's father before modern medicine could heal him, and that the pair are inciting the rest of the natives against them. With relations between the natives and the visitors worsening, the foundation sponsoring the expedition flies in super-competent and compassionate Dr. Terry Mason (Tina Carver) to help with the health crisis. Arnold and Mason go way back, and Bill is secretly in love with his colleague.

Smooth-talking Bill (Tod Andrews) tries to convince Terry
(Tina Carver) to give up science and run away with him.

When she arrives, Bill warns her about the dangerous situation and tries to get her to leave, but she's serious about her mission and won't hear of it. While Arnold clumsily tries to woo the no-nonsense Mason, a strange tree or bush is rapidly sprouting up from the spot where poor Kimo was buried. A couple of islanders still friendly with the Americans alert the team to the thing. At first the professor and the doctors think it's some sort of new, unclassified plant life, but when the thing grows to human size with a face only a weeping willow could love, the team digs it up and takes it back to their makeshift lab. To their amazement, they find it has a "human-like" heartbeat and is radioactive. Stranger still, the ceremonial dagger projects from the "chest" of the mutant tree, right in the area where a human heart would be.

One of the natives calls it the Tabanga, meaning "creature of revenge." He relates the story of a previous murderous rampage by another walking, revenge-minded tree. Terry, monitoring the vitals of the man-tree, detects a weakening heartbeat and fears the thing may be dying. When she tries to enlist Bill's aid, he's not so sure keeping it alive is such a good idea-- "I'm no tree surgeon!" he complains. She administers an experimental stimulant serum that she assures her colleagues will take several hours to work on the creature's circulatory system. When they return to the lab, they find it wrecked and the creature gone. Tabanga has shambled off to take its revenge!

I wooden't say that From Hell It Came is a great film, or even a particularly good one, but if you think that there's nothing to recommend it, you're barking up the wrong tree. Anyone with the cockeyed optimism to think that they could make an effective sci-fi programmer out of the concept of a grumpy, revenge-driven walking tree deserves at least a little credit. The Tabanga is so unique and unlikely that you can't help but root for these impecunious filmmakers and their rubber-suited tree monster.

Much of the credit for the Tabanga goes to legendary creature effects artist Paul Blaisdell, the creator of such iconic '50s monsters as The She-Creature (1956) and the alien invaders from Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957). According to Blaisdell biographer Randy Palmer, Jack and Dan Milner (producer and director, respectively) approached Blaisdell to create the tree creature (they had contacted him previously to design the monster for their 1955 production The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, but he was busy at the time working for Roger Corman on The Day the World Ended). Having been burned on another low-rent production by people he hardly knew, Blaisdell was reluctant to go all in (and he also had a commitment with Bert Gordon to do The Amazing Colossal Man). Blaisdell did provide some concept drawings, and even went so far as to create some very realistic-looking foam rubber tree bark to guide the eventual maker of the creature suit. [Randy Palmer, Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker, McFarland, 1997.]

Details from Paul Blaisdell's Tabanga concept art.

The eventual product, while not quite as elegant as Paul's original drawings, certainly captures their spirit (not to mention the signature scowl of just about every movie monster Blaisdell created):

"The Milner brothers became concerned about the cost of reproducing Blaisdell's two-dimensional design in three dimensions. Had the Tabanga been constructed using the sketches as exact blueprints, it would have had to be made as a stop-motion model, rod puppet, or marionette. There was clearly no way it would have been able to interact with the cast to the extent required by the script-- at least not in 1957 and not without a more substantial special effects budget-- so the Milners took Blaisdell's illustrations to Hollywood's Don Post Studios and had a standard rubber and latex monster costume made. Since Paul's original design was so thin and spidery, the basic visual concept needed to be altered. The dimensions were enlarged so that a normal actor or stunt specialist could play the part as Paul had played the monsters in his own pictures. The end result was nowhere near as nightmarish as Blaisdell's original concept, but there was no mistaking it for anything that might have wandered over from the Disney studios either." [Ibid.]

I suspect that there are folks out there who, even allowing for the era's less sophisticated effects, will conclude that the Milners went too far out on a limb with this particular monster. All I know is that the Tabanga made a far greater impression on me as a kid than the standard-issue giant rubber spiders, lizards standing in as dinosaurs, and tin-plated robots that were so prevalent in sci-fi of the time. The Milners were wise enough to exploit their creature and give it a lot of screen time while also covering up its more obvious deficiencies. We see several shots of the creature moving through the thick brush, its legs hidden, its mouth moving uncannily, grim determination etched on its hideous wooden face. (There is one ill-considered long shot of the entire creature shuffling along a forest path -- it has the crab-like walk of someone whose pants have been pulled down around his knees; needless to say the spell is somewhat broken at this point.)

Remember: Don't stand under a tree or a
Tabanga during a lightning storm!

Regardless of what you think of the monster suit, there is an obvious problem with the concept of a mobile tree creature. To say the least, this is not one or the quicker or more agile B movie menaces. Like Universal's Mummy, the average viewer must think, "how dangerous could this thing be if a little old lady with a walker could outrun it?" So the script twists and turns in unnatural ways to place the victims within the grasp of the slow-moving but inexorable monster: one trips (of course!) and hits his head on a rock; another misses the thing with a spear at a distance of about 3 feet, and apparently is so chagrined by his poor aim that he forgets to get out of Tabanga's way; yet another mistakes the grumpy tree for one of its more natural, non-ambulatory cousins, and stands right next to it.

It also doesn't help that From Hell's modest budget and production crew (Jack Milner wrote, produced and edited; brother Dan directed) is obvious from the get-go: the ostensible South Sea island setting looks like a rundown city park, and the natives look like random actors pulled from a casting call and given tan makeup and floral print tablecloths to wear around their waists. To add insult to injury, the Milners follow up the promising opening scene with dull exposition of the American scientists complaining about the island, the weather, the natives, what they had for lunch, you name it. Worse yet, they then engage in "sparkling" banter with an egregiously unfunny "comic-relief" character, the self-absorbed trader and professional widow Mrs. Kilgore (actress Linda Watkins employs the worst Australian accent ever and says "bloomin'" every third word in an annoying attempt to make her character colorful and endearing). Last but not least, lead dog doc Bill Arnold embarrasses himself in an extremely feeble, yet chauvinistic attempt to woo the committed heroine Terry Mason (despite the name, she's a B movie doctor, not a TV lawyer).

In one cringe-inducing scene, Arnold whines to Terry, "don't you want a husband and children like other women?" and then quickly digs himself deeper with an exasperated "Will you stop being a doctor first and a woman second?" (Presumably the plague that's decimating the native population will wait while the lady doctor gets her feminine priorities in order; even for the decidedly non-feminist '50s, this is nauseating stuff.)

But don't let this stuff deter you from seeing one of the crazier monsters in all of '50s B sci-fi. You may laugh, you may cry, you may throw your popcorn at the flatscreen (especially when you see how the Americans finally dispatch the monster), but I guarantee the Tabanga will move you in some way (even though he doesn't move so well himself).

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Where to find it:

Warner Archive Collection


"Creature of unholy vengeance, born in the heart of a man unjustly condemned to death!"