Project Moonbase
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One of the things a review of Project Moonbase is bound to bring up is how women are badly treating in the film. This gets the knickers of feminists and those who think feminism is an unassailable dogma into a right twist, which is amazing, since Heinlein regarded himself as an arch feminist. Mind you, his preoccupation with sex did tend to get him going at cross purposes from time to time. There are three women in the cast and none of them are of the bare foot and pregnant variety that some people today think was required by law in the United States back in the '50s. Indeed, for a mysogynist film the ladies are doing pretty good for themselves. One is a professional columnist named Polly Prattles (and good Lord, does she!), who is there for exposition and (I hope intentionally) comic relief. The second is Colonel Breiteis, whom we've met, and the third is the President of the United States, which always gets remarked upon by people who forget that Eleanor Roosevelt was still running around loose in 1953. If you step back a bit, this becomes one of those films that says more about our times than it does about theirs. Seeing a sixty year-old film through the prejudices and bigotry of the early 21st century isn't a very pleasant experience and if you don't try to cultivate a sense of perspective, it's easy to end up condemning it on a charge that boils down to "Not being like us". The plot, such as it is, of Project Moonbase is a standard Hollywood trope so worn it's a wonder there's any hair left on it. Apparently, even in 1970 romances will be stalled by obstacles such as Major Moore resenting his humiliation of being passed over for promotion while the distaff part of the couple let's her pole-vaulting up the chain of command go to her head and then the audience gets dragged along while some crisis allows them to sort things out.
True, the character of Breiteis is handled atrociously, but so is everyone else in the film including the guy on the left who doesn't have any lines. Yes, Breiteis is scolded, patronised, and condescended to, but she's also written as, and bluntly referred to as, a brat. The idea of a woman who is technically competent, but promoted way above her capacity as an officer, going on an ego trip is quite credible and suffers more from very poor execution and abysmal acting. The idea that such a woman wouldn't be resented by her peers (of either sex) and scolded by her commanding officer is absurd. If the leads had been Tracy and Hepburn and the director was George Cukor, this might have made for a light comedy, but here it's pretty much poverty row all around. The result is charges of misogyny being hurled where the real crime is a film that was written with a hammer and chisel and directed by a Tickle Me Elmo doll. And for those who are disturbed because Breiteis is occasionally treated as an unruly and not very bright child who must be put in her place, let me advance any commercial, sitcom, or stand up routine of the past thirty years where men are treated even more shabbily and with even more open condescension without a murmur of complaint on their behalf. Glass houses and all that. |
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