Devil Girl From Mars

You won’t believe what Mars needed in 1954.

The creator of the Daleks, Terry Nation, has admitted he moulded them on the Nazis. Thus the Daleks are violent, merciless, and pitiless cyborg aliens who are determined to conquer the universe and exterminate every other race they view as inferior, which is to say all of them. This is hardly news, Nation admitted this as far back as 1978 in an interview which appeared in Starburst Magazine (probably not the first time this came up so feel free to enlighten me as to when Nation first admitted it).

What doesn’t seem to get much mention though is how the Daleks are hardly an outlier in this regard. When it comes to British science fiction Nazis, fascists in general, and a love of eugenics are topics which have have popped up more than a few times. Sarban’s novel, The Sound of His Horn, and shorter stories such as The Fall of Frenchy Steiner by Hilary Bailey and Weinachtsabend by Keith Roberts are good examples of this. In the realm of television dystopian series such as The Guardians and 1990 have featured fascist governments ruling Britain while in Blake’s Seven something about the uniforms worn by its soldiers suggest to me that the Federation might also be just a little bit on the fascist side.

Remind you of anybody?

More recently another British TV series, Misfits, played with an alternative timeline in which Germany had won WWII and Nazis ruled Britain. Heck, even in Space 1999 the protagonists encountered a planet where individuals with any physical deformity were ‘eliminated’. This particular idea was also used by Nigel Kneale in his TV series (and later film) Quatermass & the Pit (retitled as Five Million Years to Earth in the US). Which is not to say every villain used in in such outings is an umpteenth generation SS officer but the Nazis and eugenics clearly have been a favoured form of evil for British writers ever since WWII.

Which leads me to today’s topic, Devil Girl From Mars, a 1954 British science fiction film from Danziger Productions. I watched this one just last week (I found it on Vimeo and you might too if it hasn’t since been taken down) and while I can’t tell you that it’s a great flick, neither would I label it as terrible. If I had to give Devil Girl From Mars a one word rating that word would be unambitious. Yet in a way it’s very lack of ambition is what made it interesting to me.

The reason I call Devil Girl From Mars unambitious is mostly because the plot feels like it has been filched from the sort films about Nazi spies or saboteurs being made in Britain only a decade before. Like them Devil Girl is set in a remote location, in this case an inn deep in the Scottish highlands during winter. As with those wartime films the opening scenes introduce a large number of characters; the elderly Scottish couple who own the inn, their barmaid, a crippled handyman, a small boy, a glamorous city woman, the escaped convict boyfriend of the barmaid, a reporter, and a scientist, the last two wandering around the the Scottish Highlands in search of a reported meteor. These films always required such a varied cast in order to demonstrate how British folk from all walks of life would firmly united against the Nazi, or in the case of this revamp, the alien menace.

As was also the tradition with such British films of the 50s certain scenes would descend into overly fraught melodrama. This seems to have been a ploy designed to establish the degree of sacrifice certain characters would be making in order to defeat the Nazi, or in this case alien, menace. It’s always a safe bet that at least one or more of the cast who is required to aggressively emote will go on to make such a sacrifice before the film ends. Personally, I associate this sort of performance with amateur theatrics and I don’t think I’m alone. The cast of the BBC radio comedy, Round the Horne, took great delight in expertly lampooning this sort of thing. Betty Marsden, as Dame Celia Molestrangler, and Hugh Paddick, as ageing juvenile Binkie Huckaback would overact dialogue such as the following:

Binkie: I know.
Celia:    I know, you know.
Binkie: I know you know I know.
Celia:    I know. Then why can’t you give it to me?
Binkie: It’s not easy Fiona.
Celia:    It’s not hard Charles. If you try. And now you’re going.
Binkie: I have to. This is something I should have done a long time ago.
Celia:    Is it her? Daphne?
Binkie: Yes, Fiona. I must go. She needs me.
Celia:    I need you. Does this mean nothing?
Binkie: Daphne needs me more. Much more. But I shall think of you all the time I am with her.
Celia:    I’ll wait for you Charles. You will come back to me won’t you? Please say you’ll come back to me.
Binkie: I always come back don’t I?

At this point Binkie takes Daphne the dog for a walk.

Anyway, so we’re sixteen minutes in before the previously mentioned meteor the professor and reporter are looking for, or ‘unidentified white aircraft’ as the radio announcer calls it, arrives on screen and proves to be a rather decent looking flying saucer for a 1954 science fiction film. It lands and sits there glowing menacingly until minute twenty-four when Nyah, the devil girl of the title steps out. As can be seen above all the posters depicted Patricia Laffan, who plays Nyah, in a skintight catsuit. Laffan actually wears a black mini skirt with stockings, mid-calf boots, and a long black cape. Does this make her a more impressive looking alien threat? Hmm… either works if you ask me. The catsuit would have made her a predecessor to Diana Rigg as Emma Peel whereas this outfit makes her a predecessor to Jacqueline Pearce as Servalan.

Almost immediately after exiting her ship Nyah encounters the crippled handyman trying to flee home and using what looks like a glue gun disintegrates every part of him but his glasses. Having displayed the sort of ruthlessness that would win make a Dalek proud Nyah then appears at the hotel and explains that she’s from Mars, that there has been a war between women and men which the women won, the women now rule Mars but ‘the males have fallen into a decline and the birth rate is dropping tremendously for despite our advanced science we have still found no way of creating life’. Turns out that Nyah’s solution is to collect some nice, healthy breeding stock from Earth. Upon hearing about this plan the reporter is inexplicably outraged by the idea that Nyah will proceed to London and select a few such specimens to take back to Mars. I could understand if he was a bit jealous or if British men truly hated breeding but I’m pretty sure it was neither of these.

This is the point at which the retooled Nazi spy script started to not work for Devil Girl From Mars. Unlike Nazi spies Nyah’s intentions don’t threaten the British way of life in any way. I’m sure if she made it to London and announced her plan to the authorities there they would be able to provide her with more than enough willing volunteers. Even if she announced it was a one way ticket I doubt there would be any shortage of men lining up for the physical. I should perhaps also point out that despite her brusque demeanour (very like the stereotypical Nazi she was based upon) Nyah is not an unpleasant threat. Combine this with the fact that all she wants to do is take a few men back to Mars and it becomes very difficult to empathise with this British desire to stop other people from having a good time.

Of course Nyah does talk like a recycled Nazi:

Today it is you that learns the power of Mars. Tomorrow it will be the whole world.

Fill your eyes Earthman. See such power as you never dreamed existed.

You fools! Do you think you can hurt me with this? Even your limited intelligence should have convinced you by now that you cannot harm me.

Talking tough like this is all very well but it has to be backed up with action in order to convince the audience. This sort of dialogue from a Nazi character works because the audience knows what the Nazis were capable of. When an alien whose plan is nothing more than to collect a harem talks this way it just sounds empty and pompous. Yes, she killed the cripple handyman but she doesn’t even boast of this to the other characters or threaten to kill them all she leaves. I’m pretty sure a Nazi would not have made such an oversight. Another area where the scriptwriter needed to tweak the Nazi spy plot I think.

The majority of the plot revolves around Nyah making multiple visits to the inn as she waits for her ship of living metal to repair itself. While there she amuses herself by telling the humans about how powerful she and her race are and how humanity can do nothing to thwart her. The Brits look scared at these pronouncements and then when she leaves they immediately make plans to thwart her, none of which come even close to succeeding (as Nyah keeps predicting). At one point Nyah takes the scientist back to her ship to show him around and browbeat him with some truly impressive technobabble. A little later she shows off her robot to the whole group. Chani the robot is a big, bulky, man-like device which shuffles around awkwardly and disintegrates things in a rather similar manner to the Martians in the 1953 version of The War Of the Worlds. I suspect all this coming and going was caused by the fact that these Nazi spy movies usually had multiple villains and for some reason it was decided not to give Nyah any companions. This meant that scenes which previously would be split amongst various villains all required her presence and thus a certain amount of scene repetition.

Eventually Nyah chooses to take the escaped criminal boyfriend with her and predictably the scientist is able to tell this fellow how to cause the ship to explode and shield British men from the attention of alien women. Nyah’s ship takes of with the boyfriend and her inside but before the ship gets very far it disintegrates in one of the best explosions I’ve seen in a science fiction film.

As I wrote at the start of this article this is a competent but unambitious effort. Things are set up early on and paid off later, the characters all have something to do in plot terms and apart from that lovely final explosion the effects are decent without being really impressive. Patricia Laffan is quite good as Nyah the alien from Mars and her outfit is quite impressive looking but the rest of the cast fail to rise above soap opera quality. The film isn’t sufficiently engaging plot wise as there is really very little at stake and Nyah is made too indestructible to generate dramatic tension. On the other hand it’s quite well made for a 1954 science fiction movie, they really did put a decent amount of effort into it. I did find the soundtrack took some getting use to though as the musical score is used quite aggressively to to tell the viewer how they should feel about each scene (a not uncommon practise in 50s movies it has to be said).

What I found most fascinating about this movie was how so many of the details suggested the script was cribbed from earlier films about Nazi spies invading British soil. I would certainly label Devil Girl From Mars as exhibit A when making a case for the Nazis as an integral part of British science fiction.

Also of interest is the fact that Devil Girl From Mars had a very positive reception in Australia. As can be seen from the above review scanned from the Friday, 28 June, 1957 issue of the Western Herald newspaper not only did the film garner a positive reaction but was also paired with movies such as The Colditz Story and The Big Heat, films that have retained a higher reputation than Devil Girl.

Above and beyond the relative quality of the films quoted above I can’t see how anybody could decide that Devil Girl From Mars was a logical pairing with either of them.

Australia was a weird place in the 50s.