Doris Wishman (as Anthony Brooks) | Nude on the Moon / 1961

conversion therapy 2* 

Doris Wishman (screenplay as O. O. Miller, based on an idea by Jack Caplan), Doris Wishman (director, as Anthony Brooks) Nude on the Moon / 1961

Commentators have long suggested that filmmaker Doris Wishman as a sister to naïve (and equally quite abysmally untalented) director Ed Wood. Particularly in her second film, Nude on the Moon, they are only too happy to point out its silly narrative, sets, costumes, and film-making techniques. Comments on the normally tight-lipped Internet Archive are typical of these perspectives:

 

“Two scientists cash in on one’s inherited fortune, and finance their own trip to the moon. And what surprises they find! Blue skies, lush vegetation, identical gravity, gold ingots… But they also discover a civilization of telepathic ‘moonatics’ who look exactly like us – except for two key differences.

     All of them have pipe-cleaner antennae attached to plastic hairbands…and everyone is topless all the time! Naturally, our intrepid duo must investigate – purely in the interest of science. Of course.

     Nude on the Moon is almost Woodian in its ineptitude. Yes, you shouldn’t expect much more than cheese from these things – but the astronauts’ flight suits seem to be leftovers from a Middle Ages picture. Their helmets are not airtight (really just buckets on their heads) and they keep the faceplates raised most of the time. Their quarter-million-mile trip takes just two hours. Inside the ship, they must communicate with each via mics and headsets…while seated next to each other! And let’s not forget…the queens’….breath….and….halting….telephatic ….communicationnn…”

   

     Wiseacre Paul Kienitz, admirer of bad movies, further comments:

 

“Oh man, this is the stuff that makes a bad movie hobby so rewarding.  I’d have to call this one of my favorite bad movies of all time.  The finest silly astronaut movie ever made.

     Doris Wishman, as some of you know, was a leading maker of “nudie cutie” flicks in the sixties.  The idea is, you set up some thin premise and then you show, like, naked ladies playing volleyball.  They would be given a title something like “the secret world of nudist camps,” so all you really needed for a plot was to have somebody go “There’s a camp of (gasp) nudists, let’s find out what’s really going on in there.”  Nude On the Moon follows that form, but it’s different.  What gives the film its magic is that the “thin premise” part got out of hand.........

      They actually try to do a serious story about building a moon rocket!  With a special effects budget of $0.00, and no idea what they’re talking about except from one or two popular-science magazine articles. (At that time the magazines and Sunday papers were overflowing with education and speculation about the solar system and Outer Space.)  In spite of these limitations, they spend fully a third of the film’s running time getting the rocket off the ground, and they’re only a few minutes short of the midpoint when they encounter the first nudism.

       They couldn’t build a rocket for us, but one thing they could do, by gum, was make the actors some space suits.  And damn me if these are not the BEST... SPACE SUITS... EVER!  These have got to be truly the goofiest laugh-out-loudiest space suits ever captured on film. The exposed skin... that hose hanging from the face... the pointy shoulder pads and matching groin guard...!!  And in their overall fashion sense, I almost wonder if these suits helped inspire the design of the Power Rangers.”

     I should add, in this context, that Huntley and Nichols’ scientific explorations up until their trip to the moon consist of pouring the contents of several bottles of colored liquid into other vials, of feeding a curious monkey, and of secretary Cathy’s (Marietta) attempts to get the hunky crewcut Dr. Jeff Huntley (Lester Brown) to simply notice her, since she’s fallen head-over-heals in love with him, staying on long after quitting time each night to type over his letters again and again—actions which haven’t gone unnoticed by Huntley’s older mentor, Professor Nichols (William Mayer).

     And when they do reach to the moon (after a long two-hour trip) and discover the strange half-nudist colony camping (in all senses of that word) out on what that looks precisely like the grounds of the famed Miami-Dade County “Coral Castle,” dubbed “Florida’s Stonehenge,” they spend of their time, when not photographing the human landscape, worrying about their oxygen levels—despite the fact that they are not apparently hooked up to any oxygen tubes—and wondering whether the gold-nuggets they find scattered about the place might be able to finance their next trip.

     Despite the visual splendors that greet their eyes, neither Nichols nor Huntley take advantage of the nudie cuties on display quite literally posing for their male earthling friends. They allow the women to touch and explore their faces, but they nary lay even a hand on the sweet moon dolls and men. Even intelligent critics such as Abbey Bender writing in Artforum have to conclude that, although it’s “tempting to read a feminist message into the film” “given Wishman’s work in a genre thought to be the sole province of leering men….” “Nude on the Moon’s salient trait is its innocence.”

     Indeed, this 1961 film almost tempts the viewer to compare the work with film-naifs such as Wood and write out a list of the ridiculous events in this seeming sci-fi moon adventure. Wishman herself often encourages such attitudes by mocking her own oeuvre. Critic Elena Gorfinkel reminds us that according to her biographer “she would bristle when asked about her aesthetic, quipping, ‘What style? The lack-of-money style?’”

     To place Doris Wishman in the same category of Ed Wood, however, is a vast mistake. Wishman’s works may look to be “innocent,” but she is as aware of the campy tropes she’s working with and the mind-games she is playing as the wittiest and most brilliant of camp queens such as James Bidgood and John Waters. Those reviewers who make the mistake of taking any of Wishman’s absurd narratives to heart are doomed to miss all the real fun.

     I think to best understand Nude on the Moon we need begin at the beginning of the film with boyish Jeff Huntley’s telephone call to his mentor, so excited by the news he has just received that he stops by a phonebooth to call just to make sure Nichols remains in his office until he gets there so that he can spill the beans, that his uncle has died leaving him 3 million dollars, which will now allow them to build the rocketship to the moon without any government funding.

     Already Wishman has thrown us into world of outsiders, a man who, as in so many movies about sudden luck winners of lotteries, inheritances, and jackpots will probably be doomed in his attempts to enjoy his riches; and a couple of scientists attempting to work completely outside of normal channels. Indeed, Huntley and Nichols are so convinced in their private theories and experiments that they consult no one else and don’t even announce their private space launch to the press.

 

     But then Huntley is an outsider in other ways as well. First of all, the nerdy, flat-topped scientist drives, quite inexplicably, a pink convertible, the color associated with the flamboyant males often described as being homosexual (see, for example, Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane wherein the closeted brother of Sloane’s landlady owns a pink 1959 Pontiac Parisienne convertible). And when Nichols, knowing of Cathy’s love for his protégée, suggests he worries about the overworking boy who while he’s young should enjoy himself, Huntly insists that his only real enjoyment is science. With the money he’s just received he might retire, settle down, and raise of family, Nichols continues. But Huntley immediately shuts him up, “Marry? Me? No Sir!”—reconfirming Nichol’s earlier comments to Cathy that Huntley is interested only in his work.

     I’d say, as an observant “outsider” myself, that our young hero sounds a bit like he’s queer, that he’s more interested in spending time in the office with Nichols than ever noticing Cathy’s hardworking attempts to get his attention, let alone observing her rather fulsome bust.

     As the six months they have given themselves before their launch clicks down to a few days, Nichols tries to bring up the subject several times, worrying for the fact that if they get to the moon, they might not be able to return, a tragedy given Jeff’s young age, a boy with the rest of his life before him. But each time Huntley insists that he’s gung-ho on the scientific experiment he’s set out before himself. Even the day before the launch, when Nichols, suggests that he sees the boy as a kind of son, insisting he’d like to see him happily settled down with a wife and a family. Again Huntley immediately reacts, “Let me just say this time and I hope never again: I’m not interested in marriage or settling down. Science is my life and nothing else.”

    What does a father-figure do when he’s convinced that his boy, despite his age, still needs to be thoroughly educated about the birds and the bees, or simply has to be taught about the female anatomy? One must recall that this was still a time when you couldn’t admit to being gay, and no director might possibly explore, if she were to want her movie exhibited, her hero’s “outsider” status. Besides Wishman obviously enjoys women and their shapely figures, particularly their toes and breasts. Her only hope—or perhaps I should say her character Nichols’ only hope is that he might “convert” the boy from being the “unmarrying kind.”

      Wishman plants dozens of small clues throughout this early part of the film that the real trip may not be to the moon—which, after all, has long been the symbol of heterosexual love—but to some more earthy den of iniquity that might help in his protégée’s conversion therapy.

      Wishman plants dozens of small clues throughout this early part of the film that the real trip may not be to the moon—which, after all, has long been the symbol of heterosexual love—but to some more earthy den of iniquity that might help in his protégée’s conversion therapy.

      As they drive off to the launch site we might notice a cute little trinket tied up to the visor with a bright pink ribbon, another indication that our boy just loves the color pink. Huntley suggests that the professor hasn’t gotten to see the movie he was looking forward to seeing before he leaves. But Nichols admits that he saw it last night, Jeff a bit worried that perhaps he didn’t get enough sleep, the professor assuring him that the picture was well worth it. At that very moment, I should point out, they are passing the Variety theater which happens to be showing in “Nuderama” Doris Wishman’s first film Hideout in the Sun.

     We never see the rocket into which they soon after climb, but we really don’t need to see it since perhaps it doesn’t actually exist. Besides, in a few moments after take-off first Nichols and then Huntley are overcome with immense drowsiness, both of them falling asleep almost as if they were drugged. Their ship lands without needing any of their support, and even they wonder are they really on the moon?

     What follows are the semi-surreal adventures described above, a tour through a topless female nudie pic akin to François Reichenbach’s all-male pin-up flick Last Spring (1954), as far away from Jean Genet or even Wishman’s later female sexploitation films as you can get. Having literally slept together, what these two moon explorers—dressed up similar to Christmas elves—observe is safer even than a Times Square topless flick. These pretty girls are there merely for one’s edification, and their male observers are inexperienced nerd-voyeurs who stare and snap photographs, but don’t even dare to touch.

 

    Where they are doesn’t truly matter. All we know is that it’s just like earth, no need for oxygen tubes, although given the fact of Huntley’s increased heartbeat he may soon need some fresh air. And how nice that the moon queen looks exactly like Cathy back in his office, with whose half-undressed visage he’s now quite impressed. Nichols encourages him calmly to explore the territory, obviously in the name of science. And the would-be father is almost pleased with the boy’s wonderment. Does it surprise us that, unlike Dorothy in Oz, Huntley has no desire to return home. He’s clearly already there, as if Nichols has somehow spirited him off to Wishman’s movie down the street from where they work. After all, the theater banner suggests there are always double-features.

     And when they return home, accordingly, it certainly shouldn’t surprise us that, gee whiz, they forgot the camera and have no evidence of their amazing discoveries, and that the authorities from the Pentagon who checked out the rocket doubt it ever could have even flown, or that re-encountering his secretary Cathy, our boy is finally ready to embrace her for his first kiss? There’s no place like home. And there’s no father who isn’t proud to take his boy’s attention off his toys and point him in the direction of some rather more mature playthings? Conversion completed sir! Ready and out.

 

*The first film I discussed under this title was Henry Schenck, Edward Warren, and Alice Guy Blaché’s 1912 film, Algie the Miner. The subject makes its way, in most later films proven as a failure, throughout the several volumes of this work.

 

Los Angeles, March 20, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).