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It's strange, but it's wonderful
Doris Wishman and Raymond Phelan's Nude on the Moon (1961) is one of the greatest pieces of science fiction produced by exploitation cinema, or possibly the reverse. The title alone should tell you if you want to see it, but honestly, why wouldn't you?
Even the most science-minded of nudie-cuties cannot expect its audiences to show up for the plot, but part of the charm of this DIY exercise in sincere titillation is how faithfully it hits all the marks of planetary romance, merely franker than most about the cheesecake potential of all those worlds beyond. Ahead of the curve of the Apollo program, Miami-based Dr. Jeff Huntley (Lester Brown) has sunk all $3 million of his inheritance into the private venture of a moon shot, oblivious to the willingness of his buxom, black-haired secretary Cathy (top-billed Marietta) to work overtime whenever her handsome young boss stays late over his researches. "For the five years I've been associated with him," Professor Nichols (William Mayer) has to admit, "all I've ever heard him talk about is rocket propellants and the laws of gravity." Gently encouraged by his older colleague to explore other avenues of happiness, Jeff declares, "Science is my life—and nothing else." The film follows his lead with such enthusiastically lo-fi technobabble that by the middle of the first act I was saying impatiently to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch, "Talk, talk, talk. We're still on Earth and clothed!" I can't prove that their laboratory is played by a local chemistry classroom, but it would explain the industrial benches and shelves lined with Boston round bottles and Schlenk flasks fuming with dry-ice experiments in rocket fuel while oscilloscopes and spectrophotometers ping and whine and go everything but phee-eep. En route to the clandestine launch, Jeff cruises his mauve-tailfinned 1959 Pontiac Catalina down the main drag of Coral Gables, not neglecting the drive-by of a movie theater advertising "Hideout in the Sun in Nudearama"—Wishman's previous, debut feature. Since the budget does not extend to an exterior shot of the rocket behind the chain-link gates of the "Huntley Rocket Project," the moment of lift-off is sweetly contrived with a climb up a construction scaffold, interior shots of the switch-studded cockpit of an airplane, and a splice of model footage so jarringly dissonant with the overgrown field we just saw our astronauts walk through that it may have been discreetly nipped from some film which could afford practical effects, although the nose cone separation appears to come courtesy of Estes Industries and God bless it. Mysteriously, an irresistible drowsiness overcomes not just the Professor but Jeff as their rocket completes its landing on the lunar surface. Emerging in a skintight, Christmas-tree suggestion of space suits with thirteen hours of oxygen supplied to their sunglassed helmets, they marvel at the verdant, tropical landscape which greets them, complete with a sky as blue as the one they blasted off from and gently waving palm fronds. Well might Jeff wonder, "How do we know it is the moon, Professor?"
What our intrepid scientists discover, of course, as they peer over the megalithic oolite walls of Coral Castle whose celestial motifs including a titanic crescent make it a legitimately inspired choice of setting for a lunar civilization, is one of the advanced yet primitive, peacefully utopian societies of classical science fiction, just with their jugs out. Breasts are everywhere to be seen as the inhabitants of the moon stretch and lounge to their full advantage in the sunshine, most magnificently on the buxom, black-haired Moon Queen (topless Marietta), although tushital-crackular values may also be appreciated thanks to the low-cut briefs worn by male and female "moon dolls" alike. The telepathy of the aliens is designated by the deely bobbers of their antennae and by the drawn-out whispers of the Moon Queen, post-synched like the rest of the dialogue over her regally voluptuous profile. Once our heroes are deemed harmless and freed to wander among the locals, the plot effectively goes into hibernation as the men observe all manner of nude pastimes from flower-picking to bathing to tossing a ball around a ring, but the effect is oddly wholesome rather than prurient, partly because no one is doing anything more sexual than being half-naked on camera, partly because of the script's adorable insistence on the science of the whole affair. The Professor goes around collecting rocks and plants and making notes on the behavior of the moon dolls who giggle silently over his space suit and his mustache, sternly reprimanding Jeff when the younger man appears in danger of distraction by the equally intrigued Moon Queen, "Don't forget, we're scientists!" It doesn't even come off as voyeuristic that Jeff has been detailed to take pictures of the abundant toplessness, since he has gone so obviously, monogamously head over heels for one moon doll alone. He courts her by singing to her, then offering a candy bar, which she wrinkles her face over until she finds something more to her taste: "You're not supposed to eat the paper!" Inevitably, the paradisiacal atmosphere of the moon has achieved what all Earth's science could not, awakening the love of the spaceman for the beautiful alien until she declares to him in return, "Earthman, I too feel something strange and wonderful. Is this the love you speak about?" Just as time-honored, the lovers are separated by the cold equations of his return flight and their mutually inhospitable spheres, leaving an Earth-bound Jeff to pine around the lab, lamenting the loss of the photographs and samples that could have coaxed the funding for a second flight out of a government so skeptical that it doesn't even believe their homebuilt craft was spaceworthy. Even the Professor is beginning to doubt the reality of their trip, recalling the green lawns strewn with gold and cuties instead of craters and regolith: "The moon? We really don't know where we went." After all, they dreamed through the transition from space to moon as if in a tornado to Oz. By the same token, however, perhaps the consolation of realizing that his devoted secretary is played by the same actress as his unattainable Moon Queen will bridge the gulf between worlds for Jeff? Look, I've seen sillier episodes of Star Trek.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention "Moon Doll," the lounge theme crooned earnestly first by Ralph Young over an opening panorama of a lunar landscape at earthrise, later telepathically reprised by Jeff to the Moon Queen—in keeping with the entire no-budget enterprise, the Judith J. Kushner credited with its composition was Wishman's niece. Elsewhere the credits are less reliable, as Wishman's own contributions as writer and director as well as co-producer are camouflaged by two different male pseudonyms. Nude on the Moon is the tip of the iceberg of her phenomenal career in sexploitation, showcased by the Criterion Channel's Indecent Desires: Six Films by Doris Wishman where we discovered it, but for all the rest of you mild-mannered perverts it is blessedly available on the Internet Archive. It's kitschy, genuinely cute, and once banned in the state of New York on the grounds that there were no nudist camps on the moon. This gravity brought to you by my associated backers at Patreon.
Even the most science-minded of nudie-cuties cannot expect its audiences to show up for the plot, but part of the charm of this DIY exercise in sincere titillation is how faithfully it hits all the marks of planetary romance, merely franker than most about the cheesecake potential of all those worlds beyond. Ahead of the curve of the Apollo program, Miami-based Dr. Jeff Huntley (Lester Brown) has sunk all $3 million of his inheritance into the private venture of a moon shot, oblivious to the willingness of his buxom, black-haired secretary Cathy (top-billed Marietta) to work overtime whenever her handsome young boss stays late over his researches. "For the five years I've been associated with him," Professor Nichols (William Mayer) has to admit, "all I've ever heard him talk about is rocket propellants and the laws of gravity." Gently encouraged by his older colleague to explore other avenues of happiness, Jeff declares, "Science is my life—and nothing else." The film follows his lead with such enthusiastically lo-fi technobabble that by the middle of the first act I was saying impatiently to
spatch, "Talk, talk, talk. We're still on Earth and clothed!" I can't prove that their laboratory is played by a local chemistry classroom, but it would explain the industrial benches and shelves lined with Boston round bottles and Schlenk flasks fuming with dry-ice experiments in rocket fuel while oscilloscopes and spectrophotometers ping and whine and go everything but phee-eep. En route to the clandestine launch, Jeff cruises his mauve-tailfinned 1959 Pontiac Catalina down the main drag of Coral Gables, not neglecting the drive-by of a movie theater advertising "Hideout in the Sun in Nudearama"—Wishman's previous, debut feature. Since the budget does not extend to an exterior shot of the rocket behind the chain-link gates of the "Huntley Rocket Project," the moment of lift-off is sweetly contrived with a climb up a construction scaffold, interior shots of the switch-studded cockpit of an airplane, and a splice of model footage so jarringly dissonant with the overgrown field we just saw our astronauts walk through that it may have been discreetly nipped from some film which could afford practical effects, although the nose cone separation appears to come courtesy of Estes Industries and God bless it. Mysteriously, an irresistible drowsiness overcomes not just the Professor but Jeff as their rocket completes its landing on the lunar surface. Emerging in a skintight, Christmas-tree suggestion of space suits with thirteen hours of oxygen supplied to their sunglassed helmets, they marvel at the verdant, tropical landscape which greets them, complete with a sky as blue as the one they blasted off from and gently waving palm fronds. Well might Jeff wonder, "How do we know it is the moon, Professor?"What our intrepid scientists discover, of course, as they peer over the megalithic oolite walls of Coral Castle whose celestial motifs including a titanic crescent make it a legitimately inspired choice of setting for a lunar civilization, is one of the advanced yet primitive, peacefully utopian societies of classical science fiction, just with their jugs out. Breasts are everywhere to be seen as the inhabitants of the moon stretch and lounge to their full advantage in the sunshine, most magnificently on the buxom, black-haired Moon Queen (topless Marietta), although tushital-crackular values may also be appreciated thanks to the low-cut briefs worn by male and female "moon dolls" alike. The telepathy of the aliens is designated by the deely bobbers of their antennae and by the drawn-out whispers of the Moon Queen, post-synched like the rest of the dialogue over her regally voluptuous profile. Once our heroes are deemed harmless and freed to wander among the locals, the plot effectively goes into hibernation as the men observe all manner of nude pastimes from flower-picking to bathing to tossing a ball around a ring, but the effect is oddly wholesome rather than prurient, partly because no one is doing anything more sexual than being half-naked on camera, partly because of the script's adorable insistence on the science of the whole affair. The Professor goes around collecting rocks and plants and making notes on the behavior of the moon dolls who giggle silently over his space suit and his mustache, sternly reprimanding Jeff when the younger man appears in danger of distraction by the equally intrigued Moon Queen, "Don't forget, we're scientists!" It doesn't even come off as voyeuristic that Jeff has been detailed to take pictures of the abundant toplessness, since he has gone so obviously, monogamously head over heels for one moon doll alone. He courts her by singing to her, then offering a candy bar, which she wrinkles her face over until she finds something more to her taste: "You're not supposed to eat the paper!" Inevitably, the paradisiacal atmosphere of the moon has achieved what all Earth's science could not, awakening the love of the spaceman for the beautiful alien until she declares to him in return, "Earthman, I too feel something strange and wonderful. Is this the love you speak about?" Just as time-honored, the lovers are separated by the cold equations of his return flight and their mutually inhospitable spheres, leaving an Earth-bound Jeff to pine around the lab, lamenting the loss of the photographs and samples that could have coaxed the funding for a second flight out of a government so skeptical that it doesn't even believe their homebuilt craft was spaceworthy. Even the Professor is beginning to doubt the reality of their trip, recalling the green lawns strewn with gold and cuties instead of craters and regolith: "The moon? We really don't know where we went." After all, they dreamed through the transition from space to moon as if in a tornado to Oz. By the same token, however, perhaps the consolation of realizing that his devoted secretary is played by the same actress as his unattainable Moon Queen will bridge the gulf between worlds for Jeff? Look, I've seen sillier episodes of Star Trek.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention "Moon Doll," the lounge theme crooned earnestly first by Ralph Young over an opening panorama of a lunar landscape at earthrise, later telepathically reprised by Jeff to the Moon Queen—in keeping with the entire no-budget enterprise, the Judith J. Kushner credited with its composition was Wishman's niece. Elsewhere the credits are less reliable, as Wishman's own contributions as writer and director as well as co-producer are camouflaged by two different male pseudonyms. Nude on the Moon is the tip of the iceberg of her phenomenal career in sexploitation, showcased by the Criterion Channel's Indecent Desires: Six Films by Doris Wishman where we discovered it, but for all the rest of you mild-mannered perverts it is blessedly available on the Internet Archive. It's kitschy, genuinely cute, and once banned in the state of New York on the grounds that there were no nudist camps on the moon. This gravity brought to you by my associated backers at Patreon.
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I had forgotten the shot of the moon doll with moon toddlers, who are just hanging out by one of the pools of Coral Castle. A family-friendly nudesperience!
I'm also still a little worried about the moon dolls who climbed and ran barefoot across the moon-coral formations.
I used to run barefoot across all manner of rocks and shells and ledges as a child at Kettle Cove and Two Lights! I built up summer calluses. I bet nudists in Florida do the same.
Still, without male gaze as the default, the whole thing is a lot healthier than, say, Queen of Outer Space. Thank you, Doris Wishman.
No Ensign Jerry in sight. Amen.