Argonauts of the Air (1937)

D. Jimmy Cowdell
B&W


It’s H.G. Wells week this week on The Alternative History of Cinema. There’s no specific reason for this, on this blog I just pick things on a whim and whimsy and go from there. And since in recent weeks, two H.G. Wells adaptations have occurred to me, I thought I’d create thematic unity by running them together. Yes, I really should have done it in September for his birthday or something like that, but sod it! All year around is a good time for Bromley’s finest literary son. First up we have a stilted, cut glass tale of British derring-do in outer space. Set in the wonderful year of 2014, but clearly much more the 1930s. The future, much like the present, is British and nothing is going to stop that. Get your Union Jack marked spaceships at the ready, put your stiff upper lip in place, and off we go.


Based on the very short Wells story of the same name, this is the almost Monty Python set-up of spaceflight from the suburbs. Just outside the two up, two down of the new suburban developments, there are rockets lined up ready to fly to the furthest reaches of space. There dashing young men queue up to be spacemen and take the glory of Britain to the further possible horizon, while dowdier men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats man Mission Control – just like Mr Benn’s most out of this world adventure. We hear tales of a moon-base, a Martian colony (where in a throwaway line it seems we are teaching the Martians about civilised government), of how the Saturn fleet is now mighty. But a threat is coming from closer to home that could seriously harm this brilliant endeavour.


For the most part this is derring-do of a Bulldog Drummond style. Lewis Coleman is Captain Jack Cook, a legendary figure in the space corps – the kind of man with a pencil thin moustache, slicked back hair, a rakish grin and a glint in the eye bright enough to weaken the knee of any poor susceptible member of the female species. He’s the type of Englishman who is every woman’s dream (although that dream probably involves pounding her lover’s buttocks once a week with a cane to really get him off. Yes, he’s that type of Englishman!) Clearly the film makers have seen Flash Gordon as there are the plastic rocket ships, onesie space uniforms, strange new planets. But at the forefront, hands on hips, staring handsomely into the distance, looking both heroic and rather repressed, is our very English hero.


But there’s a problem, the large staff back at space-fleet command has been infiltrated. It hasn’t been infiltrated by a Martian, or a Venusian or a moon person – no the big threat comes from closer to home, it comes from the anarchists. Arthur Simkins, as rat-faced an actor as ever lived, is Karl Mannix, an anarchist who is determined to destroy the space-fleet. He doesn’t dream of a glorious space Empire, he dreams of bringing England to its knees. After a few acts of sabotage a general meeting is called and after a bumpy opening, Captain Jack carries the day and gets the workforce on its side. It’s then that Mannix, and his sinister foreign cohorts, decide to step the plan up and kill Captain Jack, slaughter the glorious symbol of the British Space Empire itself. But the will of the people is stronger. Joined together – every member of the space corps, from Captain Jack Cook down to a lowly cleaner named Marjorie (who stares at Captain Jack with a mix of motherly pride and lustful wantonness) is able to root out and get rid of the these subversive infiltrators. Space flight is for all and the all join together to make sure that the malcontent few do not destroy the great dream of mankind.


It’s a beautiful image, one that precedes ‘Star Trek’ by thirty years, and chimes well with Wells’ own political views. But it also makes for an oddly confusing movie. The anarchists are clearly portrayed as left wing themselves. There they are with their pamphlets, their copies of Marx, their exaggerated (as it turns out) claims about poor working conditions. And so they don’t seem to be that different from the grouping which eventually crushes them. Yes, socialism without Marx is an ideal Wells is on record as desiring, and this is a film where the Marx is forcibly removed from socialism. Yet there is little on the screen to truly explain what that means and we’re left with a story where some left wing patriots get rid of some really left wing malcontents so that the bowler hatted fellows of Wimbledon, Surbiton and Worcester Park can continue their work in Britain’s glorious imperial space-race.