Red Planet Mars and 1950s Hollywood propaganda

In what film do you find a former Nazi scientist serving the devil, funded by Soviet Union money, a highly-advanced Mars nuclear culture, ruled by a Christ-like figure and a religious revolution in Communist Russia, inspired by American radio broadcasts? Only in wonderful 1950s, B movie, propagandist Hollywood can you find such a film, called Red Planet Mars, made in 1952.

This film is presented in its entity on YouTube, making a change from piecing together 13 parts of a film in a different language, until you find out that the end has been removed due to copyrighting. Through the technique of reading further down the page, you will find that I placed this unique film just below. Isn't that nice.

 

The 1950s were the peak of Hollywood's propagandist output  in the cultural Cold War between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union and the fight for people's hearts and minds. Particularly, religion became one of the most emotive themes used in Hollywood and the United States, due to the Soviet Unions persecution of religion throughout its combined states. It was Lenin's original belief that religion was a product of social, economic oppression and exploitation.  

Red Planet Mars perfectly and insanely encompasses pretty much all the 1950s Cold War themes in one film. Obvious anti-communism, the power of religion and alienation at home and even at other planets. The film even manages to fit in a distrust of science, with the antagonist and protagonist scientists both dying in a fiery laboratory explosion. Lots of rather large cultural eggs were put in a very preposterous, cold basket.

An American astronomer, Chris Cronyn, played by Peter Graves, starts to receive mysterious messages from Mars using a new invention named the 'hydrogen valve' to contact it. Through questioning and exchange of information, Cronyn realises that Mars is ruled by advanced intelligent beings. They live a longer that human life-span and have developed new, more efficient energy sources. The discovery causes chaos on Earth, with a threatened collapse of Western society, through stock markets falling and wide-spread depression. The original, ex-Nazi inventor of the 'hydrogen valve', Frank Calder, played by Herbet Berghof, along with Russian agent cohorts, looks upon gloatingly at the approaching western collapse.

This is until the discovery that Mars follows Christian values, through the message of, 'Seven lifetimes ago, you were told to love goodness and hate evil.' The news sends the Soviet Union into panic and chaos instead, where their people openly start to worship and embrace God once again, sending peace and revolution throughout the world. But then Calder reveals himself to be the true sender of the messages, in an attempt to dupe and bring down both sides using a radio-transmitter, high in the Andes mountains. Realising he has failed, he attempts to blow up the hydrogen valve, taking his life and Cronyn and his wife in an explosion. Just before the hydrogen valve is destroyed, one final, disrupted message comes through from Mars: 'Ye have done well, my good...' possibly proving that God was indeed on Mars. 

There is a clear attempt here to attach religion with freedom, liberty and democracy, a theme that is constantly used in America and Hollywood in the 1950s. They attempt to create the idea that capitalism, anti- communism and Christianity was one whole synonymous idea. The danger of science and dabbling in things we do not fully understand was also investigated, a theme common in Hollywood movies until the later wave of disaster movies in the 1990s and 2000s.