With The Mole People, the co-editor of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, Virgil Vogel, made the inevitable manifest: A notorious B-movie which posits a barrage of substantial ideas. Obviously in defiance of the dictum that a B-movie disaster must violate aesthetic sensibilities on most every level, The Mole People is perhaps lambasted and criminally catalogued alongside other celluloid tragedies of the time due to the fact that it combines very subversive, satirical notions which run counter to the cultural mores and mindset of the period (as well as today) while presenting them by way of a truly B-movie plot.
A race of Sumerian albinos, displaced after the Flood and an untimely earthquake, are discovered literally inside the mountains of Asia by three archaeologists, Roger Bentley (John Agar), Jud Bellamin (Hugh Beaumont), and Etienne Lafarge (Nestor Paiva). To the scientists’ surprise, the primitive people retain a race of mole-like humanoid creatures, which rear the Sumerians’ food supply.
Granted, Vogel’s film does possess many B-movie trademarks, such as a didactic and inarticulate prologue by Frank Baxter (playing himself), an English Professor who is speaking upon–of all things–geology. He does so while making eye contract with the camera and the cameraman as he communicates more with his hands than his mouth. The Mole People also suffers from poor pacing, inane dialogue, plot holes, and flawed characterization, the latter of which is epitomized in the figure of Lafarge, who perpetually complains of the heat underground and the futility of the trio’s plight amid sporadic flights throughout the various ominous, subterranean caverns despite the fact that he cannot see and that such readily houses the potential for death.
However, the film is perhaps one of the most scathingly critical pieces of cinema to come out of the 1950s. In this light, Baxter’s overview of some of the more “liberal” notions upon Hollow Earth theory becomes a double-edged sword by the climax of a film which posits a primitive culture who naively, yet adamantly, insists that “Nothing [is] above us but Heaven” as the scientists suppress their laugher, the self-same individuals whom astutely note, “This one [pointing to dilapidated skeletal remains] died of a blow to the head with a blunt object” to be followed by “That’s the sign of a higher civilization.” Indeed.
Like Aldous Huxley’s tyrannical, morally-decrepit character of Mustapha Mond in his 1932 science fiction masterpiece, Brave New World, Elinor (Alan Napier)–the High Priest and leader of the Sumerians–covets the only passage to the outside world which, succinctly, is also the only source of natural light (and symbolic knowledge). Ironically, and in further alignment with Huxley’s text, the passageway, referred to as the “Eye of Ishtar,” is highly reminiscent of the Chrysler automotive insignia.
True to the film’s essence, the subservient race of slaves and their masters are both destroyed as a consequence of American imperialism, the result of the “liberators’” determination that the Sumerian creed to support servitude is unjust (imagine the outcome of foreign abolitionists appearing in America as late as the 1850s or consider America’s moral legislation upon the sovereign states of the Middle East at the turn of the 21st Century). Amazingly, the scientists diligently protest against the treatment of the Mole People, never questioning if there are other motives aside from farming labor that has brought about their imprisonment. This, even though one of the Americans is brandishing deep wounds from one of the suppressed as they conclude that violence cannot be a motive, while standing amid one of the creatures whom they have recently freed. Vogel does such a superb job of highlighting the conveniently-reasoned subjective judgments (via patriotic indoctrination) of the Americans that such almost demands that the characters release a human-aggressive canine in order to determine the precise girth of the individuals’ rose-colored deductions. Interestingly, in the presence of the American dignitaries-cum-demigods, the Sumerians exercise population control in the form of–if the populace exceeds the food supply–sacrifices, which steadfastly retain an equilibrium in their spatially-limited world (as opposed to increasing the supply and therefore promoting further overpopulation, ad infinitum).
Yet, the feature is not as simplistic as a mere inversion of the American hero. Not only do the ethical dilemmas presented in The Mole People become exacerbated time and time again as Vogel refuses to cast easy answers and scenarios, but he also addresses the all-too-relevant (yet highly volatile for the time) issue of race within the feature. Depending upon one’s perspective, the work houses three metaphorical races: Caucasian, African American, and Mulatto. Ingeniously, Vogel leaves it to his viewer to decide which parties are to be cast into the aforementioned categories. One could easily argue that Vogel iconoclastically projects the Americans, who possess pigmentation, as being symbolic African Americans who, understandably, adamantly oppose slavery on historic principle, thus positing the Sumerians, who are devoid of color, as the prototypical Caucasians who, as history precedes them, are the slave owners. As such, Adad (Cynthia Patrick) becomes the “victim” of the recessive gene within the latter’s race as her tonality nonetheless confesses itself to be the product of the Sumerians.
A further irony exists in respect to the history of the feature. In an attempt to concur with Hollywood’s insistence upon a happy ending, the slated finale involved Adad and her two American saviors surviving the debacle. However, fearful of the social implications and audience reaction of having two figures of different races together–in that Adad, who has pigmentation (as do the Americans!) and, as a consequence is referred to by her kindred as the “Marked One,” (thus making the previous interpretation of metaphorical race all the more ironic)–the ethnic logistics of the executives’ decision is suspicious at best in that the studio forbid anything less than absolute destruction by the final frame. As such, Virgil Vogel’s The Mole People stands as a completely cohesive and concise social, ethical, and historical criticism, satire, and litmus of America. Not bad for a B-movie mishap.
-Egregious Gurnow
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