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Reviews
Rocketmen (2009)
Missed a few points
Director Richard Dale managed to shoot only Whites. One Black astronaut slipped through in passing. 0ne woman technician, a blond knockout, made the cut. No Black technicians were shown, male or female. Ironically, the narrator spouts a line when the Apollo missions were beginning, that the time for calculations is over, ironic in the light of the recent Margot Lee Shetterly book and 20th Century Fox film, "Hidden Figures," which tells the story of the essential calculations accomplished for years by NASA's "Colored Girls," as they were known at the time. Dale even managed to exclude Blacks from the decades of fascinated onlookers at launches, landings, tragedies, and successes.
Susanna Pass (1949)
Roy and Dale as 1949 feminists
I love the movie, and especially Dale's character, "Doc" Parker, the Ph.D.-toting, martial-arts trained ex-Marine who only needs Roy because he's got the guitar! By 1949, we think "Rosie the Riveter" and other women were uniformly back in the kitchen, but boys and girls were watching this. No wonder the girls wanted to grow up to be women, not drudges! The film makers' seriousness about such issues is shown by the extended sequence in which Doc explains the hatchery's operations to Roy. This portrays her, not as some kind of oddity, but as an informed, highly educated woman in an instructive, not subordinate, relationship with Roy. Meanwhile, his interest is romantic, sure, but he is also clearly "teachable" and interested, not cowed or mocking regarding her leadership.