On the Threshold of Space (1956)

Can you imagine a movie made nowadays with an introduction from some high-flying military type telling us, in the most imperious of tones, that the impending movie really "is" the future? Well we have one here, as Guy Madison ("Hollenbeck") trials an experimental ejector seat that has an habit of breaking the shoulder of anyone who uses it at altitude; else it spins round and round enough to render you just as dead as if you hadn't used it in the first place! Can he find a solution? Well, with the help of "Pat Lange" (Virginia Leith) and a team including John Kodiak and Dean Jagger, we just know that he can. It's not that this is a bad film - though it isn't very good; it's just that it is a pretty shallow cold war competitive drama with the usual "must beat the Soviets" imperative that probably worked ok in 1956, but now is all just a bit feeble and scare-mongery. It does feature the odd bit of impressive aerial photography, but the rest of the film is very formulaic with the actors doing things very much by the numbers, a dry script that does likewise and an ending that could been seen just as easily from space as the Great Wall of China. To be fair, it doesn't play quite so fast and loose with the science as many, but it's still totally unremarkable.