Gog (1954)

Computers entered the American imagination when UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) correctly predicted the outcome of the 1952 US presidential election for CBS-TV News based on 7% of the vote. Shrouded in mystery as to its potential, UNIVAC – and its immediate predecessor ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) – was used by the US Census Bureau and university research projects. Monsters in size (8 tons) and containing miles of wires, some 5,000 vacuum tubes and running at a blazing clock speed of about 2.4Mhz, it was only a matter of time until Hollywood – in the throes of post-war sci-fi movie madness – turned it into a device of fear.
Consider the publicity blurb:

“Then suddenly it became a Frankenstein of steel!”

“Gog” is the earliest Hollywood computer movie that I could find. Not available on VHS or DVD, the film has managed to almost completely disappear. Which isn’t a major loss considering it’s basically an incoherent Cold War monster movie.

Someone – or something – is killing scientists at a secret underground research facility in the New Mexico desert. David Sheppard – an operative for a US military intelligence service – is sent to investigate the sabotage and murders. Set in the deep chill of the Cold War and caught up in the glorification of technology and the fascination with space exploration, the film catalogs a variety of scientific experiments including reanimating frozen monkeys. (Astronauts will be frozen for space travel and thawed out by radar beams as they return to earth. Apparently, the microwave hadn’t been invented yet.) The entire facility is controlled by NOVAC – the Nuclear Operation Variable Automatic Computer – sometimes referred to as “the Brain.”

NOVAC is a first generation computer, which means it uses vacuum tubes and a machine language. A machine language means that the programmers had to enter zeros and ones to write each computational sequence. Interesting that the unnamed enemy could write machine language that quickly as computer languages didn’t exist. That means the enemy had to write 1s and 0s to create commands or have a handy punch card with basic kill-the-scientist instructions on it.

In the mid-1950s, the reality of application software and even operating systems (as we now know them) were still in the theoretical stage and networking would be a dream for another 15 years. So how do you hijack a computer the size of a room and use it for murder? The explanation in the film is that NOVAC was built in Switzerland (a neutral country) where enemy agents installed transmitters and receivers into the Brain and then controlled it via a fiberglass aircraft that evaded radar and circled above the research facility. Aircraft made from composites were only flying somewhere deep in dreamland at the time “Gog” was made. And it isn’t composites that add stealth to aircraft but the manipulation of surface area. The F-117 – the so-called stealth fighter – is made from conventional materials.

Where “Gog” moves into really strange territory is in the naming of the robots controlled by NOVAC and used for various chores by the scientists. (Why these robots are equipped with flamethrowers is an options choice I don’t understand but I guess the DVD burner wasn’t offered.) Gog and Magog – the names of the robots in “Gog” – are the nations that join Satan for the holy war of Revelations in the Bible; or, they are vague and dreadful places in ancient writings that preceded the Bible. Either way it’s a bizarre naming convention that better fits the meat of “The Matrix” in playing with religious allusions and the notion of evil.

The unnamed enemy gains control of the robots when they remotely hijack the computer and attempt to kill a scientist, leading to the now classic line: “Open the panel and smash the tubes.”

In spite of all that, “Gog” gets the role of the computer right. NOVAC isn’t evil, isn’t making decisions that are too important for humans to make, isn’t trying to take over the world or launching a missile strike against an enemy because it believes it’s playing a game. It would be at least a decade before the computer would lose its typecasting as a box filled with wire and tubes that could only calculate infinitely complicated math problems in a matter of hours.

Bad science fiction – for all its techno-babble – seems far more intent on the fears and conventions of the present than it does with the future and “Gog” is no exception. It is a film filled with unapologetic male chauvinism, bad science, and the usual American jingoism typical of the decade. The chief scientist, at the end of the movie, dismisses the inroads of the enemy by telling a worried colleague that the US needn’t be concerned about a surprise attack because that very morning a rocket is launching a television set into orbit to track every movement of the enemy. (Yes, a television set.) And then we see a V-2 rocket taking off.

Not a very auspicious beginning for computers in film but as the electronic brains became commonplace, technophobia would become a genre that would produce some of the best and some of the worst films ever made. Many of them would use the same bad science and some would exploit other underlying fears.

Many thanks to Michael Ahearn for the loan of the film.