Good Taste Has Its Place
By Jacqueline Jonée

A Lunar Excursion Through the 1st 2/3rds of the 20c


The passing of Walter Cronkite, the man who ushered America through the space race, on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that first saw men walk on the moon, provides an appropriate occasion for a fond look back at all those cinematic imaginings about men (and women) setting upon the surface of our only satellite… although, it should be cautioned, not in any craft, or on any moon, recognizable to Cronkite, the astronauts, or actual science of any kind.
Movie moon voyages were usually very simple affairs. No need for years of pilot training, the intricacies of computer calculations, the torturous and time-consuming development of exact and delicate instrumentation designed to lift a few brave men into the heavens on a journey of infinite precision aboard the most complex vehicles ever conceived by humankind, sustain them in the vacuum of space and the hostile environment of an alien world, all with no margin for error. Just climb in, flip a couple of switches ostentatiously connected to an “atom chamber,” strap yourselves into an office chair or lawn furniture with an airliner seat belt, and off you go. Navigation? No prob. Hey, see that round white thing up there? Aim for it. Heck, this spaceship stuff is easy. It’s all those meteor showers and moon monsters that pose the real difficulties. Like anybody doesn’t know that.
So, a lunar excursion through the first two-thirds of the 20th century, before 1969 came along and ruined it all for future generations by showing us the prosaic truth…
“A Trip to the Moon” (1902.) Movies were less than a decade old when French film pioneer Georges Melies produced the first-ever movie about a journey to the moon and the most famous film of Melies’ career. A trained magician, Melies combined the bag of tricks from his former profession with the new cinematic ones he was busily inventing to conjure this visually stunning and amusing little picture, one still known and watched 107 years later. (Think about it – a 107-year-old movie.) Yes, this is the one with the renowned shot of a rocket crashing into the right eye of the man in the moon. Melies’ Verne adaptation runs just 10 minutes, but it packs lots of amazing sets, sights and even plot into that brief time, and at least Melies didn’t have to worry about being condemned for the film’s thorough-going unscientific-ness. Truly a milestone in the development of cinema.
“Woman in the Moon” (“Frau im Mond”) (1929.) Fritz Lang’s final silent film, made as the industry was rapidly shifting to sound, is an overlong and over-plotted escapade about a rocket trip to look for gold on the satellite. Made three years after Lang’s “Metropolis,” Lang and his crew utilized their visual skills to create stunning scenes of a rocket take-off and lunar landscape. The effect, however, is considerably lessened—blown, really—by Lang’s decision to have his space travelers discover the moon has a healthy atmosphere, like an Alpine morning, making such niceties as spacesuits unnecessary. The sight of Lang’s adventurers cavorting on the lunar surface in Lederhosen and Bavarian hats kind of ruins matters. And plot bogs down in too much pre- and post-lunar melodramatics. Still, it remains a landmark of science fiction in its way, not to mention that – according to Lang, anyway – it was he who invented the concept of the countdown, shown in the film and quickly emulated by real-life rocket pioneers everywhere. Well, maybe. But before I swallow that one whole, a good, deep breath of moon air seems in order.
“Things to Come” (1936.) This British adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel of the destruction of society by war and its rebuilding into the year 2036 has as its climax the launching of a ship to orbit the moon. The protagonists of Wells’ sterile, Fabian-Society utopia choose two particularly unpleasant upper-class twits to go off in the thing; fired out of a cannon. This event is meant to convey man’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge and discovery, a thirst which is presumably slaked at least a little after they discover that launching people to the moon sitting in hammocks, wearing togas, and did we mention out of a cannon, fails to achieve the desired results.
“Munchhausen” (1943.) This German film, based on fanciful events of a real-life 18th century figure, was ordered up by Josef Goebbels to compete with “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Thief of Bagdad.” It’s an astounding movie to have come out of Nazi Germany during the war—a lavish, no-expense-spared, and astonishingly propaganda-free film, in color, depicting the Baron’s most legendary exploits, including riding a cannonball and sailing a balloon to the moon, where he literally meets the head of the orb (moon people carry their heads around in their arms, and speak German quite well,) and has other adventures on this weirdly inviting satellite, before returning to Earth. The film itself, as you might guess, is remarkable in many ways, a real curio for us today. Two other films based on the same stories would later be produced and also carry the hero to the moon: the 1962 Czech film “Baron Prasil” (as “Munchausen” is known in Czech), released here as “The Fabulous Baron Munchausen,” and Terry Gilliam’s spectacular but not-as-much-fun “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” in 1989.
“Destination Moon” (1950.) This is the one film that really began Hollywood’s obsession with science fiction. Oscar-winning producer George Pal abjured melodramatics—romance in the rocket, moon monsters and the like—and instead derived his plot and dramatics from the preparation, launching and landing of a moon rocket. Based on a novel from legendary science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, who co-wrote the script, Pal’s color production was as technically accurate as science at the end of the 1940s could make it, and remains so today; though the gleaming silver spacecraft used is unlike anything we really saw 19 years later. A huge popular success, and very much a landmark in filmmaking, the film is cited by NASA in its official history of the space program as a stepping stone in the realization of space travel, a movie that inspired hundreds of future scientists, astronomers, engineers and even astronauts to make space their specialty, and their cause. And for studios, a whole new genre was born, bigger today than ever.
“Project Moonbase” (1953.) Three years after “Destination Moon,” Heinlein struck out with this quickie; an abortive early TV show that was redirected to theaters instead. It’s 64 minutes but hardly brisk with Heinlein’s usual Commie spies attempting to undermine America’s plans to orbit the moon preparatory to a landing. The film ostentatiously tries to be progressive by making the nation’s chief astronaut a girl, though it takes care to have her nicknamed “Bright Eyes” and to provide her with a uniform consisting of short-shorts and an ultra-clingy top designed to safeguard her perky breasts against the forces of weightlessness. Sent into space with her ex-boyfriend, a mere captain, they’re marooned on the moon thanks to the Commie’s machinations, but after he dies on the surface they’re married by the president (another woman who looks like a cross between Ma Barker and your grandmother) to keep up appearances, and at Bright Eyes’ request he’s promoted over her so he can show her who’s boss until they’re rescued. But Heinlein did manage to come up with a lunar lander that looks amazingly like the real one 16 years later. The moonscape is pretty good; the film takes place in far-off 1970. And everyone even uses a kind of clunky cell phone.
“Cat-Women of the Moon” (1953.) The rocket’s interior looks like the set of an old game show. The crew sits in rolling swivel chairs and chaise-lounges rejected as too cheap for K-Mart. Their bubble-headed spacesuits have obviously open face pieces. They communicate on the moon by shouting. They’re commanded by Sonny Tufts. They find a moon cave with oxygen, a giant puppet spider and man-starved bar girls in black leotards whom one of the crew eventually dubs “cat women”, apparently because of the eyeliner they use. The cat women live in an ancient Greek city, use telepathy and vanish at will after assuming a constipated look, and the female member of the Earth crew has been under their spell for years, bringing with her knowledge of rocketry and a hair brush. Suddenly all the girls die and the crew takes off for Earth, except for the greedy guy who was looking for diamonds and got stabbed by an evil C.W. with one of those retractable fake knives. Yes, you have to see it…and its remake…
“Missile to the Moon” (1959.) Same basic thing – crew member under the spell of moon maidens, cave with oxygen, wooden torches and two puppet spiders, a Greek-style underground civilization needing the Earthmen’s rocket ship to escape their dying world. Plus real-life lunar hazards like a bright, high-clouded, sunny sky that incinerates you if you walk in the sunlight, and, oh, rock creatures that lumber after you but explode if you throw one of the moon girls’ doorknobs filled with air at it. Had enough? Did I add the moon-born scientist recruits two escaped cons hiding in the spaceship as his co-pilots? And that the crew is rounded out by his fellow scientist and that man’s fiancée, who has a hissy fit when one of the moon maidens takes a shine to her boy after mistaking him for the main scientist, who was killed by a tool box en route which I forgot to mention? Ah, well. Make it a double feature!
“From the Earth to the Moon” (1958.) Producer Benedict Bogeau took Verne’s public domain novel, hired a slightly past-their-prime “name” cast and then as usual pulled the plug on financing, leaving this tale of a post-civil-war excursion into space confused and under-produced. Stars Joseph Cotton, George Sanders et. al. do their best. There’s a lively music score and some promise early on, but the whole thing dissolves in illogic and bad effects, such as the moon rocket shooting out flames while attached to a metal spike, looking like a silver shish kebab, all against a blue sky. This one’s also shot out of a cannon and carries a sexy female stowaway (Debra Paget) for love interest, or more properly, disinterest, and in its own poor way can at times be oddly likable, but it’s really a pretty carelessly made flick.
“12 to the Moon” (1960.) A hand-selected international crew of 11 idiots and one alcoholic is picked to fly the first spaceship to the moon, a joint effort of the nations to promote Earth’s noteworthy achievements in the fields of peace, brotherhood and harmony throughout the universe. They make it but run into unseen lunar beings who demand the Earthmen depart at once, on the unexplained condition that the expedition leave behind the two cats they brought along to watch them procreate. Two of the crew who’ve discovered love on board also mysteriously stays behind. Amid further deaths, fistfights, yelling, meteors and a traitorous Frenchman (that “freedom-fries” crowd was right!) aboard this peace-loving flight, the moon people freeze North America anyway to demonstrate their power, but two more of the crew—the son of an ex-Nazi and an Israeli whose family was wiped out by the guy’s father, in a further show of reconciliation—sacrifice themselves by riding a mini-rocket into Earth’s atmosphere to thaw the planet. They fail, but the moon beings relent, and Tom Conway (George Sanders’s brother) gets back before the bars close.
“First Men in the Moon” (1964.) Another Wells tale produced on a fairly high budget, with elaborate and excellent special effects by the great Ray Harryhausen… though even he trips up by making outer space and the surface of the moon very noisy places, the absence of atmosphere notwithstanding. Set via flashbacks in 1899 (after a modern expedition lands on the moon and discovers evidence of an earlier voyage,) the film gives Harryhausen the chance to construct Celanites (insect-like moon beings,) their underground civilization, a large moon worm, and a bizarre little spacecraft, all animated in Dynamation, the stop-motion process of his invention. Generally well-made, colorful, and entertaining despite its lapses, it was the first film to depict a lunar voyage after President Kennedy’s call for an actual moon landing by the end of the 60s. Look for Peter Finch, who visited the set one day, hamming shamelessly in a cameo as a solicitor.
“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968.) Well, you know. The moon serves as the jumping off point for deeper-space psychedelic adventures. Stanley Kubirck’s deliberately-paced, groundbreaking film was a trip in more ways than one, but despite its flaws (and shameless product placements,) it’s one of the few films that can genuinely be termed a cultural touchstone.
All these films don’t even bring in such tangential lunar-themed films as
Rocketship X-M” (1950,) where a rocket headed for the moon gets knocked off course and lands on atomic-destroyed Mars instead (it happens); or the so-bad-they’re-goodies “Robot Monster” (1953,) wherein a gorilla in a diving helmet invades Earth from the moon, kills off all but six people, then plods around Bronson Canyon in Los Angeles trying to bump off the rest while falling in lust with an Earth girl (I cannot make this stuff up,) and “Invisible Invaders” (1959,) where invisible beings who’ve made the moon their home for 20,000 years now decide to invade Earth to prevent us from bringing our violence to their world (apparently unaware of the prospective mission of those 12 to the moon,) and wreak their havoc by inhabiting the corpses of well-dressed white men. Of course, if you must, there’s the superb 1995 movie Apollo 13, chronicling the aborted lunar landing of that jinxed mission after an explosion cripples the spacecraft and NASA races to find a way to get the men safely back to Earth. But, c’mon – what fun is that? Sure, those guys were incredibly brave and resourceful, and the salvation of the crew a feat of genius, innovation, guts and know-how. Yeah, yeah, but if they had landed, how would they have held up against rock men vulnerable only to doorknobs?

Warming Up to Warner
Studio’s New Series Releases Classics from Tomb
BY HUGH O’BRIEN
Somewhere, one hopes, Jack L. Warner is smiling, or at least relieved.
Back in 1956, needing cash, Warner decided to sell his studio’s entire catalogue of pre-1949. The buyer was Untied Artists [UA], then feverishly expanding after several lean years. For the bargain-basement sum of around $12 million – enough to finance maybe half a dozen movies in that era – UA acquired hundreds of the greatest classics of Hollywood’s golden age. These include “Casa-blanca,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang,” “Little Caesar,” The Public Enemy, Dark Victory.” As Billy Wilder had said earlier that year, when his old studio, Paramount, had sold its pre-1948 library to MCA for a whopping [sic] $2 million, “When Hollywood starts selling its children, that’s the end of Hollywood.”
Time hasn’t been kind to the fate of the Paramount library, half of which is still controlled by Universal (itself acquired by MCA in 1962, hence the transfer of ownership,) but time has turned out quite fortuitously for the fate of the old Warner Bros. holdings. It took a lot of wheeling and dealing, bad business judgment by one studio and great judgment by a visionary broadcaster, but for the past dozen or so years the once severed Warner Bros. library has been whole again. It started back in 1981, when Ted Turner bought out MGM/UA for the sole purpose of acquiring its invaluable library, which, thanks to that earlier merger between MGM and UA, now included the Warner titles owned by the latter. Turner quickly sold off the studio and its assets, but retained the films, to which he in short order added the vast RKO library in a deal with General Tire, its former owner, and soon began releasing these titles on VHS. (He also eventually indulged in a rash of colorization…, but this lapse of taste made him a pariah in the film industry, brought about the creation of the National Film Registry to preserve films from such vandalism, and lost him a lot of money…so, as in an old Warner movie, justice was served.)
Fast forward to the mid-’nineties; Turner merged with Time Warner – owner of, among other things, the post-1949 Warner Brothers library. Thanks to that merger, the two halves of the Warner Brothers family were once more melded into one, as they remain today.  (Meanwhile, after another convoluted corporate twist, the UA and post-1982 MGM libraries have spun off into other hands, consolidated under the MGM label, whose titles, since the demise of that once-omnipotent studio, are now being released by Fox.  There’s a quiz afterward, so I hope you’re taking notes.)
Warner Home Video has been the most active division of a movie company in releasing its vast library holdings. With the exception of a few stray titles, either fallen into public domain or owned by an entity other than the releasing studio, every WB, RKO and pre-’82 MGM film ever made is held by Warner, along with most of the Allied Artists library as well the company acquired in the late 80s. But even with its relentless releasing schedule, there remain so many unissued films in its holdings that Warner, in a unique decision, decided upon a new way of making its library available to fans without the expense of standard DVDs.
The result is the Warner Archive series, which premiered in April.  The series consists of hundreds of titles pressed not on standard DVDs, but recorded in the DVD-R format. Sensitive to quality issues, Warner uses newly developed equipment capable of rendering discs of higher visual definition, picture stability, and better sound than is normally found on DVD-Rs. This results in discs that are in most cases scarcely different from a DVD. The releases are of the “bare-bones” type increasingly common on standard DVD releases of older films. But they come in their own packaging, in their original aspect ratios, and with sound and picture quality virtually equal to regular DVDs. Initially Warner promised the addition of up to 30 films per month for this series, but while this appears to have been scaled back to closer to 20 or so, the archive has more than quadrupled in size just since its introduction. So far the discs have been available (for $19.95 each) online only at WBshop.com, but beginning in July they’ll also be sold through Movies Unlimited (moviesunlimited.com) for $2 a disc less – though there’ll be a 90-day gap between the discs’ debut on the Warner site and their availability via MU. The films range from silents through lesser 1980s titles of varying quality. Herewith, a random sampling of a handful of the good, bad and a bit of ugly:
“Abe Lincoln in Illinois” (RKO 1940.) Raymond Massey reprises his stage role in Robert E. Sherwood’s Pultizer Prize-winning play, following Honest Abe’s life from his 20s through his election as president. A perfect way to mark this, the bicentennial of 16’s birth, and Massey, in his only Oscar-nominated role, manages the part with seriousness but not solemnity. Not bad for a Canadian.
“Al Capone” (AA 1959.) Perhaps the most famous, if not the most accurate, portrayal of the infamous gangster, with Rod Steiger chewing the scenery in a restrained way in a largely fictionalized but entertaining overview of old Scarface’s career.
“The Big Circus” (AA 1959.) A year before he went off to Fox top produce first sci-fi movies and TV shows, and later disaster movies, Irwin Allen fashioned one of his better films, a sprawling look at life under somebody’s idea of the big top, as circus owner Victor Mature battles for survival against a treacherous rival; with Red Buttons, Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Gilbert Roland, an actor who can do no wrong, especially wire-walking over Niagara Falls. Hey, any film where the good guy is named “Whirling” and the bad guy “Borman” can’t be all bad.
“The Citadel” (MGM 1938.) It’s amazing this film hasn’t received a true DVD release. From James Hilton’s novel of a dedicated doctor who loses his idealism before he becomes a physician to the fashionable, it stars the peerless Robert Donat, with sterling support from the likes of Rosalind Russell and Ralph Richardson. The Oscar-nominated Donat delivers one of his typically flawless, shaded performances in an unjustly neglected film not to be missed.
“Countdown” (WB 1968.) Overshadowed by “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the real thing a year later, this almost forgotten movie about the life-and-death problems encountered by the first American astronaut to land on the moon, was the first film helmed by Robert Altman before his breakthrough with M*A*S*H*. James Caan and Robert Duvall head the usual vast cast soon to be common for Altman, who reportedly got the job after a dozen other directors turned it down. I don’t share the common adulation of Altman, whose films depend much more on the quality of their script for their success than his tiresome, anarchic direction, but this film turned out surprisingly well and is definitely a lost, if minor, gem worth a look.
“Crisis” (MGM 1950.) Cary Grant as a brain surgeon? Yes, and he’s good as an American doctor kidnapped while touring a South American country and forced to operate on its engagingly ruthless dictator, played by Jose Ferrer. Swedish actress Signe Hasso is effective as Ferrer’s Evita-style wife, and good old Gilbert Roland shows up again, this time as a cynical revolutionary.
“The Crowded Sky” (WB 1960.) This is a low-rent rip-off of “The High and the Mighty,” with a pair of planes headed on a collision course while the passenger reflect on their excruciatingly boring personal lives. The dialogue is idiotic, the direction inept, the passenger plane less realistic than that plywood model you used to roll around the floor powered by its rubber band, but its annoyingly irresistible. Note on originality in filmmaking: here, a westbound passenger plane out of Washington piloted by Dana Andrews collides with a small eastbound plane flown by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. In “Airport 1975” (1974,) a westbound passenger plane out of Washington piloted by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., collides with a small eastbound plane flown by Dana Andrews. For this, someone went to film school.
“The D.I.” (WB 1957.) Sergeant Joe Friday meets “Full Metal Jacket.” Enough said. Hilarious Jack Webb stab at Marine Corps reality… yeah, just as “Dragnet” reflected the real LAPD.
“I Was a Communist for the F.B.I.” (WB 1951.) Loyal Joe turns phony Commie to infiltrate a troublesome cell. As usual, the Reds are unimaginatively depicted as 1930s gangsters, and the movie is one of those “artifact of its era” types, but for all that not bad of its kind and good for a few insights along with the snorts.
“Lost Boundaries” (1949.) A stunning (and virtually forgotten) film for its time, all the more hard-hitting because its story is real, based on the experiences of a light-skinned black husband and wife who passed for white for over 20 years. Mel Ferrer, in his film debut, plays the husband, a doctor who after professional rejections and setbacks takes the advice of his friends to pose as a white man. Settling in a small town in New Hampshire and never telling even their children they’re black, the family establishes itself at the center of their community for over two decades before the parents’ secret is revealed. The casual, often gratuitously nasty racism exhibited is a stark reminder of the vile, demeaning boundaries that for so long boxed in African Americans and restricted or even destroyed their talents and aspirations. The characters and their plight are made all the more immediate and real thanks to producer Louis de Rochement, a former documentarian who made several fact-based films in the late ’40s (“The House on 92nd Street,”) and made it a point to always shoot on the locations actually associated with his story. This film is a unique, real-life history lesson – with a note of hope and redemption at the end – for those who never realized, or have forgotten, just how pervasive was the poison of racism in American society, no matter your station in life or the community you called home.
“Sunrise at Campobello” (WB 1960.) This is another presidential biopic with Ralph Bellamy repeating his Tony-Award-winning role as Franklin Roosevelt. It recounts FDR’s battle against polio from its onset in 1921 through his political reappearance in 1924. Dory Schary’s play is too hagiographic for its own good. Bellamy is 20 years too old, and Greer Garson is way too glamorous for Eleanor, but as a piece of drama and a moving depiction of a man’s struggle against a terrible disease, the story works, and works well.
“Three Comrades” (MGM 1938.) Erich Maria Remarque’s tale of the relationship between three German World Ware II veterans (Robert Taylor, Robert Young, Franchot Tone) and a doomed girl (Margaret Sullavan) is both poignant and remarkable as the shadow of Nazism and a more barbaric war loomed. This is the last Hollywood film to portray Germans in a sympathetic light for many years to come.
“Westbound” (WB 1959.) Mentioned in our last DVD column, this film stars Randolph Scott and was directed as a favor to him by his pal Budd Boetticher, but neither man considered this routine western truly one of “theirs.” Scott made it to close out a contractual obligation to Warner and brought Boetticher aboard to make something more out of it. The movie, about stage robbers, a rich and ruthless town boss, and hostile citizens, is entertaining enough, and Boetticher does manage to bring some of his inspired toughness to a few surprisingly brutal scenes. Worth having as part of their collaboration; good but not especially memorable.
Collect all 222!