by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we ended up running last night into the wee hours
was a Mystery Science Theatre 3000
presentation of 12 to the Moon, a
rather O.K. sci-fi thriller from Columbia in 1961 that’s essentially Woman
on the Moon meets The Day the
Earth Stood Still. The premise of the film
is that the International Space Order (ISO) has formed to bring all the
countries of the world together to contribute to the first journey from earth
to the moon (though I couldn’t help but joke, “I wonder how much help Vanuatu
was able to give”), and a polyglot assortment of cast members representing a
wide range of nationalities and ethnicities is assembled to fly a “moon rocket”
whose interior, as Charles commented, is the size of a frat house (whereas the
real lunar flights were conducted by people locked into things the size of the
average bathroom). As the title coyly suggests, there are indeed 12 people
bound for the moon when the flight takes off — though, as you might have
guessed, not all of them get back. They are flight captain John Anderson (Ken
Clark, and though the MST3K
people made jokes about the hunkiness of his body and his utter lack of
reticence showing it off, he was
a nice hunk of man-meat and entertaining to watch on aesthetic grounds alone!),
lady scientist Dr. Hideko Morata (Michi Kobi — I guess Yoko Tani, virtually the
only person named “Yoko” anyone outside Japan had ever heard of until John
Lennon started dating Yoko Ono, was busy doing a Godzilla movie or something
that week), Dr. Feodor Orloff (Tom Conway, the best actor in the piece, but
saddled with an awful “Russian” accent), Dr. Luis Vargas (Anthony Dexter, who’d
played Rudolph Valentino in a 1951 biopic), spaceship designer Dr. Erich
Heinrich (John Wengraf), Roddy Murdock (Robert Montgomery, Jr.), Dr. William
Rochester (Phillip Baird), Dr. David Ruskin (Richard Weber) — who despite his
Anglo-Saxon name is supposedly a Polish Jew who emigrated to Israel after most
of his family was killed in the Holocaust — Dr. Selim Hamid (Tema Bey), Dr.
Étienne Martel (Roger Til), astronomer and navigator Dr. Asmara Markonen (Cory
Devlin — imdb.com lists this as his only film credit but his casting is
historically significant in that he’s playing a Black African from Nigeria —
this may be the first science-fiction film ever to feature a Black character; previous movies like When
Worlds Collide had depicted the future as
lily-white!) and the only other distaff member of the crew besides Dr. Murata,
Dr. Sigrid Bomark (played by an apparently Swedish actress billed only as
“Anna-Lisa”).
12 to the Moon is a
decent movie by a major studio (Columbia) with some first-rate talent involved
— the screenplay is by DeWitt Bodeen (reuniting him and actor Conway from Val
Lewton’s first production, Cat People) and the cinematographer is John Alton (who’d already won an Academy
Award for shooting An American in Paris, or at least the big ballet scene at the end, and whose other
assignment in 1960 was the big-budget, high-prestige Elmer Gantry with Burt Lancaster and other “A”-list stars) — it’s
considerably better than the common run of MST3K “targets” but not so good that we wouldn’t want to see it ridiculed
(unlike Rocketship X-M, Teenagers from Outer Space, I Was a Teenage
Werewolf, The Space Children and other
films the MST3K gang should have
laid off of!) — and it’s noteworthy in that there aren’t any big, nasty,
baroque action scenes. The closest things to an action highlight are a sequence
on the moon’s surface in which two of the actors fall into a pile of something
described as “pumice dust” that has the effect of quicksand — Dr. Rochester
gets sucked in and killed but Cap’t. Anderson is pulled out just in time (quite
unconvincingly) by other crew members — and a scene on the way back in which a
glowing hunk of moon rock the crew have called “the Medea stone” spontaneously
combusts and they have to put it into a vacuum chamber to put its fire out. (I
had expected this object to be a source of limitless energy à la The
Invisible Ray, but no such luck; I had also
expected once it caught on fire that it was actually consuming itself in a
nuclear reaction and would destroy the ship if they didn’t throw it away into
space.) Aside from that we get the usual meteor-models-on-a-string the
spaceship has to fly through, and a few minor perils; also a lot of angst between the cast members, not only U.S.-U.S.S.R.
Cold War arguments between Cap’t. Anderson and Dr. Orloff (had Tom Conway been
able to convince us that he was a “Russian” and not just a British actor trying
to suggest “Russianicity” by delivering his lines as if he were speaking and
gargling at the same time, this would have worked better) but also the subplot
that Dr. Heinrich is using a false name to conceal that his father was one of
the key people in the Holocaust and he especially wants to keep this fact from
Ruskin, who’s understandably bitter about the Holocaust since it killed the
rest of his family.
Instead Bodeen, working from a story by Fred Gebhardt, has
the “villain” of the piece turn out to be an unseen secret menace: it turns out
the moon is inhabited by a race of beings who live inside it, and they just want the earth people to leave
them alone and not spread their penchants for hate and war to the moon people.
The moon people lack the power of speech but communicate with each other telepathically,
and at one point they start beaming messages to the earth crew via a series of
gibberish symbols that supposedly have a close enough relationship to Japanese
characters that Dr. Murata is the only one of the crew who can read them. (An
imdb.com contributor posted in the film’s “Goofs” section that “The ‘Oriental
picture writing’ that the moon people send to the ship is obviously just random
shapes and designs, and doesn’t resemble Japanese writing in the slightest,”
but it’s possible that Bodeen meant for the writing to be just a blind: the real communication between the moon people and Dr. Murata
may be happening telepathically and they’re sending shapes that look vaguely like Japanese characters just so it will
look to the other crew members that she’s reading something.) Anyway, what the moon people are saying — however
they’re saying it — is that they’ve captured Drs. Murdock and Bomark and want
to keep them and study them to see what this “love” business is all about (they
want the two cats the earthlings brought to the moon for a similar purpose) and
they plan to demonstrate their far superior technological power, which they do
by sending some sort of ray to earth that causes everything on the North
American continent to freeze. Drs. Heinrich and Ruskin end up drawing the short
straw for a suicide mission back to earth to fly a D.I.Y. atom bomb (made from
the fissile material the crew was using for mini-bombs to be used on the moon)
into a volcano, set it off and thereby undo the moon freeze (given that the big
ecological concern right now is global warming, one wonders where those moon people with the big
freeze gun are when we need them?), and the Jew and the Nazi’s son perish
together but without accomplishing the result — though eventually the moon
people take off the freeze themselves once they’ve become convinced from
watching the two lovebird scientists that were left behind that love is indeed
a positive emotion and balances all the earthlings’ negative ones.
12
to the Moon has some real scientific
howlers — there is no attempt to
depict the effects either of acceleration (the several-times heavier gravity
astronauts feel as they escape earth velocity and head into space) or
weightlessness, and since other previous moon-flight films (including Fritz
Lang’s great 1928 movie Woman on the Moon, the best space-flight film made until 2001: A Space Odyssey 40 years later) had got weightlessness more or less right there’s really
no excuse for the writers and director David Bradley to have totally ignored it
here — though there is a nice
scene in which the captain accidentally walks in on the two crew-women just
after they’ve finished their sound-wave shower and I joked, “Now we finally
know what the inside of the ‘Zero
Gravity Toilet’ from 2001 looked
like.” But it’s an O.K. film that, unlike a lot of the MST3K presentations, would have made a tolerable evening
watching “straight,” even though a lot of the dialogue was clunky (well, the
screenwriter got his start for Val Lewton, and Lewton could use off-screen
sounds so eloquently it didn’t really matter that much what his characters were saying) and,
given how few people (three on each crew, only two of whom actually hit the
moon’s surface) the actual Apollo moon flights took along, one wonders why they
need 12 people for this mission when they only seem to be getting in each
other’s way and on each other’s nerves! Incidentally an imdb.com poster noted
the irony that the name of the spaceship in this one is the Lunar
Eagle — and the name of one of the
component spacecraft in the first Apollo flight actually to land on the moon
was Eagle.
