Charles and I spent most of the night in our room watching Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond), Fritz Lang’s 1928 sci-fi epic (his last silent film) dealing with a trip to the moon. It’s yet another extraordinary movie — so far I’ve seen every film in a quite extraordinary stretch Lang made from 1922 to 1937 that includes Dr. Mabuse, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, Spies, Woman in the Moon, M, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Liliom, Fury and You Only Live Once. With the possible exception of Kriemhild’s Revenge (part two of Die Nibelungen and based on a part of the legend Wagner didn’t use in the Ring cycle) there isn’t a clunker in the bunch, a period of sustained artistic creativity and commercial success virtually no other filmmaker of Lang’s stature ever enjoyed.[1] (Alfred Hitchcock’s record between the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Notorious was almost as strong, but it only lasted 12 years rather than 15 and it had a few substandard pieces in the mix: Jamaica Inn, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Lifeboat.) Woman in the Moon is quite a long film (169 minutes in Kino’s DVD) but it never seems either padded or dull (the two most common defects of unusually long films). It does change tone and theme quite often, but perhaps that was just the way Lang and his scenarist (and then-wife) Thea von Harbou (who, as she’d done with Metropolis and Spies, published the story as a novel simultaneously with the release of the film in one of the earliest examples of synergistic marketing) decided to keep it interesting.
Woman in the Moon
begins with grizzled old scientist Georg Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl), discredited 32
years before for giving a lecture in which he speculated that there was gold on
the moon (the newspaper clipping, which he’s kept all these years, is
headlined, “Narr oder Schwindler?” — “Crazy or a Crook?”), living in a hovel
and receiving his one friend, airplane manufacturer Wolf Helius (Willy
Fritsch). Manfeldt gives Helius his old paper on the moon and Helius agrees to
build a spaceship that will take them there. The film then takes a quick turn
into the territory of Mabuse and Spies as a cabal of industrialists described in the
credits as “The Brains and Checkbooks” (Tilla Darieux, Hermann Valentin, Max
Zilzer, Mahmoud Terja Bey and Barwin Walth) hire an agent to pose as an
American named “Walter Turner” (Fritz Rasp) and steal the plans for Helius’s
spacecraft. They not only do so, they threaten to blow up his factory if he
doesn’t allow them to put “Turner” (the character is actually identified in the
credits as “The man who calls himself ‘Walter Turner’”) on the ship. Then, as
soon as Helius has yielded to their demand, the film changes tone once again
and becomes straightforward science-fiction, as the rather motley crew —
Helius, his good friend and engineer Hans Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim),
Hans’s fiancée Friede (Gerda Maurus, whose presence reunites the romantic leads
of Spies), Dr. Manfeldt and a
prepubescent stowaway named Gustav (Gustl Stark-Gstettenbaur) whose regular
readership of Nick Carter novels about space travel has made him want to do it
for real — take off on their rocket to the moon. When they actually get there
Lang and von Harbou have one more shift in tone awaiting us — the film then
becomes a space-opera version of a desert-island tale in which the bad guys
attack, the good guys kill them but in the process accidentally destroy a good
chunk of their oxygen supply, so one of the surviving astronauts is forced to
stay behind on the moon while the others take the spaceship home. And as if that weren’t enough, overlaid on top of this is a
romantic-triangle plot between Hans, Friede and Helius, who finds himself
falling in love with his best friend’s girlfriend and ends up (a twist that, as
Charles pointed out, you could pretty well have guessed at from the title)
joined by Friede in their moon redoubt as Hans and the kid leave for Earth.
What makes Woman in the Moon most interesting is the surprising accuracy of its science. Given that
1928 audiences probably had no idea that anyone would still be watching this
film after humans had in fact traveled to the moon and back, and therefore we’d
actually have a real knowledge base to compare it to, the fact is that the
number of things Lang and von Harbou got right is pretty astonishing. It’s a bit less so when you
realize that their scientific advisors — Professor Hermann Oberth and
(uncredited) Willy Ley — later became part of the German rocket program during
World War II (which probably explains why the unmanned “H32” probe they send up
as a test before risking a manned flight looks so much like a V2) and still later part of the U.S.
rocket program after the war. The
spaceship in Woman in the Moon is
rocket-powered (unlike the silly lunar cannon from H. G. Wells’ novel and film Things
to Come — a cannon-powered moon shot had
been just barely believable in the 19th century when Jules Verne wrote From
the Earth to the Moon but by 1936 it was
flatly ridiculous); the rocket is built in multiple stages, with each stage
jettisoned as it burns out so the next one can be fired; the necessary escape
velocity and the effect of acceleration (the most physically dangerous part of
space flight, assuming the containment holds up and the astronauts aren’t
exposed to the immediate death of losing all their air instantly) are depicted
accurately; and there’s even an attempt to dramatize weightlessness, though
since there apparently weren’t any wire workers at UFA in 1928 the astronauts
themselves don’t float in mid-space (the floor of the spaceship is adorned with
leather straps into which they insert their feet so they won’t lose contact with the floor even in zero gravity);
and the ship lands on the moon by firing retro-rockets to slow its descent
until it can touch down safely. All these aspects were part of the actual manned
lunar flights as well. About the only major scientific boner is the assumption
Lang and von Harbou incorporated in their story that, though the familiar side
of the moon is in a vacuum the then-unseen “dark side” does have air. They find this out when professor Manfeldt
goes out in a spacesuit (another
accurate call, though it’s surprising that in a film which had a major budget
for spectacular sets and special effects, the “spacesuit” is all too obviously
a recycled diving suit with oxygen tanks stuck on back — though give Lang and
von Harbou credit for yet another
good call: this was 18 years before Jacques Cousteau invented SCUBA gear) with
a pack of matches and strikes about four of them; when they ignite, this proves
that the lunar air contains oxygen and is therefore breathable by humans.
Aside from the science, Woman in the Moon is quite well-paced dramatically and gives us
characters we care about. We’re pretty sure from the get-go that Helius and
Friede will end up together simply because they’re the best-looking people in
the film (and, of course, because they were the romantic leads of the preceding
Lang-von Harbou film, Spies) and
that the oily character played by Fritz Rasp[2]
will get his comeuppance — which he does in a series of highly dramatic lunar
confrontations in which he follows Manfeldt to the lunar gold fields, watches
as Manfeldt falls down a pit clutching an enormous gold stalactite, then gets
shot by Hans in a gun battle (a stray bullet from this match hits the
regulators on their oxygen supply and sets up the ending). Woman on the Moon may not have the mythic power of Nibelungen (especially part one, Siegfried), the awesome scope of Metropolis or the sheer energy of Spies, but it too was a major influence on films to come
as well as on the real-life dramaturgy of space flight. While preparing the
launch scene, Lang asked Oberth how the early rocket experimenters gave the
signal to fire. “We usually count to 10 and launch on 10,” Oberth said. “That
doesn’t sound very dramatic,” Lang replied. Then it struck him: “Why don’t we
count backwards?” The film shows
a sequence in which the number on an intertitle dissolves from six seconds to
five, four, three, two, one — and at zero the title immediately cuts to the
rocket going up: the first countdown. No film would deal this seriously with
space travel until Destination Moon
22 years later, and the makers of that one — scenarist Robert Heinlein,
producer George Pal and director Irving Pichel — would rip off quite a lot of
this one, including the assertion that private rather than public interests
would fund the moon shot; the sinister cabal trying to derail the project
(identified, subliminally rather than explicitly, with the Soviet Union in the
later film); even the final suspense gimmick in which the ability of the
astronauts to get back to Earth is jeopardized by the lack of a key component
(though in Destination Moon it’s
fuel, not oxygen). The other interesting thing is that Woman on the
Moon is one of the few science-fiction
films ever made by a top-flight director; the sci-fi films to come were mostly
directed by hacks (Irving Pichel, Byron Haskin, et al.) and, aside from the involvement of Howard Hawks
with The Thing, and the young
Robert Wise’s original The Day the Earth Stood Still, a director of top reputation didn’t make a sci-fi
film again until Kubrick did 2001.
— 2/1/05
•••••
I screened Charles and I a movie I’d been curious about
re-watching ever since last weekend’s Vintage Sci-Fi showing of Destination
Moon and 2001: A Space Odyssey: Fritz Lang’s pioneering 1928 film Woman
in the Moon (an odd title: the original
German name is Frau im Mond, “im”
can mean either “in” or “on,” and Woman
On the Moon would actually make more sense
as an English translation of the German title). This time around it didn’t seem
as good to me as it had when Charles and I first got the Kino on Video DVD
(released in 2004 with a new synthesizer-and-guitar musical score — apparently,
unlike the original scores Gottfried Hüppertz composed for Lang’s Die
Nibelungen and Metropolis, the accompaniment actually composed for this film
didn’t survive even though there’s an enigmatic credit on imdb.com for a song
that supposedly appeared in this silent film and was sung by its leads, Gerda
Maurus and Willy Fritsch, suggesting that the original prints presented it as a
non-dialogue sound film but only the silent version survives) along with some
other Lang material they released. The print quality of Woman in the
Moon is excellent — either they had
unusually good sources, the folks at Transit Film and the Friedrich Wilhelm
Murnau Foundation did an especially good digital restoration, or both — but the
Kino DVD is 169 minutes long and, quite frankly, this is a film that could have
used some cutting. Indeed, what’s surprising about it is that very little of it
is actually about the trip to the moon: it begins with a prologue that lasts
nearly an hour and is about the skullduggery between the good guys — aircraft
factory owner Wolf Helius (Willy Fritsch), his engineer Hans Windegger (Gustav
von Wangenheim), and Windegger’s fiancée Friede Velten (Gerda Maurus), with
whom Helius is in unrequited love; also Professor Georg Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl in
a way overacted performance that
makes Wallace Beery’s acting in a similar role in the 1925 The Lost
World seem restrained by comparison), who’s
spent 32 years working out his
theory that humans not only can go to the moon but should because the moon’s
mountains contain far more gold than those of earth — and the bad guys, a
mysterious syndicate of businessmen represented by a character referred to in
the credits as “The Man Who Calls Himself ‘William Turner’” and is played by
Fritz Rasp. The syndicate wants either to take control of Helius’s moon rocket
and grab the riches of the moon for themselves — they are shown at a secret
meeting at which one of them insists that the moon’s wealth should belong to
businessmen, not “intellectuals and visionaries” — or, failing that, to destroy
it. Rasp is clean-shaven but his hair is combed down so far over his forehead
it’s hard not to think that Lang deliberately meant the character’s appearance
as a caricature of Adolf Hitler, who was five years from taking power in
Germany when this film was made but was already a celebrity as the leader of a
Right-wing political movement that got stronger every time the German economy
got weaker.
Just how much Lang’s departure from Germany when Hitler took over
in 1933 was a principled statement against fascism (as he, of course, portrayed
it) and how much was simple fear that the Nazis would discover he had a Jewish
mother is something his biographers are still arguing over; it is known that
when Lang made his two-part film of Die Nibelungen in 1923-24 he was publicly identified with the
German Right, but later in the U.S. he was a financial supporter of various
Left-wing causes and, if not outright blacklisted, was at least grey-listed: the man who in Germany in the 1920’s had
made epic spectaculars like Die Nibelungen and Metropolis eked out
a living in the U.S. in the 1950’s directing low-budget films noir while other directors (including fellow German expat
Henry Koster, who’d established his reputation in the 1930’s with Deanna
Durbin’s musicals but was out of his depth in big movies) got assignments like The
Robe and The Virgin Queen. It’s also true that because Lang fled the Nazis
while his wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou, stayed and worked in the
Nazi-controlled film industry, later critics have tended to give him credit for
all the good aspects of their collaboration and blame the bad stuff — the
sentimentality and almost child-like moralizing — on her. (Von Harbou also got
a bad rep from the way Metropolis
was cut up for years; since her name was on the screen as the writer, she got
blamed for plot holes and dramatic lacunae that had been coherent and made sense in her original version but
didn’t in the cut-down prints from Channing Pollock and others who mangled the
original film.) For much of the first hour of Woman on the Moon we watch tales of greed and unscrupulous among
Earthlings and wonder, “When will we get to the moon already?” Also, it’s
surprising that these scenes are mostly photographed quite dully (though the
cinematographer, Curt Courant, later worked with Alfred Hitchcock and did a
magnificent job shooting the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too
Much) and only an occasional shadowy,
oblique, chiaroscuro composition
reminds us that Lang, more than any other individual, invented film
noir.
Once we actually get to the moon
rocket, which Helius has named Friede both because it’s the name of his crush object and it’s the German
word for “peace,” the film is stunning not only in its visual acumen (even
though the long shot of the factory and its environs is one of the most obvious
models ever put on screen in a big-budget movie) but its scientific accuracy.
Lang’s and von Harbou’s astronauts go to the moon in a multi-stage
liquid-fueled rocket (just like their real-life counterparts did 41 years
later), and this was the film for which Lang invented the countdown. He asked
his scientific adviser, Dr. Hermann Oberth, how they signaled the launch of one
of their experimental rockets. “We count from one to 10, and launch on 10,”
Oberth told him. “That doesn’t sound very dramatic,” Lang said. Then an idea
hit him; Lang told Oberth, “Why don’t we count backwards from 10, and launch on zero?” After Woman
on the Moon came out, real rocket
researchers started counting down the way Helius and his fellow astronauts do
in the film, and eventually the countdown became one of the defining rituals of
the space program. (Oberth and his uncredited colleague, Willy Ley, later
worked as part of the team that developed the V-2 rocket weapon for the Nazis,
then got to come to the U.S. after the war and work for NASA.) Even though this
is a silent film, the countdown — with big numbers flashing as titles on the
screen until zero is reached and the rocket goes up — is exciting and dramatic.
The moon voyage itself is depicted more or less accurately, and Lang got his
actors to look credible undergoing acceleration (the increase in gravity that
makes going up into space a painful experience until escape velocity is
reached). His depiction of weightlessness is a bit more hit-and-miss — though
the Friede’s capsule comes
equipped with leather straps, some hanging on the ceiling and some bolted to
the floor, to give the astronauts something to hold on to so they don’t just
float around the interior, there are all too many scenes of them walking
normally in the spacecraft. Still, it’s nice to have at least one space-travel
film from the silent era that acknowledged weightlessness instead of ignoring
it completely like the Republic serials!
Lang’s and von Harbou’s biggest
scientific howler is their assumption that while the side of the moon visible
from Earth had no atmosphere, the “dark side” not only had breathable air but
ice — when they get to the moon Prof. Manfeldt first goes out in a spacesuit
(which looks just like a diver’s outfit at the time and almost certainly was a diver’s outfit sent up from the UFA costume
department, though it has a portable air tank two decades before Jacques Cousteau invented SCUBA and divers started
carrying portable air tanks for real), then lights three matches and they catch
fire and burn, indicating that that part of the moon, at least, has
oxygen-containing air and people can move around in it without the encumbrance
of spacesuits. Once the astronauts get to the moon, Manfeldt discovers a patch
of bubbling mud that looks like a tar pit, the villain (who’d insisted on
coming along or his fellow conspirators would sabotage the flight) gets
conveniently eliminated, but then they discover that because the landing was
rougher than they anticipated, one of the ship’s oxygen tanks ruptured and so
they don’t have enough air to get everybody home. Wolf Helius makes the noble
sacrifice to stay on the moon — in the final shot he’s surrounded by a lot of
food boxes, indicating that he’ll have rations for a few months, though one
wonders how he will continually resupply himself (unless he brought plant seeds
and can grow food à la
The Martian) unless there’s a steady stream
of new moon rockets re-provisioning him. Also, like Destination Moon — a film that copied a lot from Woman on the Moon (the flight is funded by the private sector instead
of the government, the investors are attracted with a film showing how the trip
will be made, there’s a sinister attempt to sabotage the project, and in the
end the big problem turns out to be how to get back from the moon due to the loss of a key component),
so much so I suspect Robert Heinlein or someone else on George Pal’s writing
committee had seen it and was deliberately copying it — there’s a major
disappontment at the end in that we don’t see the moon rocket actually return to Earth. Instead
there’s a scene in which Helius sees the rocket fly off and gets ready for his
new life on the moon — and, in a scene which Charles thought anticipated the
ending of Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco by two years, Friede turns out to have stayed behind as well and the
two lock arms and lips for the final scene.
Woman on the Moon re-teamed Willy Fritsch and Gerda Maurus after
Lang’s immediately previous film, Spies (a thriller which anticipated both Alfred Hitchcock and James Bond!),
and according to Patrick McGilligan’s “black” biography of Lang — which was so
nasty to him McGilligan could have called it Director Dearest — he said that Lang not only psychologically but
physically abused Maurus during their two films together. Oddly, what comes
across on the screen is an actress giving a diffident, restrained performance —
Lang directed Maurus much the way Sternberg directed Marlene Dietrich in their
famous series of films in the early 1930’s — and Maurus, with her
close-cropped, wavy hair and androgynous appearance (she spends the last
two-thirds of the film in pants) and her enigmatic demeanor, also seems to
anticipate the “Hitchcock blonde” of his later films. Though at least one movie before Woman on the
Moon attempted a serious, realistic
depiction of space travel — the 1918 Danish film Himmekskibet (A
Journey to Mars), which contained what
looked like process shots almost a decade before Lang and Eugen Schufftan
supposedly invented the process screen for Die Nibelungen and Metropolis — Woman on the Moon set
the template for virtually all films about serious travel from then on and got
copied a lot — the 1936 Russian
film Cosmic Voyage almost counts
as a remake and copies from Woman on the Moon the pre-pubescent stowaway who sneaks aboard the
moon rocket (a gimmick also used in quite a few Republic science-fiction
serials). Woman on the Moon is
often slow going, but the parts of it that do work — notably the central section, with its quite
accurate depiction of how humans ultimately would get to the moon — more than make up for the parts
that don’t. — 4/18/18
[1] — It’s even
more amazing that he sustained his creativity despite the wrenching
biographical and historical events of the time — his falling-out with UFA that
kept him idle from 1928 to 1931 and the rise of the Nazis, which forced him
into exile and put him through two dodgy periods of relocation, to France in
1933 and the U.S. two years later.
[2]
Incidentally, Rasp — who was also in the
cast of Spies as well — though
clean-shaven, wears his hair plastered across the side of his forehead the way
Adolf Hitler did. Though Patrick McGilligan has pretty much laid to rest the
myth Lang fostered in later years that he’d always been a principled opponent
of the Nazis, it’s still startling to look at a film from the late Weimar era
and see a villain with an apparently deliberate resemblance to Hitler.
