Today the 1950 science-fiction movie Destination: Moon is of no more than historical importance — the moon trip was actually made 19 years later, and the special effects on this are charmingly primitive (though weightlessness is actually well — albeit inconsistently — dramatized) — Irving Pichel’s direction is of the traffic-cop variety and a no-name cast of actors perform efficiently but unmovingly (though, given the well-trained taciturnity of real-life astronauts, this actually lends the film a patina of authenticity). The story is pretty undramatic — nothing much happens except they fly a rocket to the moon (stopping in mid-space for some extra-vehicular activity and a reasonably suspenseful rescue of an astronaut who starts drifting away into space), then make such an inept landing they have to jettison practically everything in order to lighten the rocket enough to get back (and we never even see them land back on earth; the film ends with them still in mid-space on the return trip).
Ironically, neither my roommate John P. nor I had ever seen
the film in color before; John missed it on its original theatrical release and
he, like I, had seen it before only on
black-and-white TV. Not that we were missing much; aside from the
brightly-colored spacesuits (so the astronauts could recognize each other over
long distances on the surface of the moon), there wasn’t much in the way of
creative use of color in this movie (Lionel Lindon from King Kong was the cinematographer). The most interesting
aspect of this film was that it was based on a novel by Robert Heinlein, and
Heinlein is also listed in the middle position of a three-person screenwriting
credit (with Rip Van Ronkel — what a great name! — above him and James O’Hanlon
below), and Heinlein’s Right-wing ideology makes its appearance in subtle but
unmistakable ways throughout the film. One of the astronauts is a Billy
Mitchell-style general who attempts to get federal funding for rocket projects
on the grounds that we can’t let the unspecified “enemy” (in 1950, that could only have meant the Soviet Union) develop a lunar rocket
before we do; when the first test rocket crashes spectacularly, the general and
the corporate leader whose company built it suspect sabotage (with absolutely
no evidence at all); when the federal government pulls the rocket allocation
after the failure, the corporado
gets all his friends from private enterprise together and they do it all without government assistance (there’s even a promo film,
starring Woody Woodpecker and actually made by Woody’s creator, Walter Lantz,
which he uses to “sell” the project to the investors — and it’s the best promo
insert into a conventional dramatic film I can think of, aside from the
superbly done “Mr. DNA” sequence in Jurassic Park); the residents of the area where the rocket launch
site exists protest against it because it’s nuclear-powered and even obtain a
court order to stop the flight, which our heroically libertarian astronauts
simply defy. Ironically, after the recent election results (and more recent
phenomena, like Newt Gingrich’s McCarthyite charge that one-fourth of Clinton’s
White House staff people have taken drugs), this film’s reactionary politics
are the most au courant thing
about it! — 12/8/94
••••••••••
I went to see Charles at his place, bringing the tape I made
last year of the movie Destination Moon.
It holds up pretty well, actually, though author Robert Heinlein’s Right-wing
ideology really drags the film
down (especially his insistence that the private sector build the moon rocket
because government wouldn’t fund it, and the scenes in which protestors
attacking the idea of a nuclear-powered rocket are revealed to be dupes of a
sinister foreign power, carefully unnamed in the film but obviously referring to the Soviet Union). The final scenes, in
which the rocket needs to be lightened so it can travel back to Earth (which it
never actually reaches — the film ends rather abruptly with the ship in
mid-space), are the ones that Apollo 13 reminded me of, and while the scenes are nowhere near as suspenseful
as the ones in the recent film, they do have a somewhat similar air of improvisation, as if the astronauts are
forced to be more “heroic” than they might otherwise have been because their
original plans have broken down in some way. I like this movie for several
reasons, not the least of which because it’s a portrait of where America was
“at” in 1950, hyper-concerned about Cold War competition and at the same time
in love with the idea that American industry, especially freed from the
shackles of government regulation, could do anything. (I also have a feeling
that most of the people who went to see this film in 1950 regarded it as wildly
science-fictional and had no idea that in just 19 years — within the lifetimes
of many of them — people actually would get to the moon.) — 1/4/96
••••••••••
The Vintage Sci-Fi film screening last night combined the
obscure Russian film Cosmic Journey,
a.k.a. Cosmic Voyage (I presume
the original Russian title, “Kosmicheskiy
Reys,” can be translated either way) with a pretty familiar U.S. movie from
1950, Destination Moon. The genealogy of Destination Moon is a bit
unusual but it’s pretty clear that this is a Schreiber movie and the Schreiber
is Robert A. Heinlein. His screenwriting credit is second among three — Alford
“Rip” Van Ronkel precedes him and James O’Hanlon follows him — but the credits
also proclaim the film is based on a Heinlein novel, though there seems to be
some uncertainty as to which one. Heinlein actually published two moon-travel
novels in 1950, Rocketship Galileo
and The Man Who Sold the Moon,
and after the film was finished he placed a short-story adaptation of the
film’s plot under the “Destination Moon” title in a sci-fi pulp, Short
Stories Magazine, and also wrote a radio
script for NBC’s Dimension X
program called “Destination Moon” that was apparently his own adaptation of the
movie. I’ve seen Destination Moon
twice before, first on an old TV in black-and-white and then with my late
roommate/home-care client John P. on TV — an experience I remember because we
were both startled that the film was in color: like me, he’d seen it previously
but only on a black-and-white TV! Destination Moon is a good, workmanlike science-fiction movie
hampered by Heinlein’s Right-wing Libertarian politics — this is the sort of
story Ayn Rand would have come up with if she’d done a piece about space travel
(as it is, the one science-fiction story in Rand’s oeuvre, Anthem, is a dystopia from 1937 in which socialist
collectivism has so totally taken over the world that the words “I” and “ego”
have been eliminated from the language; the narrator, who of course is a
Randian superhero who rebels in the name of individualism, refers to himself as
“we” throughout until he finally rediscovers those magic words and the
I-don’t-need-anyone social attitude that goes with them). The film begins with
an attempt to launch a satellite into space; the U.S. military has funded the
effort and the rocket has been designed by scientist Dr. Charles Cargraves
(Warner Anderson), but despite extensive tests prior to the launch the rocket
explodes in mid-air before it ever leaves earth’s gravity. Cargraves and his
military sponsor, General Thayer (Tom Powers), are convinced the rocket didn’t
just fail; agents of a sinister foreign power (and you don’t need two guesses
to figure out who Heinlein and his co-writers meant, and wanted the audience to
understand, who that would be in 1950!) sabotaged it because they wanted to be the first country to conquer space. So
Thayer retires from the Army and he and Cargraves seek out the backing of
aircraft manufacturer Jim Barnes (John Archer) to put together a consortium of
private industrialists to back the project financially, since the failure of
Cargraves’ previous rocket has killed their chances of getting any more
government money.
There’s a big scene in which Archer calls together his
would-be investors for a pitch meeting and introduces the project with a
promotional film explaining the physics of space travel; the film is by Walter
Lantz, creator of Woody Woodpecker, and Woody is indeed the star of it.
(According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the film-within-the-film was later
taken over by NASA and suitably updated to indicate how people were really going to fly to the moon.) This sequence is the
clearest statement of Heinlein’s politics in the film; asked why the government
isn’t funding the project, Barnes says, “The vast amount of brains, talents,
special skills, and research facilities necessary for this project are not in
the government, nor can they be mobilized by the government in peacetime
without fatal delay. Only American industry can do this job. And American
industry must get to work, now, just as we did in the last war!” Then General
Thayer adds, “We are not the only ones who know that the Moon can be reached.
We’re not the only ones who are planning to go there. The race is on — and we’d
better win it, because there is absolutely no way to stop an attack from outer
space. The first country that can use the Moon for the launching of missiles...
will control the Earth. That, gentlemen, is the most important military fact of
this century.” (It sounds a lot like the arguments Admiral Thayer Mahan was
making in his late-19th-century book The Effect of Sea
Power on History, a book which profoundly
influenced Theodore Roosevelt and led him to support both the Spanish-American
War and the Panama Canal; Heinlein is arguing that control of space will be as
important in the new era as control of the sea was in Mahan’s and Teddy
Roosevelt’s time.) The pot of Right-wing melodrama boils even hotter as the
moon rocket gets built, only because it uses a nuclear reactor as its fuel
source there’s a supposedly “spontaneous” — but actually, Barnes insists,
sponsored and funded by That Sinister
Secret Power That Dare Not Speak Its Name — anti-nuclear demonstration
aimed at preventing the rocket from being tested. Fine, says Barnes; we won’t
test it. We’ll just launch it, he decides, even though that means being ready
to lift off in just 17 hours to catch the moon at its closest to Earth.
This
means that he’s able to lift off his rocket while some obnoxious mooching
busybody is outside of it waving a court order forbidding Barnes and his crew
from launching. It also means his original fourth crew member, who’s just come
down with appendicitis, is unable to go and Barnes has to draft Joe Sweeney
(Dick Wesson), a typically obnoxious comic-relief character with a Brooklyn
accent (the sort of role Frank McHugh would have played at Warners in the
mid-1930’s if they’d decided to
do a film about a moon trip) who agrees to go aboard the rocket only because he’s convinced it’ll never work. The
reluctant fourth astronaut joins Barnes, Cargraves and Thayer and they actually
get to the moon — along the way there’s some entertaining wire-work simulating
weightlessness and at least some scenes done the way Buster Keaton had done at
the end of The Navigator, Fred
Astaire did his dance on the walls of his room in Royal Wedding and the flight attendant served Dr. Heywood Floyd
his meal upside-down in 2001: A Space Odyssey: a revolving room set and a camera bolted to it so
the actors could look like they
were walking up walls when they were really in normal gravity the whole time.
(There’s a mistake in the film in that once the astronauts are through with the
horrifying acceleration process and are in space, Barnes equips them with
magnetic boots so they can walk around the spaceship normally — but when they
go outside the ship to do repairs the boots allow them to cling to the side of
the ship even though we’ve previously been told it’s made of titanium, which is
non-magnetic.) Instead of the usually obligatory meteor shower in space, Barnes
has to order his crew (all but Thayer) out because they’ve lost radio contact
with Earth. This turns out to be Sweeney’s fault; he thoroughly greased the
moving parts of their retractable antenna, not realizing the grease would just
freeze in space. They get the thing fixed but almost lose one of the astronauts
and Barnes has to grab one of their spare oxygen containers and use it as a
makeshift rocket to propel himself to Cargraves so he can grab him and steer
him back to the ship.
When they finally reach the moon Barnes blows the landing
and uses more fuel in his retro-rockets than he was counting on, which leads to
the famous final scenes in which the astronauts are told by their mission
control people back on Earth that they have to lighten the ship by 1,200 pounds
to have enough fuel left to return home — and when they’ve thrown away
everything they can think of and made the ship look like an old building in a
rundown neighborhood that’s been stripped by scavengers, they’re told they’re
still 120 pounds over the limit and it looks like one of the astronauts is
going to have to sacrifice his life and stay behind on the moon so the other
three can get back safely. Thayer offers to be the sacrifice on the ground that
he’s the oldest of them; Sweeney also offers to be the sacrifice, presumably
because the world can get along well enough without the obnoxious and unfunny
“comic relief” character; but Barnes says they’re all going home and by
throwing out the ship’s radio and its last spacesuit, and cutting their oxygen
supply to the bare minimum they need for the trip, they can lighten the ship
enough to accommodate all four astronauts. Oddly, the film ends before the
returning astronauts actually make it back to Earth — there aren’t the usual
welcome-home crowds we generally got in space-travel films of this vintage —
and a title which reads “The End”
and then another line of type comes on under it and says, “of the Beginning.” This seems especially
ironic now that the U.S. sent six crews to the moon between 1969 and 1973 and
then stopped doing so; no one since has attempted a manned (personned?) moon
flight, let alone one that went any farther (like Mars), and quite a few
science-fiction fans are convinced that if there’s going to be any more human
exploration of space, it’s going to be funded, as it is in Destination
Moon, by the private sector because
modern-day governments and the politicians who run them lack the vision to see
that it’s the human race’s destiny to explore space.
Destination Moon is a good movie, and though there were certainly
other moon-flight films before it (from the pioneering one by Méliès in 1902 to
Fritz Lang’s and Thea von Harbou’s Woman in the Moon — which made the assumption that there would be
pockets of atmosphere on the moon that would allow humans to live there
normally without having to wear space suits and bring their own oxygen — and
the Russian Cosmic Voyage/Cosmic Journey shown as a double-bill companion with Destination Moon), this is the one that got seen the most by U.S.
audiences and U.S. filmmakers and set the cliché templates for how space
exploration would be depicted on screen for decades to come. There were some
odd stories about the production of Destination Moon; it was made by Hungarian-American producer George
Pal, who wanted to make a feature after doing a series of model-animation
“Puppetoon” shorts for Paramount. Naturally Paramount was the studio he shopped
this project to first, but when they turned it down he went to the Eagle-Lion
company, which had been formed by J. Arthur Rank in 1948 when he bought the
infamous sub-“B” studio PRC (the initials officially stood for “Producers’
Releasing Corporation” but, despite a few islands of quality, most of their
movies were so bad Hollywood jokesters said it really meant “Pretty Rotten Crap”)
to have an assured U.S. outlet for his British productions. The first year of
Eagle-Lion’s operations he had a blockbuster U.S. hit with one of his British
movies, The Red Shoes, and Destination
Moon turned out to be another huge hit for
him. Indeed, George Pal had his revenge against Paramount because the theatre
showing Destination Moon in New
York happened to be in the same neighborhood as Paramount’s business
headquarters, and the executives who ran Paramount then, Adolph Zukor and
Barney Balaban, got to look down from their offices and see the people lined up
to get into the theatre showing the film they’d turned down. So quite naturally
Paramount rushed to re-sign Pal and give him, for the plot of his next
science-fiction blockbuster, a 1932 novel by Philip Wylie called When
Worlds Collide they had bought when it was
published at the behest of Cecil B. DeMille, only to decide that DeMille’s
version would be too expensive to make money.
The people behind Destination
Moon themselves went into paranoid overdrive
when producer Robert Lippert announced that he’d be making his own moon-travel movie, Rocketship
X-M, based on a story writer-director Kurt
Neumann had sold him about a crew of astronauts who travel to Mars and discover
living dinosaurs there. Lippert told Neumann that living dinosaurs were right
out of his price range budget-wise but he’d be interested in a space-travel
movie, only he asked Neumann if he could send his astronauts to the moon
instead of Mars and shoot his film so quickly he could get it into theatres
before the still in post-production Destination Moon — only Eagle-Lion got wind of what was going on and
threatened to sue Lippert if he released a movie about a moon flight before or
while Destination Moon was in
theatres. Lippert briefed Neumann about this, and Neumann’s response was O.K.,
I’ll have my astronauts intend to
go to the moon but get sidetracked in space and end up where I wanted them to
go in the first place, Mars. Also either Lippert or Neumann hired blacklisted
Leftist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to do an uncredited rewrite of the film,
which meant that Rocketship X-M
became less a knockoff of Destination Moon and more a seemingly deliberate progressive response to it: in this version the astronauts who end up on Mars find the
remnants of a Martian civilization, the Martians having rendered themselves
extinct due to nuclear war. (See the moviemagg blog post on Rocketship X-M at http://moviemagg.blogspot.com/search?q=Rocketship+X-M.) Rocketship X-M got into theatres before Destination Moon and did respectable business even though
Eagle-Lion’s legal department forced Lippert and the theatres who booked their
movie to post signs outside their locations reading, “This Is Not Destination
Moon.” (In the 1970’s I remember a similar
sign outside a revival theatre showing the 1931 version of The
Maltese Falcon and its 1936 remake, Satan
Met a Lady, warning would-be patrons that
this was not the classic 1941 The
Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart.) —
6/19/16
