Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi film screening (http://sdvsf.org/http://sdvsf.org/) was billed as “Ground-Breaking Science Fiction!” and contained two movies that stood above the common rut of sci-fi films then and now: including the 1950 Eagle-Lion release Destination Moon and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve not only seen both these films several times but have previously posted notices on them to this blog, Destination Moon at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/06/destination-moon-george-pal.html and 2001 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/05/2001-space-odyssey-kubrick.html, so I’ll just be brief here. Destination Moon was produced by George Pal, directed by Irving Pichel (usually known as an actor but the co-director with Ernest B. Schoedsack of the first version of Richard Connell’s story “The Most Dangerous Game” in 1932) and written by Alfred “Rip” Van Ronkel, Robert A. Heinlein and James O’Hanlon based on a novel by Heinlein. That’s how the names appear in the credits, but it’s clear this is really a Schreiber rather than an auteur movie and the Schreiber is Heinlein — who, according to “Trivia” posters on imdb.com, worked on no fewer than five versions of this material: two novels, Rocketship Galileo and The Man Who Sold the Moon, a short story called “Destination Moon” which a science-fiction pulp magazine published in connection with the film, the film script itself and a radio adaptation of it. Heinlein’s Right-wing Libertarian politics are very much in evidence throughout this movie, from the assertion that going to the moon is too big a job for the government and only private enterprise can handle it to the dark hints that if the U.S. isn’t the first country to get to the moon, a sinister, unnamed (but obviously, in a 1950 Cold War context, the Soviet Union) foreign power will get there first and will be able to rain down missiles on us in space attacks we’ll be helpless to stop. (The simultaneously filmed Rocketship X-M can be read less as a cheap ripoff of Destination Moon and more as a politically progressive response film to it — something I thought even before I learned that blacklisted Communist writer Dalton Trumbo had made one of his uncredited sub rosa contributions to its script.)
I’ve had an odd relationship with Destination Moon over the years; I remember watching it with my late
roommate/home-care client John P. on TV and both of us were startled that the
film was actually in color; we’d each seen it (separately) before, but only on
black-and-white TV’s. (Destination Moon is often cited as the first science-fiction film ever made in color,
which is true only if you don’t count the 1932 Doctor “X,” shot in two-strip Technicolor and usually classed as
a horror film, though it’s about a group of scientists doing advanced research
and the horror comes from one of their discoveries going terribly awry.) One of
our regular attendees hailed Destination Moon as the first “serious” science-fiction film that
attempted a realistic (as realistic as the scientific knowledge available at
the time it was made could be, anyway) depiction of space flight — this
gentleman also mentioned that he’d once driven astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin
around at a convention, thereby putting the rest of us one degree of separation
from someone who really had gone
to the moon and set foot on its surface. Sorry, but Fritz Lang’s Woman
on the Moon, from 22 years earlier, got
there first: Lang had the assistance of two technical advisors who later worked
on the Nazis’ rocket program and still later on the U.S. space program, Hermann
Oberth and an uncredited Willy Ley, and they explained everything to him,
including acceleration (the increase in gravity that occurs as a rocket nears
escape velocity) and weightlessness (Lang and his writer, his then-wife Thea
von Harbou, posited that the floor of their spacecraft would be studded with
leather straps into which the astronauts could insert their feet so they could
walk normally in a weightless environment; in Destination Moon the astronauts wore magnetized shoes and in 2001:
A Space Odyssey they used Velcro grip
shoes). Woman on the Moon was
also the film for which Fritz Lang invented the countdown: he asked Oberth how
they knew when to launch their experimental rockets. “We just count from one to
10, and launch on 10,” Oberth said. “That doesn’t seem very dramatic,” Lang
answered — and then the director hit on counting backwards and having the launch be at zero. (Woman
on the Moon was a silent film, but the
launch countdown — shown with numbers flashing on the screen — is still quite
dramatic and powerful.) About the only scientific howler Lang, von Harbou and
his advisers committed was positing that there would be pockets of
human-breathable air on the moon so that the astronauts — Lang’s romantic-lead
couple, anyway — could stay behind and live out their lives there.
I found myself liking Destination Moon last night better than I have before. It’s still a
creepily fascistic movie — and I probably was more aware of those elements than
I would have been if I hadn’t seen it right after a Mars movie night in which
the main feature was Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars, another film with its origins (however dim) in
something Robert Heinlein wrote. One surprise about Destination Moon is that there are virtually no women in the dramatis
personae (later space-travel films like Rocketship
X-M usually included at least one, if only
to provide a romantic interest for the lead): just Erin O’Brien-Moore (the
interesting actress who played Humphrey Bogart’s clueless wife in the 1937
social-comment melodrama Black Legion, and played her beautifully) doing nothing but one scene in which she
pledges to stand by and wait for her husband to come home from his moon trip,
and if he doesn’t come home to remain faithful to his memory. Destination
Moon isn’t one of those science-fiction
films that offers any real human emotion, nor does it have the sort of doomed
romanticism of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles written about the same time — but then Heinlein and
Bradbury ended up at opposite poles of sci-fi fan debates throughout the 1950’s
and 1960’s over militarism, technology, the Cold War and eventually Viet Nam
(at one famous science-fiction convention in 1968 the two introduced competing
resolutions on the Viet Nam war, with Heinlein’s supporting it and Bradbury’s
opposed), but on its own terms it’s quite well done and one can readily imagine
how its combination of technological supremacism and American patriotism (and a
bit of Ayn Randianism in the pathetic attempt of a little man with a moustache
to stop the moon rocket from blasting off via a court order, which Heinlein
clearly wants us to see in Randian terms as one of those pesky little takers trying to assert himself against the
MAKERS) struck a chord with 1950 audiences. My favorite story about Destination
Moon doesn’t have anything to do with the
film itself: it seems that before George Pal produced it at Eagle-Lion he had
offered it to Paramount, who had been bankrolling his one-reel “Puppetoon”
shorts. They turned it down, so Pal got Eagle-Lion to finance it — and as it
turned out, the theatre Eagle-Lion engaged for its opening run in New York City
was two blocks away from the Paramount building, so the “suits” at Paramount
could look out their windows and see moviegoers literally lining up for blocks
to see the movie they had turned down.
