Destination Moon
                                                                                                    
Director: Irving Pichel
Year: 1950
Rating: 7.0
Twelve years before John F. Kennedy announced that we were heading for the moon before the end of the decade, George Pal got us there and claimed it for America. Mankind had been thinking about a journey to the moon for hundreds of years - the French novelist Cyrano de Bergerac, Jules Verne, HG. Wells, Baron Munchausen and of course Tin Tin. What makes this film interesting is that it was shot during the Cold War and it takes a serious angle on the whole thing. No moon monsters or signs of other life - they used the best scientific knowledge at the time to write the script (Robert Heinlein being one of them). I am sure they got a lot wrong - propulsion from nuclear energy as opposed to liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen and kerosene which they used in the first flights to the moon; landing the entire rocket ship on the moon as opposed to a capsule. Still, they get weightlessness and the enormous gravitational force on takeoff. Shot in technicolor, it looks fabulous with great matte special effects along with models. It is criticized now for being too dry and too loyal to fact with little imagination. But back in 1950 this was a revelation and a big hit. After years of low budget films like Flash Gordon, here was a film that made it sound possible.



It begins with the dreams of a few men after their rocket crashes and burns. Let's just go to the moon the next time. The government isn't willing to put up the money and so they take their idea to private industry to fund. Their argument after a Woody Woodpecker cartoon explaining how it works - Woody was a creation of Pal - gets serious. If not America, who? Whoever owns the moon will be at a huge military advantage. We can't let that be the other guys. Yay for the militarization of the moon. And fifty years after we made it, it is still open for business and everyone is thinking about heading back. I am old enough to know where I was when we landed. It was fabulous. After the Commies getting ahead of us, American ingenuity (and probably German scientists) won out. Like the Olympics. I was in our backyard in Kabul with my parents listening to the radio. I think I had a sip of champagne.



There is some drama in the film - at the last minute one of the crew has an appendix attack and has to be replaced by a guy from Brooklyn. "I wonder who's pitching tonight" as he looks down at earth. One of them floats off the outside of the spaceship and needs to be rescued and then there isn't enough in the tank to get back - one of the men may have to stay behind. A real man in the moon. I was only disappointed that the captain didn't say "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."