WOMAN IN THE MOON Movie Review

By Rocket to the Moon
Girl in the Moon

Fritz Lang's visually spectacular but dramatically underwhelming silent science-fiction fantasy was difficult to see for over 20 years following World War II, primarily because the Nazis destroyed so many prints. It's not that they regarded the film as subversive, but rather that they wanted no films circulated around the world which would suggest a German interest in rocketry—at least while von Braun and his cohorts were developing the V-1 and V-2. Woman in the Moon stresses the means by which a rocket could—and did—make such a journey, and Lang's interest in realism led him to use Willy Ley as a technical advisor for the rocket's design and the method by which it would be launched. (Like Lang, Ley also fled to the United States with the coming of the Nazis—he served as an advisor on a number of American science-fiction pictures in the 1950s, and an illustrator for SF magazines.) The original script called for the lunar explorers—four men, a woman, and a child—to discover evidence on the moon that visitors from Atlantis had been there thousands of years earlier. This predated a lot of contemporary Chariots of the Gods-type stuff by at least a half century, but eventually, Lang settled for a more pedestrian scenario. (The astronauts end up finding gold and water instead.) Woman in the Moon is probably most famous for having introduced the “countdown” to both science fiction and to the world of rocketry. Lang thought it up as a way to generate suspense, figuring that a ship blasting off on a count of “zero” would be cooler than having it launch at the count of “six.” The idea stuck, and a tradition was born.

NEXT STOP … A Trip to the Moon, Destination Moon, Metropolis

1929 115m/B GE Klaus Pohl, Willy Fritsch, Gustav von Wagenheim, Gerda Maurus; D: Fritz Lang. VHS VYY, IHF, LSV