ONE SMALL STEP: PROJECT MOON BASE

The moon, as Robert A. Heinlein so poetically put it, is a harsh mistress, but the crashed crew of his Project Moon Base (1953) doesn't seem to have it that bad. They're marooned until help arrives, certainly, but the two surviving astronauts are, despite their earlier, thoroughly contrived differences, deeply in love, and their Communist antagonist is better dead than red, so we know that everything will turn out all right in the end. Besides, one of them (Donna Martell) is even called Bright Eyes. (That's Colonel Briteis to you, soldier.) It may be one small step, but it's a step nonetheless.

Project originated as an unsold television series called Ring Around the Moon, but was reworked by producer Jack Seaman for theatrical distribution instead, making it Heinlein's second cinematic effort after Irving Pichel's superior Destination Moon (1950). This time, alas, there's no color, and Destination's outlandish carnival-balloon costumes have been replaced by Jack Miller's tee-shirt-and-gym-shorts outfits, complete with skullcaps; these decidedly Devo-esque uniforms cry out for, at the very least, Cinecolor. The actors look absurd, of course, but Ms. Martell is rather charming in her spacegirl getup, plus the film is a merciful sixty-three minutes. It's a politically-incorrect time capsule, but one definitely worth opening.

Project is set in the then-far-off year of 1970, when the United States Space Force's General "Pappy" Greene (Hayden Rorke, the long-suffering Dr. Bellows on I Dream of Jeanie) assigns the Colonel (promoted from Captain after making the first orbital flight) and Major Bill Moore (Ross Ford) to survey the appropriate site for a lunar landing. The government already maintains a space station, which the third member of the team, Doctor Wernher (Larry Johns) schemes to sabotage. Wernher, you see, is actually an impostor; the true Doctor is being held by the Enemies of Freedom. Major Moore realizes his fellow astronaut's a fake when the double doesn't get a reference to the Brooklyn Dodgers (a downright un-American gaffe); the two men duke it out in slow motion and, in the ensuing mini-chaos, their orbit's destabilized and their Magellan craft is forced to make an emergency landing on the dark side of the moon. The anti-Wernher subsequently switches sides (a distinctly atypical action, as his suicidal mission was to crash the Magellan into the station) and ventures with Moore to set up a radio relay on a mountain ridge several miles away. This allows the astronauts to reestablish contact with Earth, but the impostor conveniently falls to his death and Moore barely manages to make it back to the ship before exhausting his air supply. Spacecom's a little late with the news that Wernher's a saboteur, and, as it will be months before a rescue craft can reach them, General Greene proposes that the couple marry immediately for publicity purposes; after all, the Brave New World of 1970 can't take a chance on the impropriety of sin-living astronauts, now can it? People might talk.

The picture is packed to the oxygen tanks with militaristic propaganda, courtesy of novelist Heinlein, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former Democratic entrant in the 1938 race for the California State Assembly. Heinlein, not completely surprisingly, had a socialist skeleton in his closet: he once edited Upton Sinclair's EPIC News, but turned right during the Cold War; in fact, Thomas M. Disch observes of this amazing American Original in his superb survey, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, that "no hawk could boast sharper talons." (Heinlein championed nuclear deterrence in several newspaper advertisements in the late Fifties, advocating "Patrick Henry Leagues" to this end and even proposing a tax increase to support them.) General Greene, who's never without his sidearm, frankly admits that "if we hadn't played the science angle" of the circumlunar mission (the excuse for the civilian Wernher's participation), "we wouldn't have gotten the authorization--nor the money." He furthermore boasts to reporter Polly Prattles (Barbara Morrison) that "the most important thing in the world to me is the security of the United States, and I'm not in the least bit apologetic for my attitude." Like his predecessors in Destination, Greene understands that the first country to reach the moon can control the Earth with missiles. The General's a bombastic wheeler-dealer, and Rorke plays him with gusto.

Project's treatment of women, on the other hand, is as comically dated as it was in Kurt Neumann's Rocketship X-M three years earlier. General Greene informs Briteis that it was only her small frame that facilitated her orbital accomplishment, pointing out that "if [Moore] weighed ninety pounds instead of a hundred and eighty, he'd be a Colonel and a public hero--and you'd still be a Captain." When she balks at going on a mission with the "jealous" Moore ("The big lug hates me"), Greene actually threatens to spank her (and he looks as if he'd do it, too, the bounder). Meanwhile, the flirtatious, horizontally-challenged Prattles is fascinated to learn from Greene that the space station is currently in freefall: "It would be so lovely to weigh nothing at all," she exclaims wistfully. Briteis' gender is awkwardly withheld from viewers until her first appearance, and, in the picture's biggest "surprise," the President, who congratulates the newlyweds via monitor, turns out to be a woman (Ernestine Barrier) as well. Significantly, Briteis agrees to the marriage only after Greene promotes Major Moore to Brigadier General of Moon Base Number One, because being married to an inferior officer just won't cut it. (She earlier apologizes to Moore, after panicking upon realizing the extent of their predicament, for "going female on you"; it's a safe bet this film's not one of Ursula K. LeGuin's favorites, and even Heinlein disowned the picture.) Perhaps the author's most endearing quality is his ability to be all over the map sociopolitically: while his authoritarian space operas were incensing leftist critics, his libertarian consciousness fueled large segments of the neopagan counterculture, most notably Oberon Zell-Ravenheart's Church of All Worlds (but not, contrary to popular mythology, Charles Manson).

Director Richard Talmadge, a former actor and stuntman, does what he can with this material, but the real amusements are to be found in Jack R. Glass' low-budget special effects and William C. Thompson's (Ed Wood's cinematographer, no less) compositions of space station staff walking in magnetic shoes on ceilings and walls; these latter trick shots predate a similar sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The station's interiors are usually photographed at a forty-five-degree angle, as if the cameraman had one too many before reporting to the set. There's also a hilarious gaffe--one worthy of the infamous Wood--when Major Moore communicates via the Magellan's giant television monitor with General Greene at the space station: when Moore stands, he inadvertently casts his shadow on Greene because the monitor is simply a large hole in the wall. Take-offs, too, are a regular riot, with the men sweating profusely, their distorted faces ululating like the souls of the damned. (Briteis, on the contrary, seems positively orgasmic as g-forces accentuate her bullet-bra torso.) Herschel Burke Gilbert's delightful score is heavy on the theremin, and the Magellan's interiors were economically reused by Arthur Hilton for his same-year 3-D camp classic Cat Women of the Moon. It's also worth noting that the Eagle landed a mere year before the events in this film; Heinlein was impressively prescient.

Image's 2000 fullscreen DVD is another entry in the label's outstanding Wade Williams Collection. The print is in excellent shape, minus a brief line or two, and the disc offers a dozen chapter stops, as well as the film's original trailer. Project Moon Base (there is no compound word in the onscreen title) is also available as part of Image's four-disc "Weird Worlds" set, which additionally contains Destination Moon, William Marshall's The Phantom Planet (1961), and the abbreviated U.S. cut of Kurt Maetzig's First Spaceship on Venus (1959).

SOURCES

Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. New York: Touchstone, 2000.

Doherty, Brian. "Robert Heinlein at 100." Reason (August/September 2007).

THE END OF THE BEGINNING: DESTINATION MOON

It was not until the 1950s that science fiction emerged as a prolific film genre. There had been sporadic excursions into the unknown throughout the preceding decades (prominently among them Fritz Lang's Metropolis [1925] and William Cameron Menzie's Things to Come [1936], as well as the Flash Gordon [1936-40] and Buck Rogers [1939] serials), but it was only sixty years ago that production of these features went into overdrive, alchemically blending new, often ominous, technology with the purest pulp fantasy to produce cinematic gold. The romance of machines quickly dominated the motion picture industry, just as rock and roll would soon rule radio, and our collective unconscious would never be quite the same again.

Even at their most cynical, these fantasias reflected the fears and fascinations of their times. There was a subgenre for nearly every theme imaginable, from nuclear paranoia to time twisters, alien invasion to space opera. Like its cousins, this last category combined reds-under-the-beds hysteria with an explicit sense of wonder. As the super powers began reaching for the inner solar system, thematic concerns of totalitarianism and impending disaster would persist until the end of the Cold War, while their mutant offspring, the Special Effects Extravaganza, has outlasted both space and arms races to become the cultural norm.

Although Kurt Neumann's exploitation quickie, Rocketship X-M (1950), beat producer George Pal's same-year Destination Moon to the screen by four months, it is Pal's film which is generally considered to have inaugurated the Hollywood Space Race. Directly inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's fondly-remembered juvenile novel, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)--in which three enterprising teens and a Manhattan Project physicist refit a mail rocket and journey to the moon, where they foil, of all things, a Nazi plot--Destination Moon eliminates the fascist foofaraw to become a hard-science, no-frills affair, which is both the picture's strength and its weakness. Accordingly, it stands out from the more fanciful films that monopolized the field of interstellar travel; Heinlein himself mercifully vetoed "a version of the script which included dude ranches, cowboys, guitars, and hillbilly songs on the Moon, plus a trio of female hepsters singing into a mike."

Airplane manufacturer Jim Barnes (John Archer) and Army General Thayer (Tom Powers) convince a skeptical group of investors to defy the peacetime inaction of the (obviously Communist-infiltrated) U.S. government and fund scientist Charles Cargraves' (Warner Anderson) lunar rocket. "Why go?" one of the moneybags asks Barnes. "We'll know when we get there," he replies matter-of-factly. "We'll tell you when we get back."

To drive their message home, Barnes screens for the men, and audiences everywhere, an amusing Woody Woodpecker short which demonstrates the feasibility, as well as the necessity, of an American moon shot. General Thayer seals the deal with a Red Scare scenario in which a foreign power reaches the moon first and controls Earth with missiles. Silence. Lionel Lindon's camera pans across a sea of identically somber faces. The businessmen cough up the capital.

Of course, there is the inevitable federal intervention, as the space pioneers are forbidden to test their atomic engine in the Mojave Desert. Meanwhile, the Fourth Estate manufactures public protest. "Somebody's out to get us," Barnes declares. (Nameless saboteurs have already exploded an experimental rocket in the film's opening.) The industrialist decides to launch almost immediately; when Cargraves points out that no flight crew has been trained, Barnes counters that the take-off is fully automatic. The intrepid trio add insufferable comic relief Joe Sweeney (Dick Wesson) to their team when his fellow technician falls ill, and depart just before dawn and the arrival of a court injunction.

Numerous factors must be contended with: g-forces, the influence of which causes the astronauts to pull the sort of distorted faces (actually masks) most often seen on hammy guitarists; ghastly noises as their direct flight ship, Luna, breaks the sound barrier; spacesickness; and Sweeney's heinous harmonica interludes. When it is discovered that the radar antenna is frozen solid--Luna cannot land without it--Cargraves, Barnes, and Sweeney embark upon the cinema's first spacewalk, and a magnificent accomplishment it is. Dangerous, too: the scientist drifts off the rocket and has to be rescued by Barnes, who ingeniously operates an oxygen tank to reach him.

Like Apollo 11 in real life, Luna nearly runs out of fuel before it sets down on the moon. Barnes and Cargraves descend to the desolate brown-and-grey landscape while Leith Stevens' music swells, and Cargraves solemnly claims our nearest neighbor: "By the grace of God, in the name of the United States of America, I take possession of this planet on behalf of, and for the benefit of, all mankind." (Neil Armstrong would strike a not terribly dissimilar note nineteen years later.) The astronauts take photographs and perform a mineralogical survey, but their work, regrettably, is all for naught, as Barnes has wasted reaction mass on their touchdown, so the men have to strip the ship to its bare essentials before they can return home. For a while it looks as if one of them (Sweeney volunteers) will have to remain behind, but Barnes eventually figures out a way for all of them to depart, minus their radios, harmonica, and carnival balloon spacesuits. (These colorful outfits were presumably found by explorers from the Red Planet and recycled for Lesley Selander's Flight to Mars [1951]). As Luna hurtles through space, Earth looms onscreen. "This Is The End," the credits inform us, "Of The Beginning."

It was, indeed, especially for Pal, who would carve quite a name for himself in fantastic cinema. His efforts would improve throughout the decade; the sometimes mundane realism of this film was jettisoned in favor of more imaginative releases such as his following feature, When Worlds Collide (1951). However, Destination Moon remains a groundbreaking work; the straightforward script--Heinlein himself was a co-writer with Alford "Rip" Van Ronkel and James O'Hanlon--together with the superb astronomical art of Chesley Bonestell, Ernst Fegte's marvelous sets, Lee Zavitz's deservedly Oscar-winning special effects, and the technical advice of rocket man Hermann Oberth, all combined to take viewers on a surprisingly prescient voyage, and the significance of that expedition endures more than half a century later, despite former character actor Irving Pichel's sometimes workmanlike direction. (He also provides uncredited narration for the Walter Lantz cartoon.)

The moon adventures that immediately followed offered outrageous alternatives to Pal's and Heinlein's clear, courageous vision, and it would only be with Robert Altman's Countdown (1968) that the subject of a lunar landing would again be realistically rendered. In retrospect, the actual U.S. touchdown, although obviously a splendid achievement, was itself curiously anti-climactic. "Science fiction got there first," J.G. Ballard melancholically observed in 1993, "just as it has anticipated so much of our lives, effectively taking all the fun and surprise out of existence." The genre, it appears, has done much of our living for us, while the Inner Space advocated by the British New Wavers of the Sixties remains largely uncharted.

Image's 2000 "5oth Anniversary Edition" DVD is part of the Wade Williams Collection and sports attractive Technicolor (the spacesuits are especially vibrant), as well as an acceptable amount of grain and scratches; reel changes, however, are particularly rough. In worse shape is the film's re-release trailer, which ridiculously raves about "the black, airless void of terror-stricken space." The ninety-one minute fullscreen transfer offers fifteen chapter stops, as well as dust jacket liner notes which are supposedly continued inside the snapper case; my copy of the insert sheet, alas, does not contain them.