FANTASIA OBSCURA: This Cinematic Trip to The Moon is Not as Stellar as it Sounds
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, it’s just too late for you to finally get started on that trip…
From the Earth to the Moon (1958)
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
Directed by: Byron Haskin
Not everyone gets credit for being there during the early days. Lots of Merseyside acts did not get even a tenth of the attention Gerry and the Pacemakers did, let alone the Beatles, despite playing the same venues then, and not every act playing San Francisco just as the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead got on stage got noticed beyond the Bay Area.
Likewise, not every early Verne-mania film got the same crowds that Disney drew with their Captain Nemo…
Our film opens (after a credit sequence consisting of a reader flipping pages of an oversized art book) on what’s referred to by the narrator as May 18, 1868, at the estate of Victor Barbicane (Joseph Cotten). Barbicane is a member of the International Armaments Club, a collection of industrialists who made fortunes recently during the American Civil War, and he’s called a meeting to discuss something that will make them all rich.
And no, it’s not the inside scoop on the upcoming Franco-Prussian War. It’s instead the announcement that he has developed “Power X”, an explosive that has such a high yield for so small an amount that cities could be eliminated with a single shell shot. And with that power, Barbicane proposes, he could shoot a shell to the moon and have a huge explosion up there, which would be a great advertisement for the new product.
It’s a claim that is hard to accept by Stuyvesant Nicholl (George Sanders), fellow weapon smith who we meet in his Virginia munitions plant, suggesting that the beef between these two has been going on for some time, with Barbicane usually getting the better of it. Nicholl challenges Barbicane to back up his claims, announcing that he’s developed a ceramic that could withstand anything, especially Power X. Barbicane accepts, and the test goes spectacularly for him, destroying Nicholl’s ceramic and the mountain it sat on.
This prompts a summoning of the victor by President Grant (an uncredited Morris Ankrum), who asks Barbicane to fake his product’s failure for the sake of national security. The President asks him to state that the product is a fraud, lest 22 nations who let the President know that they would declare war on America if they went ahead with the project actually did so.
Although to be honest, had the actual Ulysses S. Grant been better modeled for the film, he’d either have called these countries’ bluffs and gotten us into a nasty war with all of these folks, or botched up this effort like he did everything else when he was held the office, but hey…
Patriotism doesn’t trump Barbicane’s fear of being ruined or mocked, however, and soon he’s back on the project, with a modification: Instead of blowing up crap on the moon, he’s going to set foot on it, and try to come back afterwards. He hopes this more peaceful use of space will allow him to save face and use Power X for loftier purposes than just busting cities for pay.
Soon, his spaceship, the “Columbia”, is ready for take-off, and the crew, Barbicane, Nicholl, and Barbicane’s assistant Ben Sharpe (Don Dubbins), become the first three people to leave the surface of the Earth. Four, actually, as Nicholl’s daughter Virginia (Debra Paget) stows away to follow Ben and keep Daddy out of trouble. Which, this being an adventure into the unknown, wasn’t going to happen…
It’s nearly a miracle that this adventure happened at all, frankly. The film originally started out at RKO Pictures, the same studio that released King Kong and Citizen Kane, but just as production began, the studio was being dissolved by its last owners, General Tire, selling their assets to Desilu Productions even as this film was being shot. The project ultimately gets picked up by Warner Brothers, who met the letter if not the spirit of the agreement to finish the film.
And it shows. Based very loosely on the titular book and its sequel, Around the Moon, and less a story about going to the moon than a heavy-handed parable about the then-current arms race, the film feels under-completed, as though there was just filler for the effects shots and dialog stretches for unshot scenes. And there probably were; Haskin, who directed the classic The War of the Worlds for Paramount, probably expected to work on a much bigger film than what he delivered, and somehow stayed on this ship as it sank burned up on re-entry. There’s hinted ambition in every shot, trying not to let the lack of budget or spirit get in the way of the film and forcing him to use a “Scene Missing” card throughout the film.
While the principals are doing their damnedest, especially Cotten and Paget, there’s just nothing really coming from anyone else. Which makes sense, as this was probably a film shot where the cast and crew didn’t know if it would ever see the light of day, let alone if they still had gigs when they showed up that morning. Under these conditions, it’s expected that there would be very little energy coming out of the 
production.
The result is, what should have been an energetic work of fiction feels more like an educational film strip, one that fell sideways out of a steampunk-fueled universe. It does no favors to Verne or the story he’d written, which was a shame as the work deserved better. (At the very least, the use of the title for HBO’s miniseries about Project Apollo was certainly a decent effort at rehabilitation.)
The fact that the film could claim to, at least, have been on site when Verne-mania started may be the best accolade it could have hoped for. Which, I guess, counts for something, maybe…
NEXT TIME: Someone came up with a new spin on the old phrase, “You’ll die laughing…”
