FANTASIA OBSCURA: A Lunar Adventure That’s More Silly Than Fantastic
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, you find something that could have used Graham Chapman to keep it from getting too silly…
First Men in the Moon (1964)
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Directed by: Nathan Juran
H. G. Wells in 1907
There are lots of props you can give H. G. Wells for his body of work. Novels like The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and countless other books and stories are essential pieces of canon for any genre fan; among speculative fiction writers, he could be considered akin to the gods.
But, he was human, which meant that not every story he wrote was worth reading.
Let alone being used as the basis for a film for the third time:
Based on Wells’ 1901 compendium of a set of stories first serialized in The Strand, this film opens sometime in the near future, as man’s first mission to the moon is about to put a lander on the surface. The world awaits word, then celebrates as our biggest satellite is visit by a UN team made up of British, Soviet, and American astronauts.
(No, they don’t bother to acknowledge the space race in the film, but hey, give them props for suggesting the Apollo-Soyuz mission a good eleven years before it happened…)
The mission takes a sudden turn, however, when the astronauts come across something that shouldn’t be there: A British flag atop a note scribbled on a warrant that claims the moon in the name of Queen Victoria… in 1899! Desperately, the astronauts relay what information they could get off the warrant back to the UN, and soon a team of researchers are tracking down the clues, ultimately finding an elderly man in a nursing home, one Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd), who claims to have placed it there.
When they ask him about it, the film shows us the story he tells them in flashback. We then follow a younger Arnold, always one step ahead of his creditors and the law, trying to make a quick buck before the game ends, all the time keeping from his fiancée Kate (Martha Hyer) just how perilous everything is.
And as complicated as things are for Arnold, they get even more so when he finally meets his neighbor, Professor Cavor (Lionel Jeffries). Cavor’s developed a wonder material, “cavorite”, which has properties that nullifies gravity and pushes objects away from the ground, which Arnold sees as a miracle material that if properly marketed will allow him to get out of debt quickly, if not become able to buy out all his creditors outright.
Cavor has other ideas, however: He wants to paint cavorite on a sphere and launch himself to the moon. At first Arnold is aghast at the idea, but faster than it takes to read “The White Man’s Burden” he comes around to the plan, and soon we watch the scientific process in all its details as the ship is built and launched, with both men aboard. As well as Kate, running from Arnold’s creditors and asking “WFT, dude,” when she’s served papers…
The three make their way to the moon, and soon encounter the Selenites, the insectoid overlords of Luna. Technologically advanced to the point where they have a solar collector powering a perpetual motion generator, the Selenites do their best to try and deal with the visitors from another world; between Cavor trying to open a dialog with them and Arnold beating them up, they’re not quite sure what to make of these blokes…
We’re not quite sure what to make of this whole endeavor, either. The film opens with a mystery that takes 15 minutes to unravel, then goes into a long flashback where we sit through a further 38 minutes of Cavor inventing carvonite and Arnold inventing excuses for not going to jail. That’s asking a lot of the audience, especially in a 103 minute-long film.
When we do get to the moon, where the meat of the piece is supposed to be, the experience is underwhelming. For a film produced by Ray Harryhausen, which included some of his ‘Dynamation’ work, it feels disappointing, even viewed against later effects-light works such as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. And when he looks back and discusses the project in his book Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, he chalks up the results to the competition between a limited budget and the studio’s dictate that the film be shot in widescreen; had one on those not gotten in the way, we likely would have had more than three notable set pieces from Harryhausen that would have grabbed our attention.
The biggest issue with the film that gets in the way of this adaptation of Wells’ fantasy, however, was the script from Nigel Kneile and Jan Read. Their adaptation plays up the lighter elements of the original story to the point of jejunity, probably on the assumption that the audience for this would skew very young. Because of this approach, Jeffries tries to get as many laughs as possible out of the material, while Judd in what feels like an effort to be the poor man’s Richard Burton comes across less an active protagonist than a straight man. And because most of the film is a flashback, they didn’t have a lot of dramatic tension they could introduce into the experience of the first lunar expedition from 1899, looked back upon by a participant discussing it decades later.
Which does the work a disservice. Even if it was not one of Wells’ greater pieces, it still deserves some respect as an effort that inspired both Georges Melies and C. S. Lewis, who’d go on in their works to bring us even more inspiration. It’s unfortunate that this try at the piece ended up being…
…well, rather silly, really…
NEXT TIME: Sure, we all talk about men getting to the moon, but what about the women already there, huh…?
