Even in its earliest years, cinema has held a unique fascination with men going to the moon.
One of the most iconic images from the nascient years of the art is that
single shot from George Melies' A Trip to the Moon, with the rocket stuck in the moon's eye.
The first film to ever be based on a science-fiction novel was
1919's adaptation of H.G. Wells' own The First Men on the Moon, and even today,
decades after such fantasies have become reality, we still make movies about the journey,
though now they tend to be historical dramas instead of speculative works of science-fiction.
It's no surprise, therefore, that when the Hungarian-American filmmaker George Pal
decided to make what he considered to be the first serious attempt at a science-fiction film,
he chose as his subject a manned mission to the moon.
Pal had a tentative contract to make two films for independent film studio Eagle-Lion Films,
on which he'd staked his entire career in live-action filmmaking. He was known at the
time as a puppeteer and animator, who had done work for Paramount Pictures. He had earned an
honorary Oscar for his pioneering techniques, but he wanted to do more with his career.
The first film he produced for Eagle-Lion, called The Great Rupert,
was designed around his strengths, a live-action romantic comedy about a squirrel named Rupert,
which was a stop-motion puppet he designed. The film starred Jimmy Durante and Terry Moore and
was directed by Irving Pichel. Despite earning something of a cult status in recent years,
The Great Rupert was a miserable financial flop, and if Pal's second film performed the same way,
his career as a film producer would never have gotten off the ground.
Still, Pal was confident that the world was ready for an accurate science-fiction film,
and he again hired Irving Pichel to direct what would eventually be known as Destination Moon.
Man is going to the moon. It's not a question of when; it's a question of who gets there first.
A small handful of wealthy industrialists and investors has foreseen the importance of such
an endeavor, and these visionary men have gotten together to build one of mankind's most audacious
creations: an atomic rocket designed to get four men onto the lunar surface. But with potential
saboteurs at their heels, skeptics giggling at their backs, and the US government breathing down
their necks, they must work quickly to make it there in time. Even though the mission proves to
be a success when the four men find themselves walking on our celestial satellite, a terrible
miscalculation might doom them to roam the barren landscape forever, never to return home.
Eagle-Lion and Pal co-funded the project for a total of around six hundred thousand dollars,
which was a lot of money for an independent film but a fairly low budget for the kind
of special effects-heavy spectacle Pal envisioned.
For the initial screenplay, he brought on James O'Hanlon and Alford "Rip" van Ronkel,
and their initial script was heavily reworked by science-fiction legend Robert Heinlein,
who turned it into a very loose adaptation of his novel Rocket Ship Galileo.
The two share the basic premise of four men flying a rocket to the moon and have a few other
commonalities, but Destination Moon wisely omits the kid astronauts and space Nazis of Heinlein's
original novel. There are also similarities to Heinlein's subsequent The Man Who Sold the Moon,
but given that he published that after Destination Moon premiered,
it's difficult to say which inspired which.
Heinlein also served as the film's technical advisor, and he, Pal, and Pichel all strove
to make the film as realistic as possible, to imagine what it would really be like to send
men to the moon. The filmmakers also consulted one of the grandfathers of modern rocketry,
Hermann Oberth, who also served as Fritz Lang's technical advisor on Die Frau im Mond,
another attempt at serious science-fiction that dealt with similar subject matter.
Modern audiences who can read about missions to the moon in history books
might have a hard time understanding what's so special about Destination Moon. It tells
a fairly basic story that isn't too far off from how space travel generally works. However,
audiences in 1950 weren't readily familiar with many concepts the space age would later teach us,
things like the realities of zero gravity and the unintuitive physics of spaceflight, so the simple
situations and problems presented in Destination Moon were largely new and alien to them.
Perhaps the film's most famous advocate for treating the subject matter with adult sobriety
was a children's cartoon character: Woody Woodpecker. Ever since George Pal emigrated
from Hungary during World War II, he had been good friends with Woody's creator, Walter Lantz.
As a sign of friendship and as something of a good luck charm,
Pal tried to get Woody into each of his films. Woody's extended cameo in Destination Moon,
in which he is used to demonstrate the principles of a moon flight to a group of investors, was
so popular, it was eventually used by NASA when the Apollo missions were getting off the ground.
This was nearly twenty years before that happened, though, and the film accurately
predicted so much of what the future held, it's frankly astounding in hindsight.
It saw the technological, nationalistic, economic, and scientific benefits of going to the moon,
and it didn't shy away from the enormous challenges inherent in such an endeavor.
It did get a few of the basics wrong--like using an atomic-powered rocket and the idea of private
industry being the catalyst--but to focus on its failures is to ignore the far greater achievements
of Heinlein's futurism. Even the fact that it correctly foresaw the coming space race
when nobody else had even conceived of it is a testament to the farsightedness of its vision.
Another technical advisor on staff was artist Chesley Bonestell.
Bonestell had worked for years as a matte painter in Hollywood, doing work on such films as Citizen
Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. He then morphed his experiences into creating what
would later be called "space art," fully rendered depictions of astronomical scenery
that used a variety of techniques including clay models, panoramic painting, and photographic
trickery. Bonestell had always been interested in a certain degree of accuracy in his work,
so it was perhaps inevitable that he would be hired for Destination Moon.
The biggest matte Bonestell assembled for the film was a thirteen foot long landscape portrait of
the lunar surface, which was placed on a large wheel and rotated around a stationary camera.
The stars were made to twinkle by way of holes poked into black material that
was passed over a series of different lights at different angles. One bit of
artistic license Bonestell allowed was the cracked surface itself, which he knew full
well was an innacurate depiction of the moon's regalith. This is one of the only
instances of the film deliberately inserting something the filmmakers knew was unrealistic.
Despite the film's special effects looking pretty laughable today,
they were astonishing at the time, so much so that the film won an Academy Award for them,
which is especially notable when you consider the film's low budget. The effects team found simple,
practical ways to accomplish complex shots that had never been attempted before.
To mimick the G-forces of take-off, for example, they used flesh-colored tape and fishing wire,
and though the resulting effect is pretty exaggerated, it does effectively
demonstrate one of the simple realities of getting out of Earth's gravitational pull.
That's what Destination Moon truly excells at, and why it is such an important work of
science-fiction. As a film on its own merits, it's not particularly great. It's at times amateurish
and painfully low-budget, especially to more modern eyes, and the plot is surprisingly thin
on drama or suspense. Pichel's decision to avoid the expressionist trappings of genre films of the
era--be they the German influence on horror or the space opera stylings of Flash Gordon
that defined sci-fi prior to 1950--makes for surprisingly dull viewing in places,
but it helped give science-fiction a certain degree of credibility to which future greats
of the genre like Forbidden Planet and 2001: A Space Odyssey owe their success.
It also helped American audiences psychologically accept the plausibility of space travel.
It is almost too earnest in its constant attempts to convince you to take the idea seriously--if
the plot has a central antagonist, it is skepticism over the idea of getting men to
the moon--but it had to be in order to help lay the social groundwork for the space age to come.
Destination Moon didn't achieve this in a vacuum,
of course, but it undeniably contributed to the mentality that made Apollo 11 a reality.
Make no mistakes: audiences were hungry for it, too. Eagle-Lion gave the film an enormous
marketing push long before its release, and it was featured in magazines like Life and Popular
Mechanics alongside an exhaustive radio presence that built anticipation to such a fever pitch,
a rival studio rushed out a much cheaper film called Rocketship X-M to capitalize on the delay
in Destination Moon's release. Rocketship X-M came out about a month before Destination Moon,
and despite not doing terribly at the box office, its only lasting legacy today
is being the subject of the second season premiere episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
"However, I must make something clear..."
"I am wearing a bra!"
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Destination Moon premiered on June 27, 1950. Estimates of its financial earnings vary,
but the most frequently cited statistics are that the film made somewhere around five
million dollars that year, which is nearly ten times its budget. No matter the exact number,
its success was assuredly astromonical, and George Pal would parlay that success into
a notable career as one of Hollywood's premiere science-fiction film producers.
Not only did the film give us George Pal's future film catalogue--which includes
When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine--it also made an indelible mark
on the history of film itself. It showed that science-fiction can be much more than juvenile
genre entertainment, and it proved that such an approach could be a box-office success. It's no
coincidence that the following year--1951--would see an explosion of sci-fi classics that would
define a decade. Cited by none other than Isaac Asimov as "the first intelligent science-fiction
movie made," Destination Moon is where the golden age of science-fiction cinema truly begins.
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"Ha-ha ha-haa ha!
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