Woman in the Moon (1929)

Original title: Frau im Mond.

Any self-respecting science fiction fan should be more than familiar with Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis (1927), the first truly classic genre film and will likely have seen it many, many times. Less familiar perhaps will be his follow-up, Frau im Mond. better known to English speakers as Woman in the Moon (1929). This may be in part due to it being hard to find for many years and partly because its extraordinary length could be a huge disincentive. Lang once famously claimed that made deliberately long films to take up the programme usually devoted to a double bill, but Woman in the Moon goes above and beyond – the longest know version clocks in around 200 minutes, though earlier English language prints were butchered to fit a 90 minute slot.

Astronomer Professor Georg Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl) plans a trip to the moon in search of the huge reserves of gold he believes can be found there but is ridiculed by his peers. He’s funded by aeronautics magnate Wolf Helius (Willy Fritsch) and hampered by an international cartel headed by the wealthy American Walter Turner (Fritz Rasp) who steal his plans and tries to blackmail Helius into letting him join the mission for his own ends. Helius reluctantly agrees and the ship takes off with Helius’ business partner Hans Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim) and Windegger’s fiancée Friede Velten (Gerda Maurus) also on board. On arrival they do indeed find that the moon offers a plentiful supply of gold but their safety is threatened when Turner tries to hijack the rocket and Mannfeldt falls to his death in a crevasse. Then they realise that there’s not enough oxygen to ensure that they can all return to Earth so someone has to stay behind…

Woman in the Moon was the first feature length film to feature a trip to the moon (the Danish Himmelskibet (1918) and the Soviet Aelita (1924) had both taken us to Mars earlier) and surprisingly, it’s rather a cynical one. The first lunar adventure is motivated by personal greed, Manfeldt creating his rocket not for the simple and noble purpose of explorations but to line his own pockets. Everyone involved in the mission seems to have their own agenda and they’re not always compatible either with each other or with their chances of survival.

The bulk of the film is concerned less with the trip to the moon (it takes a full hour and a half before the rocket takes off) but with the machinations of those involved in either constructing, financing or trying to hijack the mission. Long before Irving Pichel’s Destination Moon (1950), Lang was trying to make as realistic a vision of a trip into space as was possible at the time and that meant having to deal with the less savoury aspects of human nature, the scheming and duplicitous ways. In this respect it has more in common with Lang’s brilliant Spione from 1928 than with the more optimistic and upbeat Metropolis.

Among the innovations that Lang brings to the film is the first use of a countdown scene in cinema, so commonplace today but a fantastically innovative way to introduce tension back then. His desire to make things as realistic as possible means that his rocket ship is moved into place on a huge moving platform a la the Saturn Vs of the Apollo programme; the ship uses multiples stages to get it into orbit; and there is at least a passing nod to the problems of weightlessness with the crew using straps on the floor to keep themselves anchored during the flight. When they get to the moon, the astronauts do spend a lot of time wandering about the surface without space suits though one has to allow for poetic license and the fact that Lang and his usual scriptwriter, his wife Thea von Harbou were film-makers not scientists at a time when little was publicly known about our nearest neighbour. It was certainly realistic enough for the Nazis to allegedly pull the film from circulation during the war when they realised that the rocket in the film was very close to their own top secret V2 weapon that they were developing (unsurprisingly Lang had employed rocketry specialists Willy Ley and Herman Oberth, later essential to the V weapons programme, as advisers on his film).

As already noted, Lang was in no rush to get his story over and done with. He frequently stages scenes that are over ten minutes in length with no cuts which can make Woman in the Moon something of an ordeal for modern audiences who will find the pace a little on the sluggish side. It wasn’t that popular with contemporary audiences who put off less by the length than by the fact that it was a silent film released at a time when sound was just coming to the cinema and audiences were demanding that their screen heroes speak as well as take off to the moon. So yes, it’s slow and may seem a little ponderous at times but Lang ensures that we’re far away from something spectacular to look at, something amusing to laugh, some great performances to enjoy – Fritz Lang is particularly good as the repulsive villain but everyone here brings their “A-game” – and some great special effects from the uncredited Oskar Fischinger and Konstantin Irmen-Tschet.

Woman in the Moon is a glorious achievement, gripping despite its length, technically brilliant and satisfyingly prescient. Metropolis remains both Lang’s and silent cinema’s science fiction masterpiece but the various restorations of Woman in the Moon has revealed it to be a highly polished gem that deserves to sit right alongside his vision of a nightmarish near future. Digesting it all in one 200 minute session will test even the most devoted devotee of “slow cinema” but the full length version is the only way to go. Dive in and be amazed at just how ahead of the curve Lang and his team were.