Fritz Lang’s scorching run of the late silent era continues with Frau im Mond. Translated variously as Woman in the Moon, Girl in the Moon and By Rocket to the Moon, it’s Lang’s second go at sci-fi. He’d made Metropolis only two years before, nearly bankrupting the Ufa studio in the process. And yet, for some reason, Ufa gave Lang his head again. The fact that Spione (aka Spies), Lang’s creation of the modern spy caper the year before, had been a massive success might have had something to do with Ufa’s readiness to be so generous.
Frau im Mond is the realistic, plausible sci-fi to Metropolis‘s poetical, fantastical one, an attempt, using the tech currently available to imagine how mankind might get to the Moon using the products of heavy industry – steel, rivets, copper wire, knobs and dials – rather than imagined futuristic materials.
To this end Lang enlisted the services of Hermann Oberth as a technical consultant. Oberth would decades later work for Wernher von Braun at Nasa, but at this point he was famous for having written The Rocket to the Planetary Spaces, the 1923 manual that would inspire a whole generation of technicians and scientists.
Oberth intended to build a full-size rocket for Lang but that never came to pass. However, his model for the spaceship in the film was considered so true to engineering plausibility that the Nazis banned Frau im Mond when they came to power, fearful that it would give the game away about their future plans, which included Oberth.
But if none of the rocket stuff – built upright inside a tall hangar resembling the ones Nasa would use, two-stage design, transported to the launch pad on tracks – seizes you by the throat, Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou, who wrote the original book and screenplay, have other attention-grabbers.
The threeway love standoff between rich, heroic pilot Wolf Helius (Willy Fritsch), his not-so-heroic chief engineer Hans Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim) and Friede (Gerda Maurus), the fiancée of Hans who is secretly in love with Wolf, as he is with her.
Plus dotty discredited professor Georg Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl), a semi-comic character whose regular pronouncements on the presence of gold on the Moon, or the possibility of it having a breathable atmosphere, allow the rest of the characters to get on with the non-scientific stuff unhindered.
Plus plucky young Gustav (Gustl Stark-Gstettenbaur – what great names Germans used to have), whose love of sci-fi comics drives him into stowing away on the spaceship.
Plus shifty Walter Turner (Fritz Rasp), an American representative of shadowy global forces who uses their financial heft to force his way onto the mission.
The likes of Turner are still with us – Ash, in Alien, for example, the company “man” with an ignoble agenda – and so are versions of the eager kid, the unworldly prof and the lovers, lifted by von Harbou for the most part from the pages of Jules Verne adventures.
So, personnel assembled, relationships established, the ship blasts off to the Moon, G forces and zero gravity being represented pretty well for this era, and the astronauts’ fetching tweed and wool “space suits” the inspiration for nothing whatsoever in the future.
Here, on the Moon, where there is indeed a breathable atmosphere, the payoff. Weakling Hans reveals himself, Turner’s real motives come to light, Wolf and Friede dither, waiting for the moment to declare mutual love and the professor goes off on his own to drive himself mad in the pursuit of gold… gold I tell you. Young Gustav will eventually come into his own, in a plot turn that Hollywood could usefully dust off and re-use.
A crime thriller, a love story, a spy caper and a sci-fi movie all rolled together, it doesn’t lack for plot and stands up well today as a good story well told. It was restored in 2000 from original camera negatives, so looks fantastic, though the sharpness of the image does reveal the 1920s special effects for what they are. They can’t stand against modern CGI, but the fact that the painted backdrops look lifted from the pages of Nick Carter Detective Magazine adds a critic-proof element (they’re meant to look fake).
Technically, though, there are moments that are still astonishing. Like the lift-off sequence, which introduced to the world the notion of the countdown, a marvel of clever model making and false perspectives. And psychologically there is more going on than you might expect, with the threeway between Wolf and Hans and Friede subtly hinted at long before it’s spelled out.
Lang would later become famous for his vaulting crane shots and his superbly fluid camera but he does most of this with a static set-up. This was his last silent movie and he must have known while making it that it marked the end of an era. He’s looking back, in a sense, as the movie also does – to the age of shiny top hats in the first half – as he looks forward to what the future might bring. It’s the end of one chapter and the beginning of another for Lang, who’d be back with M and Peter Lorre’s child murderer the following year. Another masterpiece.
Frau im Mond aka Woman in the Moon – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
