Frau im Mond

The new Kino DVD release of 'Woman In The Moon' is a great addition to anyone's Fritz Lang collection. Once again, the new music composed for the film adds tremendously to the experience. I was astounded by how ahead of its time this movie was in terms of its science, and it was no surprise to read that Ufa had a team of science consultants working with Lang to supply realistic details. The use of the rotation of the Earth to provide extra impetus to the rocket, the way the booster rockets were discarded as the spaceship moved further out of the Earth's atmosphere - having grown up watching real moon launches in the 60s, it was astonishing to see the actuality echoed by fiction decades earlier. There was clearly a lot of attention to detail; they even figured out ways of conveying weightlessness in space, which were pretty advanced for the time. The special effect of trying to pour a bottle of wine without gravity was both funny and impressive. The movie is not one of Lang's great masterpieces, and I agree with other comments that point out that it tends to slow down in places. Lang always did like making long, long movies, and when he settled down to tell a story, he could really take his time getting everything perfect. When this involves people just sitting or standing in a room talking, it can get a little tiresome - in one scene, Helius is trying to get through on the phone to his partner Windegger, and it takes so long he has time to snip to pieces a big bouquet of flowers on the table in front of him. I swear, it seems to be happening in real time; if there were something exciting happening in the meantime somewhere else it might have passed more quickly, but we just keep cutting between a scene of a man impatiently holding a phone to his ear and snipping at flowers, and a scene of people sitting at a dinner table listening to a speech. Not even Lang can make this gripping, though I think he was defiantly determined to try. On the other hand, there are places where it works well. The long buildup to the rocket launch is terrific - I would have enjoyed it if it were even longer. The hangar in the darkening scene, lit with jumpy spotlights as the moon begins to rise, the slow, smooth monumental sliding of that massive machinery as the rocket glides forward to its launch position, dwarfing the human beings walking alongside it, and all the beautiful changes of camera angle to draw in the viewer, are very moving. I can see why the Nazis liked Lang and wanted to get their claws into him; if they could have harnessed him to make THEIR kind of movies, he'd have been a real prize for them, another Riefenstahl. 'Woman In The Moon' wasn't a hit at the time, mainly because Lang (as usual) wouldn't listen to the studio heads who wanted some concessions to the coming of sound technology, so it was a dinosaur silent movie when the public was engrossed with something new. But it is definitely worth watching, and its strong points are worth sitting through some tedious slow patches to enjoy.

The first half of this film; the set-up of the flight, the introduction to the main characters, a love triangle, and an international conspiracy; is frankly boring. But once the flight begins, action tenses up and things get interesting.

For 1929, the science is sometimes prescient-- a three stage rocket, a vertical assembly building, and a monstrous rolling gantry crawler-- are suggestive of the Apollo program. Other times the science is more romantic, using dowsing rods and an egg-shaped moon. The eggy moon allows a far-side with a breathable atmosphere. But an eggy moon really isn't less scientific than faster than light travel, which is a staple of modern space flight science fiction. FTL travel is simply a mechanism whereby a cast of characters can visit multiple star systems; the eggy moon allows the visit to a breathable world in the context of a 1930s Europe.

This movie understandably has fairly primitive special effects. One major effect, a rotating barrel decorated as the moon, is charming.

The ending is definitely touching. In the sub-genre of science fiction/space flight, this is an important and interesting film and well worth suffering through the first half.

This was Fritz Lang's last silent film. It is a science fiction adventure in which a scientist, Professor Georg Manfeldt, had theorized that there were large supplies of gold on the moon. He was ridiculed by his peers and disgraced because of this. However, a wealthy industrialist believes Manfeldt's theory and has been building a rocket to travel to the moon. when a group of wealthy men who control the world's gold supply feel threatened by the possibility the theory may be correct, they threaten to destroy the rocket unless one of their agents, Turner, is allowed to go on the expedition too. Apparently Lang's film got so much right about space travel that the Germans seized the models used in the film as state secrets when they started their own rocket-building program. This film runs 169 minutes and is quite slow in places. It has some very interesting and thrilling scenes, but it is probably one of the weaker of Lang's films that I have seen.

I saw the original premiere presentation director's cut of this movie in January of 2003, with excellent musical accompaniment by Dennis James at the Paramount theater. Perfect, restored print, a movie that I have always wanted to see (since it was mentioned in Carlos Clarens "Horror Movies" first published in 1967). HOWEVER... The tendency toward "original, premiere presntation" director's cut reached new heights of lunacy (pun intended) with this movie. It ran more than three hours and 40 minutes! According to it's IMDB entry the original version that ran in the US was 95 minutes with longer versions (running time up to 2 and a half hours) running in Europe. At times I felt as if I had been placed in hypersleep in prep for a deep space expedition of my own! The film certainly lived up to advance billing, yet certain things, like the 45-minute opening dinner scene, were obviously way longer than they needed to be. One doesn't need to be a genius to know that after the premiere, Fritz Lang probably cut the dinner scene to about three minutes, removed whole sections, and generally tightened up an otherwise improbable story. For example, the moon is portrayed as a rather pleasant (if poorly stocked with resources for survival) beach resort. Everyone runs around in sweaters and jodhpurs, and true love seems destined to survive the wait for a return rescue rocket. Other stuff was great: the launch pad, countdown and the experience of the G forces on blastoff were, well the archetypal events for all the space operas to follow. A good movie, but probably seen to much better effect on video or in the shorter release version (if either ever turns up).

One of the coolest things for any silent film buff is to discover a film that they hadn't heard of or known too much about. That's the case with Fritz Lang's restored "Woman in the Moon", in the 2004 KINO DVD release, in which the print quality is excellent and a new piano/synthesizer score has been added. As has been cited by many others here, the pacing of much of the picture is slow and the acting is occasionally melodramatic, but as was occurring with most movies in the latter days of the silents, the acting techniques were moving form the broad stage performances of early film to more controlled and realistic portrayals and most of the actors were of the latter group. In addition to the surprisingly realistic portrayal of many aspects of what would become space flight, it is interesting that the space (science fiction) aspect is not the focus of the movie. The movie deals primarily with six characters and the tensions caused by greed, love, scientific curiosity and boyish hero worship. The fact that they are making a trip to the moon to verify a theory that gold might be mined there is just the vehicle of the story. And the story itself is pretty decent, especially if you have the patience to let the movie tell it. And even though I am a fairly jaded film buff, I found myself genuinely startled and surprised at least twice by plot turns.

I love it when that happens.

Be patient. Its 169 minutes, but I think it is worth it.