FLIGHTS OF FANCY: SPACE FILMS BEFORE 1950
It must first be acknowledged that the science fiction films of the silent era, and even of the early sound era, remain a significantly unexplored area. Every new investigation along a different research vector may bring to light a few more obscure items to consider; every year, a film previously believed to be lost may be rediscovered, carefully restored, and released for viewing. (Now that a complete version of Himmelskibet [1906] has been located, attention is being devoted to finding the lost 1919 film adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon [1901], which might prove interesting indeed.) Having almost abandoned work in this area before stumbling upon other significant films to discuss, I cannot be confident that I am now dealing with all relevant works, and while I have strived to be reasonably thorough, it is likely that future researchers on this topic will lambaste me for my shameful omissions.
To be sure, it is also likely that the space films before 1950 that I have not seen or considered will prove to be insignificant, from the perspective of the spacesuit film; because virtually all films involving space travel prior to 1950 tended to follow certain conventions. While they might seem moderately plausible in depicting the building of spacecraft and the preparations for launching, in light of then-current technology, they tend to become less and less realistic the further they get away from Earth. In particular, space travelers are rarely concerned about the possible dangers of outer space: during their flights, they wear either street clothes or outfits modeled on the clothing of early aviators, like leather jackets and goggles, which would hardly be useful in the environment of space; they never experience zero gravity or worry about meteors; and when they land on another planet, they step out of their spaceships completely unprotected, confident that they will encounter a breathable atmosphere, suitable temperature, and beings that usually look and act exactly like humans.
The first of these films, George Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), is generally characterized as completely farcical, but this is not entirely true, since this short film does begin with a somewhat serious discussion amongst learned astronomers regarding how a flight to the Moon might be accomplished, and subsequent scenes depicting the construction of the space gun and the cylindrical vehicle for the space travelers seem reasonably well grounded in the available technology of the time as it might have been applied to the challenge of space flight. However, having a chorus line of beautiful girls push the vehicle into position to be launched signals a weakening impulse to project any aura of authenticity, and once the capsule is shot into space, a decisive shift to pure fantasy is announced by a scene in which the capsule buries itself in the eye of an animated Man in the Moon, followed by equally unrealistic scenes involving the travelers moving about on the Moon in street clothes and encountering fantastic apelike creatures. Still, one can recognize this brief film as a precursor to two later film traditions involving spacesuits: its generally comic tone anticipates the humorous spacesuit films, while its menacing Selenites (eventually defeated when it is discovered that they disintegrate when struck by a man’s umbrella) are arguably the first of the space monsters that will later epitomize the horrific spacesuit films.
To consider three later films of a similar nature, Méliès soon made another film featuring space travel, Le Voyage à Travers l’Impossible (The Impossible Voyage) (1904), which is more fanciful in all respects, in that it involves a group of travelers who voyage to the Sun inside a runaway train. However, it might be noted that the way the train is sent flying through space, by speeding it up a high mountain, is not unlike the ramps employed to launch a spacecraft in When Worlds Collide (1951) and other later films, and the film has one evocative scene of the train speeding through the blackness of space, passing by the planets, before the train is swallowed by the mouth of the Sun’s face and the travelers land upon a hot but absurdly habitable Sun.
There is also a little-known curiosity, Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón’s Excursion dans la Lune (Excursion to the Moon) (1908), which is for the most part a blatant copy of Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune with a few interesting variations. The projectile here is loaded into the space cannon not by scantily-clad women, but more realistically by uniformed soldiers; the capsule does not hit the Man in the Moon (portrayed by an actual human face) in the eye, but is rather swallowed by him; and while the residents of the Moon again include costumed acrobats who vanish at a touch, the visitors are also entertained in the court of the lunar king by a group of lovely female dancers, anticipating later films like Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) that would similarly inhabit the Moon with beautiful women with a predilection for modern dance. As a final departure from Méliès, one of the women is abducted by the visitors and taken back to Earth with them.
A better-known film inspired by Méliès was British director Walter Booth’s The ? Motorist (1906), in which a motorist drives his automobile up a building, through the sky, on top of a cloud, around the Moon, and around the rings of Saturn before he falls to the Earth in the middle of a courtroom. In these and other short films providing fanciful sequences of space travel, including Méliès’s Le Dirigeable Fantastique (1906), Chomón’s Voyage sur Jupiter (1909), and Enrico Novelli’s Un Matrimonio Interplanetario (1910), however, there was never any effort to portray space travel plausibly.
A later silent film, the Russian Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), was reasonably realistic in envisioning a spaceship to Mars being constructed by an engineer named Los (Nikolai Tsereteli), based on plans he had carefully prepared. However, while the spacecraft’s exterior looks plausible enough, the interior appears identical to a spacious room in a house, despite pieces of equipment in the background, and the conclusion of the flight seems as fanciful as A Trip to the Moon: the ship crash-lands on Mars, but the three crew members emerge unharmed into a completely Earthlike environment and immediately encounter Martians who seem exactly like human beings. (A few Martians do wear costumes and helmets that resemble spacesuits, but they cannot be protective in nature, since other Martians survive perfectly well while wearing normal, or very little, clothing.) After Los has a romantic encounter with the Martian queen Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva), who had been longingly observing him from Mars, and after his crewmate Gusev (Nikolai Batalov) leads a Communist revolution of the oppressed Martian workers, the entire flight and the landing on Mars are revealed to be nothing more than Los’s dreams, which completely invalidates any idea that the film was arguing in favor of the practicality of space travel. The significance of Aelita is that, along with Himmelskibet, it anticipates a third tradition of spacesuit films, the melodramatic spacesuit films, in which space travelers encounter aliens who are identical to human beings and become embroiled in situations that are exactly like conventional conflicts on Earth.
What may be the first talking film to depict space travel, Just Imagine (1930), is generally described as the first science fiction musical, though by modern standards it would only be considered a romantic comedy with a few musical numbers. Its central story involves a man of the year 1980, J-21 (John Garrick), who is being forbidden by law to marry the girl he loves, LN-18 (Maureen O’Sullivan), because he is deemed insufficiently accomplished. To win his appeal of the decision, he agrees to become the first person to fly to Mars in an experimental spacecraft built by renowned inventor Z-4 (Hobart Bosworth); accompanying him are his best friend RT-42 (Frank Albertson) and a man from the past, Single O (El Brendel), who has recently been brought back to life after he was struck by a lightning bolt in 1930. While the film’s focus is usually on the mildly amusing antics of vaudeville comedian Brendel (who discovers, among other things, pills that have replaced alcohol), the film is momentarily serious when Z-4 tells J-21 why it is important for someone to undertake this mission:
[Z-4] Thousands of years ago, man wondered what was across the river. Then he went over and found out. Later, Columbus wondered what was across the ocean, and he went over and found out. Since then, men have sought for and learned every secret of the Earth—on the land, in the water, in the air. But there is one secret, the greatest of all, that remains a mystery.
[J-21] And that is...?
[Z-4] The planet Mars!1
This
