From the Earth to the Moon
Entry updated 18 January 2017. Tagged: Film.
Film (1958). Waverly/RKO. Directed by Byron Haskin. Written by Robert Blees, James Leicester, adapted from Jules Verne's De la terre à la lune (1865) and Autour de la lune (1870), the two published together in English translation as From the Earth to the Moon (1873). Cast includes Joseph Cotton, Deborah Paget and George Sanders. 100 minutes. Colour.
Using a new explosive, a projectile carrying human passengers is fired at the Moon from a huge cannon. Paget plays a pretty stowaway. The film, shot in Mexico, is slow-moving and has painful dialogue; it is perhaps the dullest sf movie ever made. There are no scenes on the Moon.
A comic version, bearing no relation to Verne's novel, was the UK Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967; vt Those Fantastic Flying Fools; vt Rocket to the Moon) directed by Don Sharp from a screenplay by Dave Freeman, in which a series of farcical misadventures – the rocket lands in Russia, not on the Moon – keeps the story effectively Earthbound. [PN/JB]
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