Project Moon Base
Entry updated 17 May 2024. Tagged: Film.
Film (1953); title also rendered as Project Moonbase; the rendering above appears in the film's opening credits. Galaxy Pictures / Lippert. Directed by Richard Talmadge. Written by Robert A Heinlein and Jack Seaman. Cast includes Ernestine Barrier, Ross Ford, Larry Johns, Donna Martell, Barbara Morrison and Hayden Rorke. 63 minutes, cut to 51 minutes. Black and white.
Astronaut Bill Moore (Ford) is upset because his upcoming mission to orbit the Moon and choose a location for a lunar base is going to be commanded not by him but by his female crewmate, Colonel Briteis (Martell), as ordered by the President of the United States. (Her name sounds like "Bright Eyes," and she is referred to in that way; we never learn her first name.) A third member of the crew, Scientist Doctor Wernher (Johns), has been secretly replaced by an identical enemy spy who intends to destroy the Space Station that the astronauts will rendezvous with on their way to and back from the Moon. Before the launch, there is also a scene in which the astronauts' commander, General Greene (Rorke), explains the principles of Space Flight to a rather dense reporter, Polly Prattles (Morrison), undoubtedly inserted to educate equally dense viewers. (Rorke also oversaw astronauts in the television series I Dream of Jeannie.)
As they approach the Moon, Moore realizes that Wernher is an imposter (he is not familiar with the Baseball team the Brooklyn Dodgers, despite the real Wernher's residence in Brooklyn), which leads to the two men fighting and forces Briteis to make an unplanned landing on the Moon. The false Wernher dies when he falls and cracks his faceplate while helping Moore climb a lunar mountain to set up an antenna that will enable them to communicate with Earth; there is also a brief crisis when Moore almost runs out of oxygen while returning, finally requiring him to crawl back to the spacecraft. With Communication established, Earth sends an unmanned rocket with supplies to sustain the astronauts while a rescue mission can be prepared. Then, to avoid the scandal of having an unmarried man and woman indefinitely living together on the Moon while awaiting rescue, the astronauts are persuaded to get married in a televised ceremony that includes a message from the President, who is revealed to be a woman (Ernestine Barrier), presumably explaining why she wanted Briteis to command the mission. And to retroactively transform a failed mission into a success, Greene has informed the astronauts that their mission has been re-designated as "Moonbase One".
This relatively short film was the reedited version, with added footage, of the pilot of a proposed anthology series, «Ring Around the Moon»; the film received only a limited theatrical release and was long difficult to find, though it is now available on YouTube. Despite the inadequacies of its special effects and uneven performances, the film commands attention as one of the few films of the 1950s that endeavoured to portray space travel in a realistic manner, with astronauts wearing spacesuits (see Spacesuit Films) and facing hazards that might threaten actual lunar explorers. The film also offers creative depictions of life in a space station without Gravity: the crew is greeted by a panel of residents sitting on the side of a wall and there is a sign saying "Please Do Not Walk on the Walls". And while they are flying to the Moon, there is a strikingly unusual slow-motion battle with the imposter Johns in zero gravity. Certainly, some aspects of the film seem sexist: Briteis apologizes for an emotional outburst by saying, "Sorry for going female on you," and she agrees to marry Moore on the condition that he be promoted to serve as the moonbase commander, accepting a subservient position as his new wife. Still, the film should certainly be commended for depicting a capable female astronaut and President in the early 1950s, reflecting the input of the problematically Feminist Heinlein.
The film has been predictably ridiculed in episodes of Canned Film Festival (1986) and Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1990), but its virtues arguably outweigh its obvious flaws. Its screenplay has been published twice in Project Moonbase and Others (2008) and Screen Writing by Robert A. Heinlein, Volume I (2012). By some reports, the moonscapes that Chesley Bonestell prepared for Destination Moon (1950) were reused in this film, though he was not credited. [GW]
further reading
- Gary Westfahl, "The Dark Side of the Moon: Robert A. Heinlein's Project Moonbase" (Summer 1995 Extrapolation) [pp 126-135: mag/]
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