Woman in the Moon – Philip French on Fritz Lang’s handsomely restored moon-mission yarn

Fritz Lang was not merely a major practitioner of genre cinema but the creator of several genres, and a German documentary accompanying this handsomely restored 163-minute version of his last silent picture is correctly called The First Scientific Science-Fiction Film.

It has two claims on our attention, first as a landmark in the history of science fiction pictures that stretches from Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and second, for its important contribution to rocketry and space travel. Lang was inspired by the 1923 book The Rocket into Interplanetary Space by Hermann Oberth, who became the film’s scientific adviser and later an important figure in the team that developed the V2 rocket in the second world war and carried on the work in postwar America.

Less ambitious and mystical than Lang’s previous sci-fi film Metropolis, Woman in the Moon combines an imaginative adventure yarn, a triangular love story and a conspiracy thriller. Helius, a German entrepreneur, plans a journey to the moon to fulfil the dreams of the elderly, demented scientist Professor Manfeldt, but he’s blackmailed by Turner, a ruthless American conman, into collaborating with a cabal of rich businessmen bent on controlling the gold that Manfeldt believes is to be found on the moon. He’s also compelled to take on to the spacecraft his close associate, Windegger, and Friede, the modern liberated woman both men love. Like Metropolis and most of Lang’s other pictures, Woman in the Moon was written by his wife Thea von Harbou.

The film’s measured pace speeds up when this conflicted quartet, along with the wild Manfeldt, make an impressive lift-off to the world’s first countdown and embark on an exciting journey. All are dressed like alpinists in one of the popular German mountain movies of the time. From that point, sober scientific detail competes for the audience’s attention with conventional, often violent melodrama, and the first major surprise is the discovery that there’s a stowaway on board, a space-mad lad reared on sci-fi comics. Perhaps the most memorable moment comes when the travellers forget about what divides them and look in awe as they approach the moon itself. That excitement was recaptured this month by the international atmosphere surrounding the Rosetta project.