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Not My Department
The general and specific erudition of the Ricochet community makes me hesitant to post this, since you never know if you’re wading into an argument that was settled long ago by those who know the subject. So forgive me.
One of the greatest movies of the early 20th century is Metropolis, a German silent sci-fi film by the brilliant Fritz Lang. A few years ago I found a copy of Spies, the movie he made between Metropolis and M, and was knocked out – with its gadgets, it could be a Bond film. After Mabuse’s chilly reception by the Nazis, he moved to America in 1933, and something was ever after lacking in his work.
Okay. Hold that thought.
I listened to an audiobook of V2, a recent and lesser novel by one of my favorite authors, Robert Harris. It pings back and forth between the later days of the V2 program and the British attempt to foil it. One of the characters: Werner Von Braun. He’s depicted as bold, charismatic, and shall we say a tad evasive about the human costs of his scientific endeavors. His passion is rocketry. Science! If it means putting on this silly black uniform to get things done, then fine, fine, but the important thing is building the craft that will get man into space. Harris keeps the character remote and intriguing, unknowable, driven.
A flashback describes the German rocket experimental / testing facility at Peenemünde, and the author has Von Braun telling his protege, the fictional German rocket engineer who anchors the Nazi portions of the book, that it will be just like the rocket city in the movie they loved.
Woman in the Moon.
Wikipedia:
It is often considered to be one of the first “serious” science fiction films. It was written and directed by Fritz Lang, based on the 1928 novel The Rocket to the Moon by his collaborator Thea von Harbou, his wife at the time. It was released in the US as By Rocket to the Moon and in the UK as Woman in the Moon. The basics of rocket travel were presented to a mass audience for the first time by this film, including the use of a multi-stage rocket.
Rocket scientist Hermann Oberth worked as an advisor on this movie. He had originally intended to build a working rocket for use in the film, but time and technology prevented this from happening. The film was popular among the rocket scientists in Wernher von Braun‘s circle. The first successfully launched V-2 rocket at the rocket-development facility in Peenemünde had the Frau im Mond logo painted on its base.
It was a cultural reference point among the engineers: they were young men, proto-nerds, and they’d all seen Woman in the Moon in high school or their early 20s. It had changed them or recharged them, showed them what was possible.
I’d never heard of the movie. It’s on YouTube.
The rocket base:
The spacecraft leaving the Vehicular Assembly Building on rail tracks:
It’s all there.
I mention this for two reasons. One: we tend to fix the start of sci-fi movies in the post-war era, but this is a reminder there was a geek culture in the 20s, and the men who worked on rockets in the 40s had their own Star Wars and Star Trek. Mostly pulp magazines with cheap illustrations, of course – so imagine how a movie by Fritz frickin’ Lang made an impression.
Two: the plot of the movie requires the scientist to go along with gangsters who want to exploit the moon shot for personal profit; he agrees, because Science! You have to wonder whether Von Braun thought of this while making his own deals. Probably not a lot. But you suspect it was there, no?
If so, you wonder about the scene in the v2 book where Von Braun tours the Mittlewerk facility where the V2 was fabricated. Harris describes the deplorable state of the slave workers, beaten men shuffling through underground tunnels in their grey uniforms. I thought instantly of this:
It’s from Metropolis, of course. He had to know. He had to know, for a moment, that he was occupying two competing visions simultaneously, that the movie he revered was made by a man who condemned the world he was making.
In the end, he made a different world possible.
How much do the whys and hows matter?
Published in General
First off, let me say how much I love that you left it to your Ricochet members to upvote this. Secondly, let me confirm: Ricochet people know what they like and they like you!
This is excellent.
Working in healthcare, I think about this sort of thing a lot. When we look at stem cell research (wonderful! It can be anything! Fix it all!), I’m surprised at how dense the scientists are about the human cost and about the lack of respect for human bodies. I’m genuinely surprised, at times, that they don’t really recognize it. Being too close can sometimes blind a person to the cost and to the larger ramifications…but…
Sometimes I wonder if they aren’t just putting their heads in the sand for the sake of their Beautiful Dreams. They hope that it will do great things and use that hope to camouflage their fears that they might do something else too. I can only believe that the cognitive dissonance is such that they don’t just rationalize it; they completely deny the existence of any other repercussions. They simply do not exist and are somehow someone else’s problem for another day.
Also:
Yes. They are both amazing. The first in the Moon Nazis. The second in the Lizard People. Great watches.
Ah, Operation Paperclip. (Preceded by Operation Overcast.)
And Americans were introduced to the ambiguities of the Cold War.
Oh, it’s guaranteed to be . . .
As the British spy said to the American submarine commander in Ice Station Zebra, “The Russians put your film, made by your German Scientists, into our camera made by our German scientists, into their satellite made by their German scientists…”
I agree that it is. Appealed to my inner technocrat as a teen.
Ah yes. Ice Station Zebra – one of my guilty pleasures. It’s practically impossible to figure out but Patrick McGoohan chews so much scenery I’m amazed there was any left in the whole of Hollywood. Always put a British actor up against an American movie idol if you want some acting. See Alan Rickman opposite Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner, etc.
H.G. Wells’ political views were truly awful. In a 1932 speech at Oxford University, he said that he supported the idea of “liberal fascism.”
Yes, it’s from the brief period in the 1930s when fascism was semi-respectable in Britain. This was also true of America, where Hollywood produced a big-budget fantasy called Gabriel Over the White House, in which the heroic president disbands Congress, has lots of people shot, and threatens to attack other countries.
But the most amazing thing about Things to Come is Raymond Massey’s outfit.
I have checked it out from the library so many times, and fail to finish it.
I may end up just buying a copy to force myself to do it.
The book is by Alistair MacLean. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the movie, pretty sure I read all of his books when I was in High School.
Looks like a Zoom call, doesn’t it? It’s from High Treason, 1929, one of Britain’s earliest talkies. The movie is set at the outbreak of war in 1940.
So THAT’S where Jonah stole the title for his book!
Some trivia about ISZ: it was a great favorite of Howard Hughes, who owned a copy. In the 1968 Christmas season, back then a bigger box office season than summertime, MGM pissed off theater owners mightily by pulling the wildly profitable 2001: A Space Odyssey from Cinerama theaters, while it was still making money after eight months, and substituted Ice Station Zebra, its next Cinerama film, which didn’t do that well. It didn’t help the studio’s relationship with Kubrick either, to say the least.
Ice Station Zebra, like its near-contemporary Tora! Tora! Tora!, suffers a bit photographically by being sandwiched in-between realistic looking outdoor camerawork and old fashioned made-on-the-sound stage “exteriors” with paper mache icebergs. In, say, 1959, it would have been all studio and you wouldn’t have noticed the obvious differences between one shot and the next.
This scene comes before the previous one I posted, and explains Val Kilmer’s expression at the end of it:
Woman in the Moon, running 171 minutes, is available on Kanopy, free streaming tied to your public library card.
Such a great movie.
Jonah called it out at length in the book.
I love this. And that I have very little knowledge of the subject matter itself, but can be properly schooled by the members here makes it all the more enjoyable. But from a slightly different direction, I think what’s revealed is a universal truth that transcends time or perceptive influence: man’s constant and limitless exploration of his own imagination, and the realization of his capacity to oppress his fellow man in the pursuit of power. We see it then: post-War, as we see it now: the amazing defense of Israel by the Iron Dome, and the Chinese destruction of the Uighurs. As we peel back the layers of historical context, we see this, similarly to @peterrobinson post about the pre-Huxley & Orwell dystopia found in We by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Thanks again for a great post!
It also appears to be available on blu-ray.
His books made great movies . . .
I started reading the novels when I was 9 or 10 and kept at them as new ones appeared in the library. My first was Where Eagles Dare, a novelization of his script.
The movie is fantastic and The Critical Drinker nails its virtues here:
Tried watching Woman In the Moon. Just couldn’t do it.
TENTS on the MOON? No way, can’t suspend my disbelief that much.