Woman in the Moon (Fritz Lang, 1929)

Classic space-travel science fiction, Woman in the Moon was hugely influential on movies up until the time when human beings actually began to travel into space. You can find its traces in everything from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials to Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950) and Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956), and even into the space age in TV series like Lost in Space (1965-68) and the first Star Trek series (1965-69). None of this should be surprising: Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist who was a technical adviser on Fritz Lang's film, came to the United States in 1935 and became an ardent popularizer of space travel and consultant to many science fiction writers and film directors. Actual space travel made some of Woman in the Moon obsolete: the notion that the moon has a breathable atmosphere and a temperate climate, for example. But Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, also consulted with another rocket scientist, Hermann Oberth, while writing the screenplay, and got a few things exactly and presciently right, like multistage rocketry, the need for zero-gravity restraints, and the firing of retro-rockets to slow the descent of the ship to the moon's surface. But perhaps their most influential contribution is the suspenseful (and often hokey) melodrama of the plot. They invented the familiar clichés: the discredited scientist whose theories turn out to be right; corporate villainy and greed at odds with the idealism of the scientists; the romantic triangle heightened by the isolation of the spaceship; the unexpected but useful stowaway; the need to sacrifice a member of the crew to return to safety. Fortunately, Lang never lets things bog down in the nascent clichés, and he has a capable cast to work with. Willy Fritsch is Wolf Helius, an idealistic rocketeer who has planned the space flight with the help of the discredited professor, Georg Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl). Gustav von Wangenheim and Gerda Maurus are Helius's assistants, Hans Windegger and Friede Velten, who have just gotten engaged, to the dismay of Helius, who is in love with Friede. Fritz Rasp is the evil mastermind Walter Turner, who threatens to destroy the rocket unless Helius allows him to come along on the voyage to advance the interests of the greedy corporate types who want to get their hands on the gold deposits that Manfeldt has theorized are plentiful on the moon. (With his hair slicked back across one side of his forehead, Rasp has a surprising resemblance to Adolf Hitler in this movie.) And the stowaway is Gustav (Gustl Gstettenbaur), a boy obsessed with space travel who brings his collection of sci-fi pulp magazines along with him. Even today, Woman in the Moon is good, larky fun.