Fritz Lang returned to science fiction for the last time with Woman in the Moon (1929), an ambitious mix of spy thriller, space drama and visionary imagining of things to come. Thanks to the financial success of Spies (1928), Lang was given the resources to create another "super-film" like Metropolis (1927): a financial flop at the time but revered as a landmark of silent cinema today. Lang and Thea von Harbou, Lang's wife and longtime screenwriter were fascinated by rocketry and the possibility of space flight, and they originally intended for the heroes of Metropolis to fly off in a spaceship at the end, an idea that was scrapped as the script was developed. That may have been a starting point for Woman in the Moon, which was also scripted by von Harbou.

Whatever the inspiration, the result is a sprawling epic that married elements of Lang's two previous films. The first part plays like a sequel to Spies, with a conspiracy of industrialists and scientists masterminding a private space race while experimental rocket plans are stolen back and forth, and the second half covers the space flight itself: a mix of science fiction and romantic melodrama executed with the scope, spectacle and big ideas of Metropolis. Willy Fritsch, the detective hero of Spies, returns, as engineer-turned-astronaut, Wolf Helius, and Gerda Maurus, who had made her screen debut as the femme fatale of Spies, takes the female lead as astronomer Friede Velten, whose demands for sexual equality land her a spot on the crew. Fritz Rasp (the Thin Man in Metropolis) takes up villain duties as an enemy spy, scrambling to steal the design secrets for his own country.

Woman in the Moon features lavish production designs from his Metropolis designers Otto Hunte and Karl Vollbrecht - from a towering rocket ship to a moonscape sculpted out of bleached sand trucked in from beaches outside of Berlin and dumped on the soundstages of Ufa studios. Avant-garde painter and filmmaker Oskar Fischinger was one of the cinematographers and also assisted with the impressive special effects of the launch and space flight.

Lang hired two genuine rocket scientists as advisors: Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley, both authors of pioneering books on rocketry and founding members of the Society of Space Travel. Their guidance helped Lang accurately predict details of the modern space program, from the multi-stage rocket design to the use of liquid fuel and the figure 8 orbit trajectory from the Earth to the Moon and back. Ufa even helped finance an experimental liquid-fuel rocket designed by Oberth as a publicity gimmick, which was to be launched before the film's premiere. It failed but one of the young scientists working on the project was Wernher von Braun, who went on to lead the Nazi rocketry program and later was an important part of the American space program.

Lang could be an exacting perfectionist and was fascinated with procedure and scientific detail, and he relied on his experts to provide the realism behind his fantasy. The slow delivery of the ship from the hanger to the launch pad and the checklist before blastoff is presented with a sense of awe that anticipates the NASA missions decades later. The presentation of the g-force's lift-off and the weightlessness of space travel were all first imagined on film here. The scientific accuracy ends once they land on the moon, however, and the film slips into science fantasy as the crew finds the moon has an atmosphere and an Earth-like gravity.

Woman in the Moon can also claim an innovation that was adopted in real life: the countdown that was immortalized in the first NASA missions. "It came to me of dire necessity," Lang explained to Peter Bogdanovich in a 1965 interview. "When I shot the takeoff, I said, 'If I count 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 50, 100--an audience doesn't know when it will go off. But if a count down--10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, ZERO--then they will know.' Thus the countdown."

The film was suppressed by Hitler in 1937 when the Nazis began working on their V1 and V2 rockets, afraid that the science depicted in the film might tip off secrets from their own program, which in some ways was inspired by the film. Prints of the film were withdrawn and the models used in the film destroyed. When the film was later resurrected, it was available in a truncated version cut by almost half of its running time. After decades of this incomplete version, it was restored to its original length in 2000 by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung in Germany.

Woman in the Moon would be Fritz Lang's final silent film--sound cinema arrived before the film's release and Lang battled studio executives who wanted to add sound effects at the last minute to appease the audience demand for sound--and his final film for Ufa, his home studio since 1922. And for all the science fantasy of the film--a moon with breathable atmosphere where diamonds and gold can be plucked from the surface--it is impressive for the interplanetary physics and rocketry science it got right, as well as for the sheer scope and visual spectacle of its imagination. Science fiction film historian Phil Hardy proclaimed it "the first real space travel movie" and the inspiration it ignited in the next generation of rocket scientists and science fiction writers alike cannot be overestimated.

Sources:
Science Fiction in the Cinema, John Baxter. Paperback Library, 1970.
Who the Devil Made It?, Peter Bogdanovich. Knopf, 1997.
The Primal Screen: A History of Science Fiction Film, John Brosnan. Orbit, 1991.
Fritz Lang, Lotte Eisner. Secker & Warburg, 1976.
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, Phil Hardy. Aurum Press, 1984.
Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, Patrick McGilligan. Faber and Faber, 1997.

By Sean Axmaker