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Fritz Lang's Frau im Mond (1929) was the
film that literally invented the countdown. It will also go down
in history as the first film to have its own R&D department.
Lang was determined that his story about the first expedition to the
Moon would avoid the sort of fantasy technology that had marked the
Moon voyage of George Méliès, so he hired the rocket pioneer
Hermann Oberth as technical adviser.
Oberth
helped Lang to design a moon rocket that was remarkably accurate down
to the fine details. It was a liquid-fueled three-stage affair
that was so on the money that when the Nazi government started
fiddling with rockets of their own they confiscated Lang's models,
which were subsequently lost in the war.
Oberth almost lost an eye to the picture.
For the premiere of the film, Oberth was supposed to launch a real
liquid fueled rocket of his own. The problem was that the
technology was in its infancy and Oberth, despite being one of the
world's greatest rocket experts, was no engineer. After fighting
an impossible deadline and surviving a series of laboratory explosions
he gave up on his rocket, which made many a German fire marshal
eternally grateful.
Though
the trip to the Moon in the film was probably the best seen on the screen until
the 1950s, once the action moves to the lunar surface things just get
silly. The reason for the first Moon voyage in Lang's
film was simple: Gold. The scientists sold the backers on the
idea that the Moon was positively stinking with the stuff. When
our heroes reach the Moon, they not only find that it has caves
groaning with gold, but that there is a perfectly breathable
atmosphere to boot.
