DESTINATION MOON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 634, 24 August 1951, Page 19

DESTINATION MOON

( George’ Pal Productions) WICE in the past week-end I have been exposed to concentrated charges of the fantastic, and I am still tut-tutting away like an overworked Geiger counter -but in neither case’ was the fantastic element responsible for the reaction. Generally speaking, I respond most comfortably to actuality, or to its screen simuliacrum; I like to keep my feet as close to.th® ground as my flattened arches will allow, and'I can best enjov a story which does not retreat too far from the prosy levels of my own experience. But like most other people I’m not allergic to pure fantasy or whimsy once in a while--Et ego in Purilia vixi, so to speak. It’s when the fantasy is adulterated with propaganda, or the whimsy tainted by bad taste, that my psyche comes out in a heat-rash. Destination Moon (in Technicolor) is a far better attempt to forecast the form of man’s first voyage into outer space than was Rocketship X-M, but I was highly depressed to discover that in the present critical world atmosphere Hollywood seems incapable of devising even such a fantastic story as this without relating it to the cold war. In one of the earliest sequences of the film, starring a group of leading American industrialists (I knew they were men of distinction, they reminded me of the whisky advertisements), the proposition is. put quite plainly. "If we want to stay in business," says one of them, "we have to build this shiponly U.S. industry must get to work now. There is no way to stop an attack from outer ‘$pace."The Power using the Moon for the launching of missiles can control the earth. .. If any other Power gets a satellite into the air before we do it’s the end of these United States." Several reels later the intrepid leader of the first spece expedition sets foot on the surface of the moon and makes a formal proclamation over the intercom in his space-suit. "I take possession of this satellite.’ he says in a

vgice erstandably overcharged with emotion, "in the name of the honk-honk-squawk-horkle for the benefit of all. mankind." I didn’t catch the name of the Power invoked at all, because at the critical moment there was a burst of static on the soundtrack. And a few moments later, when the proclamation was relayed to Washington by shortwave the same thing happened. Maybe it was those Russians jamming the broadcast; maybe it was just some anonymous film-editor or ¢ensor anxious to save Hollywood from the last extremity of nationalistic paranoia. Apart from these chauvinistic pas--sages, Destination Moon is an ingenious and entertaining effort, and it provides a wide field for that speculation and argument which cheers the long road home. The space-suits seemed a little frail to protect their occupants from explosion in an absolute vacuum, how magnetic boots could work on what looked like a duralumin spaceship was beyond my scanty knowledge of physics (the magnet on my radio just ignores a potlid). But the film manages | to work up quite a head of excitement at times-even if the causes will hardly bear close examination-and beyond the field of terrestrial attraction it has its lighter moments. I was just a little disappointed that the producers were so fatally committed to the two-worlds-or-none proposition, and that having got so far out of this world we had not, as it were, got away from it all.