This second Fireside film by Ray Harryhausen underscores many of the points I made in my assessment of Mysterious Island (1961); stop-motion effects work better as the certified star of the show than they do in supporting roles. Here in First Men in the Moon they’re used just as any other effects technique might be used…and are less impressive, even less appropriate. But the movie itself—second H.G. Wells title on the list—is a flawed but still effective highlight of the cycle.

Wells’ 1901 book is a masterpiece, his best in my estimation, and probably the first true space story in the modern sense. The science in it, however, had become quite outdated by the 1960s, when the American space program was already making plans for a real trip to the Moon. The datedness, of course, is the very thing we’re after in a Fireside film, and you wouldn’t think this would be a problem. In this case, though, the actual details of what the Moon is really like had become such a matter of public knowledge that accommodations had to be made. Wells’ book has the Moon’s surface as an inhabitable place…at least during the daylight hours. At night, the frosty cold of space becomes so intense that it causes this thin atmosphere to freeze and to fall down upon the surface like snow. This made for one of the best scenes in the book; wherein Bedford, totally without any kind of a spacesuit, tries desperately to reach the safety of the moon sphere while this picturesque, but ultimately deadly, blizzard gets heavier and heavier. These guesses about lunar conditions were perfectly valid at the turn of the 20th century, but would have been puzzling, or even unintentionally funny, if depicted on screen in 1964.

The script for this movie updates the science to address these concerns, sometimes in very clever ways. The idea that a 19th century sponge-diving rig, for instance, might work just as well as a moon suit, is a total fallacy; diving suits protect against an excess of pressure, not the absence of it. But visually, it’s a rather charming conceit, something that might actually occur to a Victorian mind. And when the writer moves Wells’ story indoors, so to speak, to the caverns in the interior of the Moon, he’s actually expanding upon scenes that really are present in the novel. (Though the American promotional material made it seem as if this was the reason for the unfamiliar “in” of the title, this use of the word is actually a common Anglicism in everyday British speech—i.e., “I live in Baker Street”).

The writer in question, by the way, was Nigel Kneale, the excellent British SF scribe who also penned some genuine classics for Hammer Studios in The Abominable Snowman (1958) and Quatermass and the Pit (1965). His script for First Men in the Moon, unfortunately, gets caught between a rock and a hard place. Around the World in Eighty Days-style humor had become so intimately associated with Fireside in the public mind by now that producers began to feel they couldn’t make a Victorian SF film without it. So no matter how inappropriate it might be to the story at hand, some kind of a place had to be found from now on for a comic crackpot inventor or a dose of zany slapstick. In this case, Kneale concentrates this element into the character of Professor Cavor, originator of the anti-gravity paint that carries the travelers into space. Cavor is played straight in the book; in fact, he’s something of a tragic figure. And Kneale himself pitches the rest of the story perfectly straight in this version. But Cavor, as impersonated by actor Lionel Jeffries, is allowed to run completely wild. Many people (myself included) find his performance very amusing; others find it irritating in the extreme. But either way, this attempt to inject a ration of misplaced comedy into what is actually a rather somber (and surprisingly faithful) adaptation of a serious book throws the whole project a tad off-kilter. Jeffries takes the “potty old professor” routine about as far as it will go outside a true comedy, and possibly a bit further. Just as a footnote, he unquestionably took it the rest of the way in Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (aka Blast Off! and Those Fantastic Flying Fools), a 1967 spoof of the genre.

Visually, First Men in the Moon is a gas. The moon sphere looks just as it should, and the outer space effects are among the best in any pre-2001 space film. The magnificent desolation of the Moon is vividly presented, as well. Harryhausen’s Selenites look marvelous in their animated incarnations—a bit less so when they’re actually children in bug suits. The Grand Lunar, king of the Moon, nicely suggests (rather than actually expresses) the complex moral questions raised by the presence of his first terrestrial visitors. All of these adventures look especially great in the anamorphic widescreen version made available on the recent 16:9 DVD. Laurie Johnson’s evocative score is also noteworthy. This was Harryhausen’s first film without Bernard Herrmann in quite some time. Herrmann disciple Johnson stood in for the Maestro, and he does quite well. It’s one of my favorite scores from this era.

In Harryhausen’s First Men in the Moon, a dense, philosophical Wells novel has again been turned into something more like a Jules Verne escapade. But if you have a forgiving nature, and a strong stomach for slightly out-of-place comedy, this difficult journey is well worth the trip. In some ways, as a matter of fact, it’s absolutely imperial.