COLUMNISTS It is a close contest between the sun and the moon, with earth trailing a humble third. Ever since film titles began, they have been besotted with both our planet’s power-giving star and its mystery-bestowing satellite – from Moonraker to Moonstruck, from Sunrise to Sunset Boulevard – while the orb we actually live on lags behind as a marquee come-on. Count the respective titles in your nearest reference book. Comb the catacombs of your favourite website.
In July 1969, though, a small step for mankind became a giant start-up moment for movie and media hoopla. The moon has since stolen ahead even of the sun. Diana beats Phoebus, Artemis beats Apollo: it’s official. Barely a month goes by, to take a lunar timespan, without a film making some titular, thematic or symbolic obeisance to that disco-ball in the night sky.
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Why? Because it is there. Why again? Because sometimes, mesmerically and self-definingly, it isn’t there. Its mutability and elusiveness have inspired poets and artists. (“Oh swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon”: Shakespeare.) The moon can hide behind milky or stormy clouds. It morphs monthly from a glowing orb to a silver sickle and back. Even when seen complete and unconcealed it is, unlike the sun, pale, passive, mysterious, romantically introverted.
Passive? Are we sure? Don’t we mean, in certain subtler instances, passive-aggressive? For like a manipulative lover the moon pretends to be a pliant, uncomplaining helpmeet while evidence of its bossy powers are continually before us. It pulls and pushes ocean tides. It blows out the sun in eclipses. It grows full-bellied once a month to engender madmen and lycanthropes, at least in myth. No moon, no The Wolf Man, The Howling or An American Werewolf in London: those films that are the dark omega to the tales of alpha males zipping around the cosmos in spacesuits.
Movies about the moon as a destination and exploring target, as a solid object in the universe and human endeavour, are just the literal-minded leading edge in a lunar cinema that curves forever into weird horizons. Consider the dementias of visual poetry bestowed on the moon by Fellini (in almost any film). Look at the versatile spookiness conjured from the moon in horror films, from the incitement of bestiality in wolf-man tales to the casting of a lambent luminosity over voodoo-cursed canefields in I Walked with a Zombie.
And let us be fair, not even the literal moonshot movies are without their poetry: 2001; Apollo 13; In the Shadow of the Moon (definitive documentary of the moon-landing era). Where would we be without this science-fiction cinema poised like no other between sci and fi? Humans have visited the moon: that is fact. (Unless you subscribe to the conspiracy theories of Capricorn One, dramatising the notion that the lunar landing was staged on earth.) But humans haven’t unmasked its enigmas: there begins fiction. Even Apollo 13 celebrated a vanishing into mystery, a spacecraft’s disappearance behind the moon’s dark side, cued by that immortal, ringing understatement, “Houston, we have a problem.”
Until we colonise the moon or terraform it or bring back its last rock for analysis, it will always tantalise. Have we come that far, in reality, from the first great moon movie? The clock of years had barely struck 1902 when Georges Méliès, pioneer French animator, made Voyage to the Moon. His spaceship was a papier-mâché toy; his “space” was a dark backcloth; his moon was a thickly textured orb like an extraterrestrial cream pie. Impaled in the eye by the rocket, the man in the moon gives an aggrieved grin, as if someone’s finger has slicked the grimace into the pie’s surface.
Later in movie history the same rocket – or one from the same fantasy factory – was ridden through whimsical skies by Baron Munchausen. Innocence and romance are still up there, and down here. Moonstruck, that blithe mission to Romcomland, strewed lunar enchantment like confetti as it invoked everything from Dean Martin, soundtrack-serenading the “big pizza pie”, to the magic of a moonlit night over New York.
There was magic, too, in La Luna, with Bertolucci’s moon a midwifing presence here, there, everywhere, a dea ex machina in a tale of the recurring birth pangs of growing up.
And the greatest toast to the moon in moviedom? It has to be Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, closing that canonic weepie with the kitschiest, tingliest line in Hollywood annals. Choked by emotion as her married lover, departing to resume a life of anguished propriety, asks her if she will be happy, Davis says: “Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars.” Note the sentiment. To ask for the stars is a second-class request. To ask for the moon was, and is, the ultimate.
Nigel Andrews is the FT’s film critic
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Nigel Andrews’ 12 lunar legends
To celebrate a month in which June rhymes with moon, as we limber up for the Apollo anniversary shenanigans a lunar cycle hence, what better than a calendarful of movies? Here is a top 12, in no particular order but elevated to eminence by as many different virtues and qualifications – here a title, there a plot, there a mere line of dialogue – as there are months of the year.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Shock and awe on the big screen, at a time when those two words were still honourable ones. Stanley Kubrick’s three-hour spaceshot is the measure of moon movies before and after.
Voyage to the Moon (1902). Georges Méliès makes magic in the dawn of pre-digital animation.
Apollo 13 (1995). “Houston, we have a problem”; Hollywood, we have a hit.
In the Shadow of the Moon (2006). The enthralling, definitive feature documentary of the 1969 moon landing.
Moonstruck (1987). The enthralling story of Cher getting it together with Nicolas Cage in moonlit New York.
Destination Moon (1950). Deep-dish twaddle from Hollywood fantasy maestro George Pal. But half a century on, it has curiosity value and oodles of retro charm.
An American Werewolf in London (1981). Lycanthropy in Limeyland, directed by John Landis for comedy, horror and state-of-art make-up effects.
The Dish (2000). Australian comedy about a sheep field that became the satellite HQ for southern-hemisphere reception of the 1969 moon landing. Funny, quirky – and mostly true.
Capricorn One (1977). No one goes to the moon in this sly-fi caper. The trip is rigged in a TV studio. Actually, the faked mission is to Mars – but we know what is meant. Those who believe the Apollo 11 landing was moonshine get their grandest hour.
ET: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). See the boy Elliott and the draped shape of ET fly their bicycle past the giant, glowing “O”!
The Night of the Hunter (1955). Moon shots to die for, so lyrical and surreal that you weep the later outcast state of the film’s one-time-only director, actor Charles Laughton.
Now, Voyager (1942). The greatest of them all. Once more, with feeling: “Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars ... ”
