First Men in the Moon (1964): Gin, Ray Guns, and Lunar bureaucracy in the Queen’s name.
Long before Neil Armstrong tiptoed across the Sea of Tranquility in monochrome, before Kubrick gave us pristine orbital ballet with a side of sentient psychosis, and before The Martian turned potato farming into interplanetary heroism, there was a far sillier, far more British approach to lunar exploration.
We are, of course, talking about First Men in the Moon (1964), a Victorian-flavoured sci-fi jaunt in which the Moon is claimed for Queen Victoria, the main characters travel there in a greenhouse, and Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion creatures steal the show from everyone, including gravity.
Based on H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel (adapted here with liberties, gin, and a healthy dose of Nigel Kneale), this Columbia Pictures-produced gem opens in the futuristic world of 1964, where a multinational UN mission lands on the Moon only to discover a tatty Union Jack and a note claiming the place in the name of Her Majesty. It’s essentially 2001: A Space Oddity.
After some dazed bumbling about in Kent and a search for someone named Katherine Callender (wanted for dodgy property deeds, naturally), the UN locates Arnold Bedford, a now-aged former Moon-goer languishing in a nursing home that, for reasons never fully explained, bans space news. Possibly because it causes outbreaks of Imperial nostalgia and residents trying to phone the Queen.
Bedford—played with steely understatement by Edward Judd—spills his tale, dragging us back to 1899, when space travel was mainly powered by Cavorite, a magical anti-gravity paint invented by Lionel Jeffries in full mad-inventor mode as Joseph Cavor. Jeffries, a national treasure armed with absurd whiskers and bags of manic energy, turns in a performance that could only have come from a nation powered by tea, tweed, and war medals.
Together with Bedford and the ever-patient Kate Callender (Martha Hyer, doing her best not to murder either of them), Cavor builds a glorified brass teapot of a spaceship in his garden, lines it with velvet like a Victorian parlour, and uses blinds for navigation—because of course you steer through space like you’re managing the conservatory.
The Moon, when they eventually land (via what looks like a gentle lob), turns out to be hollow, populated by bug-eyed Selenites, guarded by a caterpillar the size of a Renault Clio, and featuring an air-filled society run by the Grand Lunar, who resembles a sentient cauliflower with an Oxbridge education. The Selenites are orderly, efficient, and speak flawless English after approximately one afternoon, which may say more about British exceptionalism than xenolinguistics.
Cavor, ever the optimist, tries diplomacy. Bedford, ever the Edward Judd character, tries elephant guns. This predictably ends badly. Our human heroes scarper, leaving poor Cavor behind to chat politics with the Grand Lunar—only for the Selenite civilisation to get wiped out off-screen by the common cold in what can only be described as the most British accidental genocide in cinema history.
The film is, to be clear, absolute nonsense. Glorious, lovingly constructed nonsense, but nonsense all the same. And yet it charms. Between Harryhausen’s legendary stop-motion work (the Moon Cows alone are worth the ticket price), the charmingly rickety spaceship interiors, and the earnest absurdity of claiming the Moon for Queen Victoria while dodging caterpillar monsters, First Men in the Moon is one of those classic films that manages to be both ridiculous and reverent.
Nigel Kneale’s fingerprints are all over the script, particularly in the framing device that attempts to tie Wellsian fantasy into the modern world of space race politics. It’s half love letter, half pastiche, and three-quarters Ray Harryhausen flexing his animation muscles like a steampunk Pixar engine gone rogue.
It wasn’t a huge box office hit, sadly. The general public of 1964 may have preferred their Moon landings with fewer Edwardian waistcoats and more scientific accuracy. But SFcrowsnest readers, we dare say, know better. They know the joy of seeing a lady packing an elephant gun and a bottle of bitters to go off-planet. They understand the quiet dignity of a Moon civilization destroyed by a stray British sneeze.
And let’s not forget the legacy: when NASA needed visualisations for the 1969 Moon landing, they nicked bits of this film. So yes—First Men in the Moon helped put the real First Men on the Moon. Sort of. All in all, a splendidly daft slice of retro-futurism, delivered with a stiff upper lip, an umbrella, and absolutely no understanding of lunar geology. And frankly, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
