Woman in the Moon

The countdown was invented here, for the launch, and the world adopted it. A professor with a theory of gold on the moon, an engineer, the woman he loves, the man she is marrying, a spy sent by a cartel and a stowaway boy fly there in a rocket, and Lang hired Hermann Oberth as adviser and got the details right: the multi-stage design, the acceleration couches, the water tanks. On the moon the film turns to melodrama and the oxygen runs out for one too many. When the V-2 was built, the government confiscated the models. Lang's last silent. The 170-minute restoration is the one to see. Ufa, 1929.