Column Science Fiction Film Club First Men in the Moon: Old-Fashioned Victoriana for the Space Age Ray Harryhausen and Nigel Kneale adapt H.G. Wells’ novel for the big screen. By Kali Wallace | Published on March 18, 2026 Credit: Columbia Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Columbia Pictures First Men in the Moon (1964) Directed by Nathan Juran. Written by Nigel Kneale and Jan Read, based on the novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. Starring Edward Judd, Martha Hyer, and Lionel Jeffries. The year is 1964, and humanity is on the verge of a tremendous accomplishment. A multinational effort has brought the spaceship United Nations 1 to the Moon. The lunar lander touches down, and the first astronaut heads outside. It’s not quite as impressive as it could be, because he’s lowered to the surface dangling from a trapeze sort of thing, but the film characters don’t know how silly that looks. Everybody rejoices. People celebrate all around the world. Humanity has made it to the Moon! The astronauts of UN 1 are very excited to be the first humans to explore the Moon—right up until they find a tattered Union Jack and a handwritten note claiming the Moon in the name of Queen Victoria in the year 1899. The note is scribbled on a court summons, which gives the folks back on Earth a place to start looking for answers to the mystery of who littered on the Moon sixty-five years earlier. The 1964 scenes serve as a framing device in First Men in the Moon, the majority of which takes place during that first Moon adventure in 1899. But there’s an interesting bit of Space Race history in that narrative frame. On September 20, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he said that the United States and the Soviet Union should pursue cooperative space programs and a joint Moon mission, rather than working separately toward the same goal: “Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?” he asked. “Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure?” Of course, just two years earlier, Kennedy had clearly framed human space travel as a national competition in his speech to Congress on May 25, 1961. But what gets people fired up to build rockets is different from what happens when people set to work, and there was always some degree of back-and-forth between the competing space programs. The UN address in 1963 wasn’t the first time Kennedy had publicly suggested joint space missions, and it wasn’t the first time the Soviet Union, under Premier Nikita Khrushchev, would decline. The two leaders had discussed the possibility in letters, and various officials in the two space programs had been talking as well. Cooperation wasn’t an outlandish or unpopular idea, but nobody had yet figured out how to made it work. Decades later, Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, would say that his father had privately considered accepting Kennedy’s proposal for a joint Moon mission, even though it would mean removing some of the secrecy around the Soviet space program. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Khrushchev was removed from power in October 1964, and it took another few years and another few changes of leadership before any official cooperation happened. In 1972, President Richard Nixon and Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin signed the “Agreement Concerning Cooperation in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes,” and the first joint mission launched in 1975. That was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, during which a crew of three American astronauts piloted an Apollo spacecraft to dock with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft piloted by two cosmonauts. These days, it’s commonplace for space missions to have multinational crew. But in 1964 there was something bravely optimistic about the notion. When First Men in the Moon opens with an American astronaut and Soviet cosmonaut aboard the same lunar lander, discussing the mission as equals, it was a brief look toward a more cooperative future, a side note in a movie that otherwise has nothing to do with ’60s space programs at all. Because this isn’t a Space Age story, for all that it is a movie of the Space Age. H.G. Wells began writing The First Men in the Moon in 1900, and it was serialized in both The Strand Magazine and Cosmopolitan in 1900 and 1901. Artist Claude Shepperson provided the illustrations, in which we can see the familiar designs of both the off-spherical spacecraft and the insectoid Moon people. The serial was also compiled and published as a book in 1901. Wells was an extremely popular writer at the time, having already published several future classics, including The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The War of the Worlds, so naturally his story about a mad scientist and his neighbor using a gravity-canceling material to visit the Moon was also pretty popular. The first cinematic adaptation of The First Men in the Moon was made in 1919 in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, almost nothing survives of the film. According to the British Film Institute’s BFI Most Wanted project, which identifies lost films to encourage people and institutions to search for them, there is only a single known still image from the movie, as well as a brief synopsis and a small number of contemporary reviews from when it played in theaters throughout the UK. That one surviving still photo is delightful. The Selenites look so charmingly bug-eyed. Skip ahead forty-five years and that’s when we get the second film adaptation. I haven’t been able to find contemporary accounts of the film’s production—they made be out there, but for obvious reasons a lot of stuff from the 1960s is not readily available online—so most of the information comes from retrospective looks at the film. And some of those, such as an article from Fantastic Films in 1979, contain some obvious factual errors, which make me unsure how much of the information can be trusted. It seems like the idea for the film first came from a meeting of the minds between stop-motion animation artist Ray Harryhausen and screenwriter Nigel Kneale. We’ve talked about Harryhausen before when we watched The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms(1953), which was his first film as lead animator. We haven’t talked about Nigel Kneale before, even though I sometimes receive polite and wholly justified comments asking when we’re going to get to his work, which I promise I am not ignoring. In sci fi circles, Kneale is best known as the creator of the character Professor Bernard Quatermass. The professor first appeared in the BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and came back in three more series; three of the series were adapted into movies produced by Hammer Films, while the fourth (released in 1979) was abridged into a film. Kneale and Harryhausen convinced producer Charles Schneer and director Nathan Juran to make First Men in the Moon, even though Schneer had doubts. Schneer and Harryhausen worked together on all but one of the films Harryhausen animated, and they also worked with Juran on the sci fi monster movie 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) and the very successful fantasy adventure film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). So this was a group of men who all knew each other and had worked together successfully before. Schneer just wasn’t sure audiences would be interested in H.G. Wells’ version of a trip to the Moon, and he also didn’t know if the rather solemn way Kneale and Harryhausen wanted to approach the movie would work. (Aside: Juran’s long career also included such extremes as working in the art department on John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley [1941]—where space artist Chesley Bonestell was creating matte paintings and Irving Pichel was providing the narrated voiceover—and directing the cult classic B-movie Attack of the 50-Foot Woman [1958].) On the other hand, just a few years earlier, George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960) had adapted another Wells novel while maintaining the Victorian context, and that movie had done well at the box office. So they decided to go forward with First Men in the Moon, while adding the Space Age framing to the Victorian bulk of the story. We meet the charming cad Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd), who is living in a cottage in the English countryside writing a play, which is the Victorian equivalent of living in a Los Angeles pool house and writing a screenplay, as he doesn’t actually do any writing, lies to his girlfriend about his income and prospects, and is behind on his rent. When the girlfriend, Kate (Martha Hyer), comes to visit, they meet Arnold’s eccentric neighbor, an inventor called Cavor (Lionel Jeffries). Cavor has invented a material called Cavorite, which can cancel out the force of gravity. Arnold sees a potential fortune in this discovery, and Cavor wants to test it by going to the Moon. Naturally. Why not? Through a series of shenanigans that involve a court summons, several geese, and many large explosions, all three of them end up in Cavor’s spherical spacecraft, headed toward the Moon. They only bring two spacesuits—actually diving suits—so the men leave Kate in the spacecraft when they head out to explore the lunar surface. They discover a huge window in ground, fall through it, and that’s when they meet the subterranean, insectoid Moon people. Cavor names them Selenites—we never find out what they call themselves—and he wants to try to communicate with them. But Arnold chooses violence, so this first contact between neighboring species does not go particularly well. In a 2005 interview, Harryhausen spoke briefly about some of his frustrations with making First Men in the Moon. After pushing to get it made, he didn’t seem particularly happy with the film, and some of that was due to various technical problems that arose because of time and budget constraints. I’m not at all knowledgeable about different camera and lens types, but I think part of what he’s saying is that when they tried to match the rear projection scenes—that is, the scenes where the background is projected behind the live action—to the widescreen format of the new-at-the-time Panavision, the projections would end up distorted in the center. I didn’t notice this when I watched, and I couldn’t see it in any of the obvious rear-projection scenes when I went back to check. But I’m not a filmmaker, and it apparently bothered Harryhausen so much he was still annoyed about it forty years later. (To be fair, Harryhausen often comes across as annoyed in interviews in his later years. Maybe he was just a curmudgeon. Maybe we would all be curmudgeons if people kept asking us about CGI after spending a lifetime doing stop-motion animation.) Those time and budget problems are apparent in how this movie doesn’t really look like a Ray Harryhausen film for most of its runtime. The production didn’t have the resources to animate all of the Selenites—or, as Harryhausen said in 2005, “…We had to do it this way, because if I had animated them all I still wouldn’t be finished today.” With a few exceptions, the Selenites are mostly little kids dressed up in bug costumes, and they look like little kids dressed up in bug costumes. They’re pretty cute, and cute is definitely not what the film was going for. The only Harryhausen creature in the film is the giant centipede-ish thing Arnold and Cavor encounter in the caverns, and honestly that’s pretty cute too. I almost felt bad when the bug children zapped it dead and stripped all the flesh from its bones. The creature design is great, the animation is great, but the giant fellow is gone too soon. After a great deal of running around, getting captured, getting rescued, shouting, sneaking, fighting, and diplomacy that fails because Arnold keeps trying to kill the Selenites, it all leads to Arnold and Kate returning to Earth while Cavor stays behind. In the future of 1964, the explorers of UN 1 descend into the underground city, only to find that the Selenite civilization is gone. They surmise that Cavor had carried with him a virus that wiped them out, which is a dark and tonally jarring end to a film previously filled with wacky mad scientist hijinks. First Men in the Moon isn’t the best movie in the world, although it’s not the worst either. Some parts of it are charming, others are dull, and the cracks in the production show. I still find it interesting, however, as a film that deliberately, albeit awkwardly, splits the difference between different eras of sci fi cinema. It has a hokey floating sphere and a giant bug monster on one hand, but it also has nods to a realistic Moon mission and the facts of contemporary space travel. This was the time of the real Space Race, after all, and on screen films such as Destination Moon (1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and Forbidden Planet (1954) had shifted the tone of sci fi cinema toward more seriousness and greater scientific accuracy. Sure, there were still monster movies, because there will always be monster movies, but space was becoming a more serious movie topic in the mid ’60s, even before 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) came along. First Men in the Moon tried to look backward and forward at the same time. It’s not entirely successful, because it doesn’t find a way to balance the tones and expectations of the two types of stories it’s trying to combine. The result is a film that ends up in “eh, okay” territory, but it also makes it feel very much like a movie that could only have been made after we knew we were going to the Moon, but before Moon exploration became a reality. What do you think of First Men in the Moon? Where does the so-called “Moon bull” belong in the ranks of Harryhausen creatures? Next week: We finish out our tour of Moon movies with one of my favorites. Watch Duncan Jones’ 2009 indie film Moon on Amazon and a few other places.[end-mark] The post <i>First Men in the Moon</i>: Old-Fashioned Victoriana for the Space Age appeared first on Reactor.