Dated but good-humoured, this 1967 adaptation includes all the era’s popular elements, from villain Terry-Thomas to penny-farthings in haystacks
There’s an serious outbreak of top hats and mutton chops in this amiable adaptation of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, originally released in 1967, when the real world was gearing up for the Apollo moonshot a couple of years later. Produced by the prolific Harry Towers, it adopted the rambling wacky-races format that had proved enduringly popular throughout the 1950s and 60s; most recently with the 1965 hit Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, which it shamelessly capitalised on with its US title (Those Fantastic Flying Fools) as well as redeplying the ubiquitous Terry-Thomas, who played yet another moustache-twirling cad.
Rocket to the
moon is watchable in a bored-Sunday-afternoon sort of way: it’s about whether an international consortium, led by Burl Ives (as Phineas T Barnum) and Dennis Price, can successfully build a giant cannon into the side of a mountain that can
fire a human
missile up to the moon, using a radical new form of gunpowder. Terry-Thomas is the chief meanie, with inventor brother-in-law Lionel Jeffries; Troy Donahue plays a dashing balloonist who lands in the middle of it all.