From the Earth to the Moon (1958)

The Cotten Sequence, or Joseph Cotten Season, proceeds with understated poise, its pleasures evenly shared, although obliging us to view this non-noir folly of fifties fantasia and filmation, we are not always best delighted.

From the Earth to the Moon (1958) is a Byron Haskin Jules Verne Civil War space rocket science fiction revenge and rivalry sane scientist drama featuring a cold war mutually assured destruction power that can destroy the earth action special effects adventure movie with Joseph Cotten, Debra Paget, George Sanders, Byron Haskin, Henry Daniell, Carl Esmond and Morris Ankrum. Oh cielo, questo non è un film noir!

Every body of everybody in this movie seems to rest in the lower part of the frame, what is going on or is there are crop on the go I do not know about?

What follows is not a review so much as a disciplinary action, a corrective lecture delivered with the clenched jaw of someone who has stared too long into the abyss of cinematic incompetence and found it staring back with a painted backdrop and a visible wire. From the Earth to the Moon (1958) is not merely a failure of adaptation, execution, or imagination. It is an offense, a wilful desecration of narrative coherence, scientific plausibility, and audience patience, carried out under the false pretense of Jules Verne’s name.

If it were not for the presence of a conspicuously photographed blonde figure, the physical film stock itself would have been better repurposed as a hygienic aid for condemned prisoners. This is not metaphor but recommendation. Nothing in this production justifies its continued existence as a motion picture, let alone as an artifact passed down through archives and late night broadcasts.

The film offers no cohesive story, not even a broken one that might be admired for its audacity. Instead, it presents a sluggish procession of scenes that neither build nor resolve, merely accumulate like bureaucratic paperwork left to rot in a filing cabinet. Narrative cause and effect are treated as optional suggestions rather than foundational principles.

The so called science is an insult not only to physics but to the basic dignity of human reasoning. Suspension of disbelief is not strained here but annihilated, shot out of the sky before it can clear the launch platform. One is not asked to believe the impossible, which is the privilege of science fiction, but to endure the idiotic, which is unforgivable.

The special effects achieve a rare feat in that they transcend inadequacy and arrive at insult. Visible supports, laughable model work, and spatial logic that collapses under casual inspection all combine to create a viewing experience that feels less like wonder and more like mockery. The film does not ask for your imagination. It dares it to revolt.

Boom shadow in From the Earth to the Moon (1958)

Joseph Cotten in From the Earth to the Moon (1958)

There exists precisely one fleeting moment of unintended grace, and it arrives by theft. The auditory textures lifted wholesale from Forbidden Planet intrude like a ghost from a better universe, reminding the viewer for a few cruel minutes of what science fiction cinema can achieve when competence is present. This reminder is not comforting. It is aggravating.

In that brief interval, one forgets the immediate catastrophe unfolding on screen and recalls a genuine classic, one shaped by vision rather than desperation. When the reminder fades, the punishment resumes. The contrast only sharpens the humiliation inflicted by the film currently playing.

It is no exaggeration to say that this production makes Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) appear not merely competent but Oscar worthy. That comparison alone should have triggered an emergency recall of every surviving print. Yet here we are, still discussing it.

Should you ever be presented with the opportunity to not watch this film, seize it with both hands. Declining to view it is not an act of ignorance but of discernment. You will thank me, and more importantly, you will retain your sanity.

The film claims lineage from Jules Verne, yet bears as much resemblance to his work as a pamphlet resembles a cathedral. Verne’s writing demands imagination, resources, and a respect for wonder. This adaptation supplies none of the above, offering instead austerity masquerading as seriousness.

Budgets matter, but incompetence matters more. Plenty of modest productions have achieved resonance through discipline and creativity. This film demonstrates neither. It squanders what little it has on endless dialogue, static blocking, and performances that suggest the cast itself is aware of the trap it has wandered into.

Joseph Cotten and George Sanders, both capable actors, are reduced here to mouthpieces for pompous nonsense. Their rivalry lacks spark, tension, or thematic clarity. They speak not as characters but as exhausted men reciting contractual obligations.

Sanders in particular appears physically ill while delivering certain lines, as though his body were attempting to reject the script as a foreign toxin. His usual elegance curdles into petulance, and the film is worse for it. Cotten fares no better, stripped of nuance and reduced to monotony.

The Amazing Story of the Boldest Adventure Dared by Man!

Debra Paget is present, photographed lovingly and written atrociously. Her inclusion as a stowaway romantic interest is not merely unnecessary but actively corrosive to the story. She exists not as a character but as an obligation, a visual apology for everything else the film fails to provide.

The film’s pacing is glacial, yet without the majesty that might justify slowness. Ninety minutes pass with almost nothing occurring, and when the long promised journey finally begins, it does so with all the excitement of a delayed train departure.

Even then, the film commits its most unforgivable sin. It does not show the Moon. The destination promised by the title, marketed as spectacle, discussed endlessly by the characters, is withheld entirely. The climax occurs off screen, like an apology muttered from another room.

This omission is not daring or abstract. It is cowardly. It reeks of budgetary panic and creative surrender. One does not adapt From the Earth to the Moon (1958) and then refuse to show the Moon unless one has already conceded defeat.

The technical incompetence is staggering. Shots contradict each other, exterior and interior logic collapses, and the infamous visible support structures render every space sequence unintentionally comic. These are not nitpicks. They are structural failures.

One might forgive a low budget production for modest effects, but not for contempt toward its audience. The film repeatedly asks viewers to accept contradictions it cannot even be bothered to disguise. This is laziness elevated to policy.

The music, again borrowed rather than earned, functions as a parasite. It feeds on the achievements of better artists and better films, hoping proximity might grant legitimacy. It does not. It only highlights the absence of original thought.

The production history explains but does not excuse the result. The collapse of RKO and the handoff to Warner Brothers reads like a metaphor for the film itself, unfinished, unwanted, and pushed into the world without care or pride.

I will quote myself here, because the situation demands authority. “C’est une œuvre qui confond la gravité avec l’importance, et la lenteur avec la profondeur.” This is not a compliment. It is a diagnosis.

As adaptation, the film drains Verne of humor, curiosity, and intellectual playfulness. What remains is high minded claptrap delivered with straight faces and empty eyes. The joy of speculation is replaced by lectures that lead nowhere.

The supposed ethical debates, particularly regarding science and faith, are presented with the subtlety of a sermon shouted through a megaphone. No perspective is interrogated. No complexity is allowed to breathe.

Another self citation is warranted, and I will indulge it. “Le film parle sans cesse, mais ne dit absolument rien.” This verbosity without substance defines the experience.

Supporting actors drift in and out, some uncredited, some misused, none memorable. Their presence adds texture only in the sense that dust adds texture to an abandoned room. One notices it, but wishes it were cleaned.

Visually, the film is inconsistent. At times competently lit, at others flat and lifeless, it never achieves a unified aesthetic. Sets look theatrical rather than cinematic, reinforcing the sense that this was never meant to be scrutinized.

The Victorian trappings, which could have provided charm, are instead treated as burdens. Ornate interiors exist without context or energy, as though imported from another production and left unattended.

What remains most remarkable is not that the film fails, but that it fails so thoroughly while insisting on its own seriousness. It demands to be taken gravely while offering nothing that merits respect.

This is not so bad it is good. That category requires intention or at least enthusiasm. This is so bad it is inert. It sits there, draining time, accomplishing nothing.

If this film has value, it is purely pedagogical. It should be screened in film schools as an example of what happens when adaptation, production, and vision all abandon their posts simultaneously.

In the end, From the Earth to the Moon (1958) stands as a monument to squandered potential and misplaced confidence. It is not misunderstood. It is accurately condemned.

Avoid it if you can. If you cannot, endure it as one endures a cautionary tale. And remember, the Moon deserved better.

In the long shadow of the Cold War's early years, amid the rising hysteria of technological brinkmanship and ideological purification, the release of From the Earth to the Moon (1958) marks an intriguing, if faltering, artifact of mid-century cinematic imagination. The film, directed by Byron Haskin and produced by Benedict Bogeaus, adapts Jules Verne's 1865 speculative fiction with both admiration and distortion. Joseph Cotten and George Sanders preside over the film as two ideological titans, sparring not merely with munitions and metallurgy, but with vision and philosophy. It is a Technicolor exhibition, stranded somewhere between the antiquarian fancy of a previous century and the nuclear foreboding of the present.

The story begins in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, where Victor Barbicane, portrayed by Cotten, introduces a new and sinister substance: Power X. His discovery, a volatile and unknown compound with catastrophic potency, invokes both economic ambition and geopolitical anxiety.

It is a quintessentially American innovation, steeped in industrial bravado. Barbicane's rival, Stuyvesant Nicholl (George Sanders), a staunch defender of Southern propriety and the metaphysical limits of man, opposes him with scorn and theological dread. Their contest culminates in the destruction of Nicholl's prized metal by a modest cannon, a scene emblematic of American hubris masquerading as progress.

The film swiftly transitions from terrestrial warfare to extraterrestrial ambition. Discovering that the remnants of the demolished metal have transformed into an ideal substance for space travel, Barbicane redirects his genius toward the Moon.

 He proposes to launch a manned vessel beyond Earth’s grasp, employing the same explosive that once threatened civilization. The narrative then dilutes itself with the obligatory romantic entanglement between Debra Paget’s Virginia Nicholl and Don Dubbins’ Ben Sharpe. These characters, extraneous to Verne's novel, exist as concessions to mid-century Hollywood formulae, not to narrative necessity.

The visual effects, conceived on a vanishing RKO budget and later completed under Warner Brothers' aegis, are often derided. And justly so. The launch sequence is mired in quaint absurdities, its spacecraft marred by visible armatures and crude miniatures. Yet this lack of technical finesse reveals something more poignant: a yearning for wonder within the constraints of collapsing studio grandeur. This was, after all, RKO's swan song.

This yearning is palpable in Joseph Cotten’s performance, a portrait of tortured modernity. One glimpses, in his weary articulation, echoes of earlier greatness: his laconic menace in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), his disillusioned charm in The Third Man (1949). George Sanders, who had lent his oily gravitas to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and All About Eve (1950), here becomes a fossilized version of himself, expounding divine laws as though reading them from a ledger. Debra Paget, familiar from The Haunted Palace (1963) and Princess of the Nile (1954), is reduced to ornamental dread. Only Don Dubbins, known also for The Caine Mutiny (1954), brings a tremor of earnestness to the film's otherwise stilted ensemble.

Historically, the film gestures toward both the past and the imminent. Set in 1868, it evokes the industrial and ideological tensions of the Reconstruction era, yet its real referent is 1958, the year of its release. That year saw the founding of NASA in response to Sputnik, and America’s fevered entry into the Space Race. 

The specter of mutually assured destruction looms over Barbicane's Power X. Like the atomic bomb, it is invention as sacrilege. The film’s evocation of international alarm and presidential intervention mirrors contemporary fears of scientific overreach and geopolitical domino effects.

Yet its philosophical core is 19th-century. Verne's novel was an ironic ode to American zealotry, not merely in technology but in warfare and dominion. The Baltimore Gun Club, his original creation, was a society of maimed veterans thirsting for new purposes after the war. Verne, an admirer of Northern victory but wary of American expansionism, portrayed the United States as a nation driven by incomplete knowledge and irrepressible appetite. 

This ambivalence is absent in the film, replaced by an implicit endorsement of American ingenuity, tempered only by Nicholl's apocalyptic warnings.

Still, the religious opposition of Nicholl is not developed with the seriousness of theological critique. Instead, it functions as a narrative impediment, allowing for a final gesture of male sacrifice. He sabotages the ship to prevent the defilement of cosmic order, only to repent when his daughter is discovered aboard. The film ends not with conquest, but with resignation. The two elder men remain on the Moon, consigned to heroic immobility, while the young lovers return to Earth. It is an inversion of traditional narratives: the dreamers are left behind, marooned with their ambitions.

To be truthful we are not sure if this is in fact smoking in space at all from Joseph Cotten and in fact may just be high altitude. This tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post–American Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, and their attempts to build an enormous Columbiad space gun and launch three people – the Gun Club's president, his Philadelphian armor-making rival, and a French poet – in a projectile with the goal of a Moon landing. Five years later, Verne wrote a sequel called Around the Moon. 

But damn if this film does not reveal its fealty to patriarchal structures. Debra Paget’s character, Virginia, is denied agency. She exists only in relation to the men: as daughter, as love interest, as cargo. Her stowaway act is not rebellion but romantic impulse, and her survival is the narrative's ultimate concern. She is the feminine ideal of the 1950s: beautiful, passive, and salvageable. 

There is no woman among the engineers, no female voice in the debates over science and morality. Even her presence on the spacecraft is an accident, to be managed by the more competent male figures.

The film, though set in 1868, is a reflection of 1958. It partakes in the anxieties of its own decade: the arms race, the dawn of the space age, and the uncertain role of America as both prophet and predator in global affairs. The scientists and industrialists in the film are avatars of American exceptionalism, grappling with the ethical dimensions of their discoveries. That same year, American troops were dispatched to Lebanon to suppress perceived Communist influence. The projection of power, whether terrestrial or lunar, was central to American self-perception.

In this context, From the Earth to the Moon (1958) becomes a minor but telling episode in the history of American cinema. It does not belong to the pantheon of luminous science fiction, nor does it possess the elegance of Verne’s prose. But it offers a valuable study in cinematic miscalculation, where the grandeur of a concept is diminished by budgetary restrictions and thematic simplifications.

The film's connection to film noir, while tenuous, may be discerned in its moral opacity and fatalistic undertones. The relationship between Barbicane and Nicholl is one of adversarial intimacy. Their dialogue is freighted with menace and grudging respect, echoing the shadowy confrontations of noir detectives and criminals. 

The interiors of the ship, claustrophobic and dim, recall the confined spaces of noir apartments and back rooms. There is little triumph in the end, only a quiet doom. The last act, with two men willingly embracing their entombment on a lifeless world, has the bleak stoicism of noir's more metaphysical endings.

[last lines]

Josef Cartier: The report is out. They're getting ugly. This hoax rumor's gotten out to them.

Jules Verne: I've received telegraphic queries on that from New York. Apparently, the morning newspapers, they have implied that nobody was aboard the Columbiad.

Josef Cartier: So I heard, but the devil of it is that we'll never be able to prove it.

Jules Verne: Of course we will.

Aldo Von Metz: They haven't even been sighted since the meteor shower.

Jules Verne: You begin to doubt too, Mr. Von Metz?

Aldo Von Metz: Yes, I think Victor Barbicane is no longer alive. Do you?

Jules Verne: I am certain he's alive. The trouble with scientists is, Mr. Von Metz, that they only deal with facts.

Aldo Von Metz: [grunts] And what do you deal with, Mr. Jules Verne?

Jules Verne: [staring straight into the camera] Something much more real than facts. Imagination, Mr. Von Metz.

Indeed, this is a film whose ambition exceeds its reach, much like the voyage it depicts. It is less a celebration of space travel than a lament for the costs of ambition. In that sense, it belongs to the lineage of films that interrogate progress rather than exalt it. Its lineage includes not only Verne's novel but also American skepticism: the fear that technology might unmoor man from his moral foundations.

Desk to camera with Carl Esmond as Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon (1958)

To assess this film is to consider its failures as provocations. Its shortcomings are instructive, not disqualifying. The film is a relic of a vanishing studio system, an early meditation on the ethics of science, and a forgotten bridge between 19th-century prophecy and 20th-century anxiety. Its Moon is not a place of conquest, but of exile. Its voyage is not one of enlightenment, but of reckoning.

From the Earth to the Moon (1958)

Directed by Byron Haskin

Genres - Action-Adventure, Fantasy, Science Fiction  |   Release Date - Nov 26, 1958  |   Run Time - 101 min.  |