JULES VERNE’S ROCKET TO THE MOON

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1967 | U | Blu-ray/dvd/download

Director Don Sharp

Cast Burl Ives, Troy Donahue,

Lionel Jeffries, Terry-thomas

As the real-life space race accelerated, cinema retreated into Victorian nostalgia with this loosest of adaptations of Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From The Earth To The Moon. It’s parlour room sci-fi, all frock coats, whiskers and mahogany, but producer Harry Alan Towers – an inveterate chancer – is chasing another kind of box office success: whimsical, star-stuffed period romps like Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. Familiar faces like Burl Ives, Gert Fröbe and Britain’s very own gap-toothed rapscallion Terry-thomas populate this tale of lunar rivalry, elevating it to charming guff, at least.

It’s an ambitious movie by Towers’s penny-pinching standards. Panavision makes the most of the film’s landscape of country estates, which look ravishing in this new restoration. But that ambition only goes so far; the chicanery remains resolutely Earthbound.

Extras An interview with cultural commentator Matthew Sweet (24 minutes), who’s illuminating on the life and career of Towers, plus another with critic Kim Newman

(21 minutes), who provides excellent cinematic context. There’s also some brief, silent behind-the-scenes footage (one minute). Nick Setchfield