Trailer
Plot summary
In 1964 a United Nations rocket lands a multinational crew on the Moon, and they find a battered Union Jack and a handwritten note, dated sixty-five years earlier, claiming the Moon for Queen Victoria. On the back of the page is a court summons made out to Katherine Callender of Dymchurch in England. Her widowed husband Arnold Bedford is still alive in a nursing home, where the matron keeps television reports of the expedition from him because they excite him, and his lunar claims are dismissed as delusion. Questioned by United Nations representatives, Bedford tells how in 1899 he and his fiancee Kate Callender met their neighbor, the inventor Joseph Cavor, who had made Cavorite, a substance that nullifies gravity, and built a sphere to carry him to the Moon.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- John Forbes-Robertsonas First Reporter (uncredited)
- Kenneth Watsonas Second Reporter (uncredited)
- Sean Kellyas Col. Rice, Moon Landing Crew (uncredited)
- Gordon Robinsonas Sgt Andrew Martin, Moon Landing Crew (uncredited)
- John Murray Scottas Cosmonaut Nevsky, Moon Landing Crew (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about First Men in the Moon (1964)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- When the 1969 Moon landing happened, NASA found it had no footage of the capsule separating from the mother ship, so it went to Columbia Pictures and used the opening sequence of First Men in the Moon to illustrate the landing; all NASA had was Neil Armstrong walking around.
- The UN astronauts' spacesuits were real Windak high-altitude pressure suits developed for the Royal Air Force, each fitted with a 1960s aqualung cylinder as a backpack. The same suits later appeared in two Doctor Who stories, "The Tenth Planet" (1966) and "The Wheel in Space" (1968), and as the costumes for Bossk and Bo Shek in the original Star Wars trilogy.
SPOILER
Screenwriter Nigel Kneale added the ending in which the Selenites are wiped out by a cold virus carried to the Moon by the professor, an idea he took directly from The War of the Worlds, because he knew a country would soon reach the Moon and find no Selenites there.- Edward Judd called the shoot "bloody hard work", and Lionel Jeffries called it "acting with chalk marks" because the two actors pointed at things that were not there and had to deal with blue backing and traveling mattes.
- A second writer was brought in to rework Nigel Kneale's script and make it funnier than he had imagined, and Kneale says this push for comedy inspired the casting of Lionel Jeffries.
