You never breathed a single word in all the time you were planning to go on this lunatic expedition.
One decade after The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and It Came from Beneath the Sea, Ray Harryhausen was in a position to bring much more spectacular fantasies to the screen. So it was that he created the visual effects for the 1964 adaptation of H.G. Wells's First Men in the Moon. Boasting a screenplay by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale and Jan Read (co-writer of Jason and the Argonauts) and the services of director Nathan Juran (who had previously helmed The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), the film opens with a present-day moon landing that discovers proof of a previous lunar expedition all the way back at the turn of the century. Once its lone survivor is located, he relays the story of that fateful trip and the race of insect-like beings they found living beneath the moon's surface.
The main characters are a debt-ridden businessman (Edward Judd), who rents a cottage in the country so he can work on a play; his fiancée (Martha Hyer), who apparently has no idea how much he's in the hole; and his eccentric neighbor (Lionel Jeffries), an excitable research scientist working on an anti-gravity compound that will allow them to travel to the moon (and hopefully back). Jeffries is the prototypical absent-minded professor and hyperactive to boot, which is amusing at first but gets to be a bit much after a while. And like a good scientist he's keenly interested in communicating with the moon's denizens once they make their presence known, while the more practical Judd is more eager to get the hell out of Dodge. (Tellingly, Hyer is never consulted about the matter, but her character doesn't even exist in Wells's novel, so why should she have her own opinion?) All the while, Harryhausen presents us with dazzling visions and fantastical creatures, because that's what he does. Even if they lack the personality of 20 Millions Miles to Earth's Ymir, they're still damned impressive.
