Woman in the Moon

Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond, 1929) is Fritz Lang's silent science-fiction epic, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Professor Manfeldt is laughed out of the room for claiming the Moon holds mountains of gold — until a stranger turns up willing to fund the trip.

The crew that boards the rocket is a tangle of motives: a devoted engineer, a woman two men are in love with, a ruthless financier, and a stowaway boy raised on pulp adventure tales. At nearly three hours, Lang takes his time, braiding a love triangle and a swindle into the voyage itself. This is the picture that first staged a launch countdown — "five, four, three…" — dreamed up purely to tighten the screws on the audience.

Lang worked with rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth, and the multi-stage craft looked close enough to real designs that the film was later pulled from circulation during the war years. Made at UFA by the same team behind Metropolis, it runs slow by modern standards but stays essential for anyone tracing where screen sci-fi began. Stream Woman in the Moon (1929) online on iFILM.