Cosmic Journey

In 1946 an old professor, blocked by the institute, takes a rocket to the moon with a young woman, a stowaway boy, and a cat. Weightlessness is done with wires and slow motion, the moon's low gravity with stop-motion figures leaping across a plaster landscape, and the launch ramp is a mile of studio miniature; Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the rocket theorist, advised and drew sketches. Vasily Zhuravlyov directs for a young audience with a boy's seriousness about equipment, a quarter of a century before anyone went, and the cabin looks closer to the real thing than most of what followed. Silent, one of the last. Mosfilm, 1936.