Not the 11th sequel

I mentioned having purchased a six-movie set of sci-fi films distributed by Columbia some weeks back, and recently watched another movie off that set, 12 to the Moon.

Francis X. Bushman plays the head of the International Space Order, an organization that's planning the first manned trip to the moon in a spirit of international peace. (The movie implies that space exploration has been going on for some time which would put the setting of the movie several years at least past the 1960 release date, but doesn't actually mention when it's set.) He announces the twelve members of the crew, captained by American John Anderson (Ken Clark) but being thoroughly international, including a Soviet scientist Orloff (Tom Conway); a German with a past Heinrich (John Wengraf); two women, one each from Japan and Sweden; and a black geologist from Nigeria (Cory Devlin) who, while not given a big subplot of his own like some of the other characters and not a lead, is treated with more respect than pretty much any black character at the time not played by Sidney Poitier.

The crew launches in a spacecraft that seems way too big for what's pictured on the outside, and face some of the tropes that are common to other movies of the 1950s and early 1960s that featured space travel before humans actually went into space, such as a meteor shower with meteors that are much too big and probably would have been detected before launch in the real world. There's also the error of a dog that's not strapped in on launch; a pair of cats for a breeding experiment is kept in a cage. But eventually, the spacecraft does make a successful landing on the moon!

The 12 go out to explore, but things don't go all that well on the moon, mostly because it turns out that there's some sort of civilization, unseen, living in a sealed city underneath the lunar surface. They communicate with some form of glyphs that don't look like Chinese ideoglyphs or any alphabet I'd recognize, but our Kanji-literate (Kanji being a subset of the Chinese glyphs) scientist is still expected to be able to read the stuff. The humans are being warned not to come back to the moon, because this advanced civilization is worried about human passions leading to the destruction of space if unleashed off the earth's surface.

So after losing a couple of crew members, the survivors beat a hasty retreat back to Earth, before learning just how powerful this lunar civilization is. Apparently, they have the power to freeze the lower atmosphere and put people in suspended animation or something similar, since they're unable to communicate with mission control in the US and they pick up European broadcasts saying that the Europeans haven't heard from North America in several hours. (Humorously, for a disaster of such epic proportions, the bulletin says that they'll return the listener to the regularly scheduled programming.) The space crew has the power to solve the problem, but it involves crashing a shuttle craft into a volcano, which everybody recognizes is a suicide mission. And wouldn't you know, the short straws are drawn by the German who is the son of a Nazi, and an Israeli who was born in Poland and lost his family in the Holocaust.

12 to the Moon is a decided B movie, helped by the cinematography of prominent noir cameraman John Alton. Other production values are low -- have fun figuring out what was used as props, such as a darkroom camera or some even lower-budget items. The plot is threadbare, and the acting nothing worth mentioning. Note, however, that one of the crew is played by Robert Montgomery's son (and Elizabeth's brother) Bob Montgomery Jr., whose acting career didn't go anywhere.

12 to the Moon is little more than Saturday matinee B fare, but in that genre it's no worse than all the other B science fiction movies of the era.