Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon * (1967, Burl Ives, Troy Donahue, Gert Fröbe, Terry-Thomas) – Classic Movie Review 12,474

Director Don Sharp’s amiable enough but dithering 1967 colour British science fiction comedy film Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon stars Burl Ives, Troy Donahue, Gert Fröbe, Terry-Thomas, Hermione Gingold, Lionel Jeffries, Dennis Price, and Daliah Lavi.

The cast is good, and so is the director, so it could have been a contender, but there is too much slapstick and not enough exciting action and movement. It dillies and dallies and dithers when it should be briskly getting on with the job of entertaining. As so often, the script lets down the game performers. The distributors announced a ‘wild adventure laced with comedy’, and thereby lies all the trouble.

Producer Harry Alan Towers (credited as Peter Welbeck) devises the story, very loosely based on the 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, and the screenplay is by TV comedy writer Dave Freeman. Towers’s original story is credited as being ‘inspired by the writings of Jules Verne’.

The film was shot in Ireland, starting on 6 August 1966. The rocket launch was shot at the site of a disused copper mine in Avoca in Co Wicklow. Other exteriors were shot in the sand dunes of Brittas Bay. Interiors were shot at Ardmore Studios, south of Dublin.

Reginald H Wyer shoots in Eastmancolor, and it looks pretty good.

It was released in the UK on 13 July 1967 by Warner-Pathé.

It was released in the US by American International Pictures (AIP) in Los Angeles on 26 July 1967 as Those Fantastic Flying Fools to try to capitalise on the success of Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines two years earlier, which also starred Terry-Thomas and Gert Fröbe, and where Don Sharp was second unit director responsible for the aerial sequences.

It was not a hit for AIP, who cut it from 117 minutes to 95 minutes and released it as Blast-Off elsewhere in the US, and then had another flop.

Bing Crosby, Senta Berger and Wilfrid Hyde-White were going to star but Burl Ives and Daliah Lavi stood in for Crosby and Berger, and Lionel Jeffries replaced Hyde-White.

The cast are Burl Ives as Phineas T Barnum, Troy Donahue as Gaylord Sullivan, Gert Fröbe as Professor Siegfried von Bulow, Hermione Gingold as Angelica, Lionel Jeffries as Sir Charles Dillworthy, Dennis Price as The Duke of Barset, Daliah Lavi as Madelaine, Terry-Thomas as Captain Sir Harry Washington-Smythe, Stratford Johns as Royal Engineer Sergeant, Graham Stark as Bertram Grundle, Renate von Holt as Anna Lindstrom, Jimmy Clitheroe as General Tom Thumb, Judy Cornwell as Lady Electra, Joachim Teege as Joachim Bulgeroff, Edward de Souza as Henri, Joan Sterndale-Bennett as Queen Victoria, Allan Cuthbertson as Colonel Scuttling, Hugh Walters as Carruthers, Derek Francis as Puddleby, and Anthony Woodruff as Announcer.

See also First Men in the Moon (1964).

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,474

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