The New Pictures

Destination Moon (George Pal; Eagle Lion Classics) proves that, in Hollywood, the sky's no longer the limit. The picture speculates entertainingly in Technicolor on what may happen when man takes his first 240,000-mile flight by rocket to the moon. For a piece of science fiction, it has a surprising amount of respect for scientific fact.

What the movie mainly lacks is enough respect for fiction. It is more convincing after it gets into outer space than during its earth-bound prelude, when a group of U.S. industrialists feel compelled to sponsor the lunar expedition because the Government fails to foresee the trip's military importance. Happily, the script draws the line at romance in the rocket or on the moon, but it does go in for some unrelieved comic relief by a lowbrow crew member from Brooklyn.

Destination Moon uses expert technical tricks to picture the oddities of travel beyond the earth's atmosphere and gravity Its four lunar explorers--a physicist (Warner Anderson), an industrialist (John Archer), a retired general (Tom Powers) and a dimwit radio operator (Dick Wesson)--float weirdly around the inside of the rocket until they put on magnetized boots. Then they can walk on the walls. When a radar antenna jams, they go out on the hull in pressurized monkey suits to make repairs while traveling at seven miles a second. The scientist slips off into space, and his traveling companions stage a fantastic rescue that dramatizes the strange laws of spatial physics. Later, the explorers bound in seven-league strides along the cracked, cratered moonscape where gravity is only one-sixth of what it is in films that take place on the earth.

A trip to the moon will probably seem like elementary stuff to hardened fans who take their science fiction on the printed page. But the excursion is ideally suited to the wizardry of the movie camera.

The Next Voice You Hear (MGM) belongs to God, broadcasting on the radio (all networks and local stations) to an errant world. The Voice's effect on an average U.S. family makes an inspirational little fable, shrewdly manipulated to warm moviegoers' hearts. Almost sure to receive both cheers and sneers, the picture fully merits neither. Simpleminded, ploddingly earnest, sometimes awkward and dull, it is less intriguing than its idea. Yet it is also more wary of the subject's pitfalls than might be expected.

Produced by M-G-M Production Chief Dore Schary,* the film begins by picturing the petty domestic frictions and foibles of Joe Smith (James Whitmore), a California aircraft worker, his pregnant wife (Nancy Davis) and their ten-year-old son (Gary Gray). Joe is sympathetic but short-tempered; he chafes at routine, hates his foreman (Art Smith), grimaces at his wife's box lunches, fumes at his stalling jalopy. One evening, in the Smith living room, the Voice breaks into a radio program to say: "This is God. I will be with you for the next few days." The rest of the world's radio listeners hear it, too, each in his own language.

On succeeding evenings, the Voice is heard again at the same hour. It speculates on the need for 40 days & nights of rain--and a token cloudburst follows. It chides unbelievers and laggards: "Create for yourselves the miracles of kindness and goodness and peace. You are like children going to school. You have forgotten some of your lessons. I ask you to do your homework for tomorrow."

Skeptical and annoyed at first, Joe grows panicky, goes off on a binge, almost succumbs to "the voice of evil," personified in a badly played scene by a talkative bar fly. He comes home drunk and shocks his son into running away. But after remorse sets in, he regains his son and his faith in time for a happy ending: with the family wreathed in a glow of good will as the second baby arrives, and the world's churches filled to overflowing, the Voice is still.

Many of the film's good points are curiously bound up with its faults. By some elaborately contrived plotting, the Charles Schnee script has taste enough never to allow the voice of God to be heard on the sound track (though it cannot avoid letting the actors quote Him at second hand). It also sensibly refrains from letting the radio pronouncements touch off a spree of miracles. While trying to pave the way to heaven with good, nonsectarian intentions, it winds up as a naive theological hodgepodge, finally flattens its concept of God into a fuzzy, sentimental pantheism.

Other mortal weaknesses: some of the picture's homely details of lower middle-class life are theatrical and patronizing; William Wellman's uneven direction is inclined to be sticky; Actor Whitmore mars an otherwise good performance with a few grotesque excesses. As unmixed blessings, Next Voice offers a fine, attractive piece of well-balanced acting by Nancy Davis and the most refreshingly frank, unaffected view of pregnancy yet shown by Hollywood. Vulnerable as it is, the movie is largely successful, on its own terms: a low common denominator of emotional appeal.

* On a low-budget ($475,000), short (14 days) shooting schedule that almost passes for a miracle itself at a studio traditionally geared to costly, timeconsuming, star-studded production.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.