Frau Im Mond

Fritz Lang’s last silent movie, Frau Im Mond (‘Woman In The Moon’) mixes sci-fi, melodrama and boys’ own adventure into a sprawling mishmash that runs near on three hours. It’s the SF element that works best: Lang called in top rocket scientists to design his spaceship, with results so accurate to reality that the film was later suppressed by the Nazis on state-security grounds.

But the like-triangle plot creaks and the acting’s OTT, though Fritz Rasp makes a ripely sinister villain with designs on the moon’s massive reserves of gold.