A curious and weird journey to the moon in Fritz Lang's 1929 silent

Fritz Lang's 1929 scifi silent film The Woman in the Moon (he's much better known for some of his early German films, M and Metropolis, e.g.) is kind of a kick to watch, despite the obvious difficulties in watching a silent film with all the exaggerated hand waving and embraces. The plot is silly and ridiculous, of course: A "mad" scientist has devoted his life to developing plans for a lunar expedition, in search of what he believes to be lunar mountains rich in gold ore(!); a former coleague, Helius, wants to help, but they run afoul of a gang that steals the mission plans - also hoping to get access to lunar gold. Eventually, the scientist, Helius, the evil rival, plus a young man and woman (Frieda) who'd also worked for the scientist (plus a young boy stowaway!) make the journey. As it happens, H. has been in love w/ F., who has just announced her engagement to the young man - we we have a romantic subplot. All of this is by the by; what's cool about the film today is to see how they envisioned space travel a century ago, what they got wrong (gold on the moon!) and, surpringly right! The rocket itself looks not too different from the Apollo rockets, although in this case it's supposed to be feather-light. But they did foresee the use of a three-rocket booster system, and it also looks as if they got right the "slingshot" approach to leaving the pull of the Earth. On the other hand, they had no sense of life in space once the crew breaks through the G-forces (they got that right, though they didn't have a term for it); the spaces inside the ship look like a modest, four bedroom apartment, with some funny straps to enable walking in zero-gravity (they got that right, too). What they got way, way wrong however, or at least altogether ignored, is the engineering - it appears as if they launched by aiming at a full moon!, and from that point on everything - including a lunar landing and later take off - just more or less happened, w/out any human intervention. The scenes on the moon are fantastic, largely because of the great Expressionist backdrop of lunar peeks and a starry sky (they seem to think it's always night on the dark side of the moon; wrong!) and the dusty surface requiring the use of moon boots, much like those actually used by the astronauts. There's an excellent fight scene toward the end, and a much anticipated cornball ending - but the quirkiness and weirdness of the lunar scenes make this curiosity worth a look,