Search - Man in the Moon on DVD

Watch Out for the Rocket Sled!

Henry S. Leavitt | White River Junction, Vermont | 09/13/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

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Man in the Moon (UK, 1960, B&W, d/Basil Dearden)



The production values of this disk would normally land it in the bargain bin at your local drug store with a price somewhere around $3.99. The black and white image is okay on a computer screen and the British accents are sometimes a little hard to make out. Subtitles or captions would be nice, but there are none. The disk doesn't even include the trailer.



The feature itself, however, is one of those minor classics that independent UK studios were so good at creating decades ago. The antics of William Blood, whose sole qualification for a top-secret astronaut training program seems to be his inability to get sick, are (mostly) of the understated, tongue-in-cheek, stiff-upper-lip, hell-of-a-way-to-run-a-railway variety never quite duplicated on this side of the pond. Some of the humor centers on the fussiness of British bureaucracy but almost all of it translates perfectly well. This is a clever and funny movie, out of circulation for far too long. If it cost a fraction of its list price, it would be a marvelous bargain as well.



One advisory, however: the production bureaucrats who packaged the disk put a quite unnecessary spoiler in the blurb on the back of the box, and it's repeated in the online product description. It might be best to avoid reading it until after watching the movie.



Bottom line: Rather overpriced, I think, but still a nice bit of British whimsey."