Victorian science fiction film location

 New Haw Lock cottage this afternoon

I was on my way to Addlestone model shop today as I had, annoyingly, run out of white paint and the colour I use for shading skin.  Taking a back route I drove past New Haw lock on the Wey Canal.  I decided to stop and take a picture of the lock cottage as it featured in one of my favourite Victorian-set science fiction films: The First Men in the Moon (1964).

It played the part of Cherry Tree Cottage, home of the hero of the film, Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd), who travelled to the moon in 1899 aboard a Cavorite sphere  designed by Professor Cavor (Lionel Jeffries).   The film is based on a novel by HG Wells but adds a modern prologue wherein today's astronauts make the first Moon landing only to discover a Union flag on the moon and a note claiming it for Queen Victoria.  Released five years before the actual Moon landing the film had a multinational United Nations crew undertaking the present day landing.  Back on Earth the UN team track down surviving astronaut Bedford via the local registry office (played by Chertsey Town Hall a few miles from where I lived - the film was shot at Shepperton Studios, a mile from my old home).

Another addition to Wells' story was the presence, on the voyage to the Moon, of a young lady, Kate Callender, played by Martha Hyer (seen above outside the cottage).

Miss Hyer posed in some period underwear for publicity shots for the film but, sadly, this costume didn't actually appear in the film itself.   Here she is on the Moon set at Shepperton with the sphere in the background and holding one of the spacesuits used in the present day sequences.  

As worn by Bossk in The Empire Strikes Back  

This suit was actually an RAF Windak high altitude pressure suit and the same design also made several appearances in the original Star Wars trilogy.  Some of the A-Wing pilots wore them too in the hangar scene in the first Star Wars film which was, coincidentally, also shot at Shepperton.

Martha Hyer's career was already somewhat on the wane by the time she appeared in The First Men in the Moon.  She had been nominated for an Oscar in Some Came Running (1958), playing opposite Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.  She appeared in a lot of TV series and foreign productions in the sixties and early seventies. 

She was, surprisingly, thirty nine years old when she appeared in First Men in the Moon (she was actually seven years older older than Edward Judd and two years older than Lionel Jeffries).  Her last screen appearance was in an episode of TV police series McCloud in 1974.  In 1966 she married legendary Hollywood producer Hal B Wallis who was 25 years her senior.  Wallis produced some of the great films of the classic Hollywood era including: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Casablanca (1942), Now Voyager (1942) and True Grit (1967).  Martha Hyer died last May at the age of eighty nine.

The film itself,  is very enjoyable with a strong cast, Ray Harryhausen effects and a creepily mysterious score by Laurie (The Avengers) Johnson.

Harryhausen's stop motion Selenites certainly gave me the creeps when I was little!

The design of the sphere is also very good with its railway buffer shock absorbers and the interior is classic steampunk.  Some time ago I bought a resin model of it which has been sitting on my desk for some years.  

Unfortunately the top and bottom don't fit together very well and it may be beyond my modelling abilities to get it looking good.  I might have one more go at it as it would fit into a game of In Her Majesty's Name quite well, especially as I have the West Wind Professor Cavor figure somewhere too.

Steampunk Cheescake!

The Legatus is not really surprised to discover that there is a whole genre of Victorian steampunk cheesecake.  Certainly some of the wargames figures out there fall into this category and I am currently working on one now, although as she is one of the most challenging figures I have ever attempted to paint I'm not going to do any work in progress shots in case, as is quite likely, she turns out to be a total disaster!

Our first picture is by Taiwan-born American comic-book artist Ben Dunne who has actually written a book on how to draw steampunk; and their are quite a few books on this subject.   The young lady's weapons have a seventeenth century look to them.  She illustrates many of the conventions of the genre:  brass back pack, goggles, straps, random clock faces/pressure gauges and an inability to keep her upper thigh covered. Her blouse is more early Edwardian and, in common with a lot of these pictures, she sports anachronistic suspenders (garter belt for our American friends) for her stockings. Dunne was influenced by Manga early on while living in Taiwan as can be seen from her face.

A sword-armed lady this one, channeling Catherine Zeta-Jones, in Zorro perhaps.  Hopeless underwear here: Victorian ladies would have worn knee length drawers, no suspenders and bras hadn't been invented yet.  Probably a scientist could work out exactly how many sword strokes it would have needed to render her into this state.

This is a better effort, although it is let down by the suspenders and the sheer stockings.  The wings are intriguing.

Pistol connected to backpack. Check.  Goggles check!  Random dials attached to stockings. Check.  At least this girl doesn't have suspenders but the required tightness of her garter, in order to support all those brass dials, would surely cut off the blood to her legs.  The gloves are a nice touch but the effort of lugging all that equipment around has given her rather fearsome shoulder muscles.

Our next steampunk heroine, who looks like she may, in fact be the one above her as well, is certainly generating a lot of steam from her enormous, but rather nineteen thirties, backpack. She is encased in a frankly very un-Victorian catsuit affair. Her shoes are wrong so we can’t give this effort a high mark. Where are her goggles? Where are her dials?

More steam in this one and at least she has boots and goggles. Her trousers, vest and screwdriver all put her rather later than the nineteenth century, however.  Still she would make a good engineer (no doubt the Professor's wayward niece) in the engine room of a steam powered tunnelling machine or some prototype land dreadnought.

A trio of ladies, now, and not a backpack in sight but a very assertively displayed frontpack instead. Goggles straps (one of which appears to be dragging the centre lady’s petticoat rapidly southwards) and big brass-bound pistols are in evidence. There is not much point in having a corset that is so abbreviated that it doesn’t cover the waist, however.   The lady on the right has a nicely sportif hat; ideal for riding or a spot of archery, perhaps.

This picture of two exhausted looking maids (why are they so tired, we ask?) was the first steampunk cheesecake picture we found. What is that, exactly, gazing at them through the window? Perhaps it is a Victorian gentleman paid to play phonograph cylinders looking for a young lady to moles...,er, impress? A reasonable attempt at the stockings but those knickers are hopeless. The bra, of course, didn’t really catch on until the period of the Great War with the first short, boned camisole appearing in about 1900. It certainly didn’t look anything like this frothy, abbreviated little number.

The final one, I have to say, is my favourite. Not only does the lady look feistily independent but her clothes are much better; with lace cuffs, ankle boots and striped stockings, which were very popular at the end of the nineteenth century. She has a nice hat too. Too many of these ladies are out and about without hats which is certainly not the thing!  The brass encased fingers add the requisite steampunk element as does her fearsome looking pistol

So, I hope to get on with my own steampunk heroine this weekend.