Steno
Totò nella Luna

More than ten years before what history recognizes as the first moon landing, on July 20, 1969, when at 20:18 UTC Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 mission (the other members were, as we know, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins) set foot on the lunar surface and solemnly declared, 'That's one small step for man, but giant leap for mankind', another 'earthly creature' had indeed already crossed that threshold and achieved the great feat first among all.

This man was Antonio de Curtis, known in the arts simply as Totò, the so-called 'prince of laughter', and who in this film directed by Steno, we recognize as knight Pasquale de Poggio Mirteto, by profession the publisher of the magazine 'Soubrette', a small publishing house whose publications, derivative of what was the 'theater of revue', are characterized mainly by the presence on the cover of photographs of attractive women mostly belonging to the world of variety, the café-chantant, operetta, avanspettacolo. Indeed, the world of 'variety' was where what is probably the most popular 'mask' of Italian cinema was formed and which in this film directed by the director Steno aka Stefano Vanzina, named 'Totò nella Luna', in 1958 was sent directly and against his will to the lunar surface with a rocket built by an unscrupulous foreign power, probably East Germany, led by the interplanetary scientist Von Braut (Luciano Salce) and the attractive spy Tatiana (a beautiful Sandra Milo).

However, how was it possible for Totò to achieve this feat more than ten years before Neil Armstrong and in an unsuspecting era when the race for space conquest between the USA and the USSR was not yet a dominant theme (Jurij Gagarin would complete an entire elliptical orbit around the Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft only two years later, on April 12, 1961) and even before the famous declarations of the US President John F. Kennedy at the special session of Congress on May 25, 1961, when he declared that the moon landing would be accomplished by the end of the decade and that this constituted a priority objective of the American space program and the most important long-range space exploration.

The work was accomplished primarily thanks to the skillful writing of two masters in the history of Italian cinema, Steno and Lucio Fulci, who together wrote the screenplay, revisiting in a parodic key, as typically happened in films starring Totò, several films of the genre on space conquest. Among these are 'Destination Moon' (1950) by Irvin Pichel (produced by George Pal) awarded an Oscar for best special effects in 1951, and especially 'La morte viene dallo spazio' (1958) directed by Paolo Heusch and considered the first science fiction film in the history of Italian cinema.

The film tells the story of knight Pasquale from Poggio Mirteto and Achille Paoloni (Ugo Tognazzi), a naive young man hired by his publishing house as a messenger with the great dream of becoming a science fiction writer and seeing his first novel 'Il razzo nello spazio' published. Among other things, Achille is also in love with the knight's daughter, Lidia (Sylva Koscina), who reciprocates his love but would like to see him accomplished before getting married (conditio sine qua non would be the father's authorization, who does not see the young Achille well at all, subjecting him to all kinds of harassment).

A series of circumstances, however, change the fate of our characters when it is discovered that Achille's blood contains 'glumonio', a substance inherited from unusual feeding with monkey milk when he was a newborn, which according to US scientists would make him suitable for space travel. Extraterrestrial forces (the 'Anellidi') will try in every way to thwart the Americans' plans; FBI agents will indeed travel to Italy to persuade Achille to attempt the feat, and to prevent this space journey from taking place, proceed to send to Earth two 'cosoni', identical copies of the knight and Achille, and that develop through the growth of primordial 'bean sprouters'. But even their intervention, which at other times had managed to thwart the plans of the Earthlings, will eventually fail to prevent the first man's journey into space from taking place and Totò from reaching the lunar surface.

A Moon that appears completely different from the one we see in historical footage or those that according to conspiracy theorists would be the work of director Stanley Kubrick's reconstructions. The Moon indeed appears, yes, completely rocky and full of craters, but at the same time, it is also 'smoky' and in any case with an atmosphere practically identical to that of Earth. In this new dimension, Totò, as the first ambassador of planet Earth to the extraterrestrials, who better than him after all, meets for the first time the representative of the Anellidi and with whom by virtue of his typical negotiating skill, concludes what will turn out to be a particularly advantageous deal for him (those who have done military service in Cuneo know what I am talking about) despite the impossibility of returning to planet Earth where a 'cosone' has definitively replaced him, proving to be, by virtue of his good-natured and naive character like that of an infant, a real deal for Achille and Lidia, who in the meantime (because of a time-space distortion whereby half an hour of space travel equates to passing several years on planet Earth) have happily married and had children.

Ahead of historical times and those related to the field of cinematography, thus equally before Gagarin and before Apollo 11, but also before film productions like 'Interstellar' that tackle topics such as space-time, Totò, as in other cases concerning his vast cinematic production and not just the several 'parodies' of successful genres, is the protagonist (surrounded as usual by a series of great value character actors like the various Luciano Salce, Agostino Salvietti, the great Giacomo Furia, not to mention the partnership with a very talented and young Ugo Tognazzi) of an adventure that surpasses every known science principle, but also science fiction and which beyond all logic leads him as usual to cross every boundary of infinite space and time.