Reaching For The Moon

A young man with the improbable name of Alexis Caesar Napoleon Brown dreams of fame and fortune, but has to settle for working at a button factory. After reading a self-help book, Alex believes he will become a success if he spends time concentrating on his goals daily. One day he concentrates a little too hard and his boss fires him for daydreaming. Devastated, the young man returns home to find a telegram from the small Balkan country of Vulgaria. Turns out his mother was Vulgarian royalty, and Alex is next in line to be king! He is soon swept up into a world of court intrigue, of romancing ladies-in-waiting and dueling with rivals for the throne. It's just like Alex dreamed...but it may be too good to be true!

Before he became an action star with The Mark of Zorro (1920), leading man Douglas Fairbanks was best known for comedies like Reaching for the Moon. Unfairly overlooked today compared to his later work, they paired Doug's athletic daring-do and boundless enthusiasm with an often satirical take on contemporary American culture and materialism. His collaborators for these films were the famed husband-and-wife team of director John Emerson and writer Anita Loos. Emerson began his career with D.W. Griffith, as an editor on the epic Intolerance (1916), and would eventually make a name for himself as a multi-talented actor, playwright, and director. During the sound era, Loos wrote such classics as Red-Headed Woman (1932), San Francisco (1936), and The Women (1939). Her 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes eventually became a hit musical and Hollywood film. Anita's script for Reaching for the Moon may have been an influence on James Thurber's famous 1939 short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,'' which was made into a classic movie in 1947 with Danny Kaye. In 1931, Fairbanks starred in another film called Reaching for the Moon, but it has no relation to the 1917 silent other than its title.