20,000 Leagues Under Sea (1954)

Nemotherapy

20,000 Leagues Under Sea
Directed by Richard Fleischer
USA 1954
Disney DVD Region 2

Much as I would have liked to watch this 1954 Disney version of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea on a nice Blu Ray transfer, I was unable to afford the frankly extortionate cost (plus club membership fee for the privilege) that Disney charge for their Blu Ray of this one (around the area of treble figures is not my thing). So I just picked up their old DVD for a fiver, thanks very much!

Now, I know I must have seen this at least once as a kid on television (possibly not in colour) but there’s not a great deal I remembered about it, to be honest… so it was like discovering this film all over again, this time around. It’s got a great cast too… although, as usual, there are elements, about the casting even, that are at odds with Jules Verne’s original novel. And by that I mean we have the great James Mason playing Nemo himself so… as you can see, not an Indian with a turban etc as I seem to remember him appearing in the novel (something the 1916 version, which I reviewed here kinda got right… but not without its own problems). That being said, the trade off is worth it as he embodies Nemo, who is often depicted as more an enigma than a real person, with great depth and soul and you can see the struggle of his torment as Professor Aronnax (played by Paul Lukas), one of his prisoners/guest on the Nautilus, challenges his ideas and motives. 

Two other big names also join the cast, with Kirk Douglas performing the rebellious and often comic relief spirit of harpooner Ned Land. And not to forget Aronnax’ life long assistant Conseil, played here by the mighty Peter Lorre himself. I mean, Lorre is always fantastic to watch but the chemistry he has with Kirk Douglas here is off the charts. 

The real stars of this movie, though, are the wonderful sets and designs. I mean, everything looks so big. Even the small hotel room Arronax and Conseil are sharing at the start of the adventure looks so large and ornate it’s like a palace. And that’s before we even get to the Nautilus submarine, which is itself a nice ornate design (not much like the plain one in the original novel, to be fair) and the interiors are equally large and colourfully lit. Indeed, it’s a big, bright, colourful film (even on this DVD transfer) and it must have cost Disney a lot of money to produce this.

And, as I mentioned in my review of the 1916 version of the tale (which is nowhere near as aligned to the original novel as this one), Disney went to the same location in the Bahamas to do all of the underwater photography scenes. But here, of course, they’re writ large in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, in colour and look equally fantastic. This one must look great in a cinema.

And the effects look wonderful too. Even the giant squid attack towards the end of the movie looks great. Now, I know they had to reshoot it because it didn’t look so fantastic in the daylight so they reshot the fight with the squid in a rainy, night time storm setting but, honestly, for a practical effect this one looks way more convincing than CGI could have done. I was totally sold on it… which I wasn’t expecting. 

So... great colours, great performances, a cute seal and some very grand music makes 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, in this iteration, a big winner. And, to boot, there’s that thing about Jules Verne never seeming to have female characters who are in with the main antagonists. Well, I was wondering who the leading lady would be that they would add in the story and… woah… there isn’t one. They did it straight to the book on that account. That being said, when Kirk Douglas enters the picture he has a woman on each arm so… maybe the producers were trying to compensate for the lack of female presence for the rest of the movie. Personally I think all films should have lots of cool women in them but… when it comes to adaptation then maybe follow the source would be my motto.

And that’s me done with the 1954 version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea… Mason’s performance as the Captain is the one to measure others by (in all but ethnicity), even if he continually decides to play exactly what you’re expecting him to on that big organ of his (yeah… it’s Bach’s Toccata And Fugue In D Minor again people!). Disney would, of course, partially remake this film in the late 1970s as The Black Hole… and you can read my review of that one here.

The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 1

Victorian Justice League

The League Of
Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 1
by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
America’s Best Comics
ISBN  9781563898587

Okay... so very behind the times but I’m finally catching up with the first collected edition of Volume 1 of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and, this is the story the film was purported to be based on... I’ll get to that in a minute, in no uncertain terms.

My first observation, which gave me a chuckle, is that the publishers of the book are called America’s Finest Comics which... well, I think it says it all when you realise that the story is written by the great Alan Moore, the famous English author and drawn by the great, again English, comic book illustrator Kevin O’Neill. Both of these talents are one of a kind geniuses hailing from the UK.

Indeed Moore is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest writer in comics of all time... nobody else even comes close (except for Neil Gaiman, perhaps... but not that close). Many films have been made of his properties and he’s tried to distance himself from the movie ‘adaptations’ as much as possible, going so far as to have his name removed from the credits of various big budget versions. His greatest work though is, curiously, untouched by Hollywoodland... namely The Ballad Of Halo Jones for 2000AD, which I still count as the single greatest piece of literature ever written, comic book or otherwise.

Kevin O’ Neill I also discovered from those early issues of 2000AD back in the day, drawing such strips as Nemesis The Warlock, among many others. His style is certainly unique and, well he passed away in 2022 and is very much missed.

Now then, I always quite liked the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen but, golly, having now read the original story on which it’s said to be based, I have to say I’m very unhappy about the way the movie turned out. It’s nothing like. It doesn’t have the breadth of the original tale in any way, shape or form. It’s like the writers of the film just threw a few related characters together (some of them and certainly not all the same ones or even with the same personalities) and did their own thing.

Take Allan Quatermain, for example. Depicted as an old man as Sean Connery was when he played him for sure but, the movie version didn’t have him spending all his time fighting off his addiction to drugs and so on. Some of the characters are also similar but, not quite the same. For instance, the Mr. Hyde version of Dr. Jeykll is an abomination, using quite shocking swear words and basically ‘hulking out’ whenever an unstoppable and violent force is needed (like a wookie, good at tearing people’s arms off). Then there’s Mina Murray... it won’t take you long to realise that, before her divorce, she was Mina Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula... and since she was bitten she has, as far as this first volume is concerned, hypnotic persuasion. The Invisible Man is a bit of a villain but working with the group too... though not worrying about brutally killing innocent bystanders to help himself to things. And Captain Nemo, of course, who the film kind of got right, actually.... to an extent.

But it’s the depth of the other appearances too, in this world of 1898, as the group work together to wrest stolen Cavorite... yes that’s right, as invented by Dr. Cavor in H. G. Well’s The First Men In The Moon to aid space travel... from the fiendish Dr. Fu Manchu in the Limehouse region of London, where he builds a big war airship harnessing the Cavorite to bomb London. However, when ‘the league’ do finally get it back for the British Secret Service, they find out they were not working for whom they thought and were, in fact, working for Professor Moriarty, for his own fiendish schemes (there’s a lovely set of panels detailing how he survived the altercation with Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls).

So the league are, once again, on their way to retrieve the Cavorite and foil Moriarty’s plans... not realising that Moriarty was put in place as the Napoleon of Crime by the British Government itself, for reasons which might actually make some sense, if you’re as cynical as I am.

And on the way they meet a wealth of characters from popular literature of the time that had me lapping up this story and it’s lovely artwork with much joy. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s original detective character C. Auguste Dupin meets the league and puts them on the trail to recruit the Jekyll and Hyde character, who he thinks is a return of the monkey killer from The Murders In The Rue Morgue. They even, at some point, have to stay the night in a boarding school run by a certain Miss Rosa Coote from visceral Victorian BDSM tale Miss Coote’s Confessions, from the underground magazine The Pearl (among others... which started me on a course to sympathy with that particular lifestyle at a fairly young age... well, if the grown ups would leave notorious and bloody Victorian pornography around then, what do you expect?).

There’s even an appearance by the gang of the Artful Dodger at some point, who seems to be running the gang of pickpockets after the death of Bill Sikes in Dicken’s Oliver Twist.

But enough... I don’t want to spoil everything other than to say I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and I’m looking forward to reading the next one in the series, which I believe will make good on those shooting flares heading towards Earth from the planet Mars, which are mentioned in this one. What are the chances, eh?

Another Wordsworth Editions Guest Blog

Great Expositions

My look at the role and definition of the constant companions of literary heroes for Wordsworth Editions can be found here... http://wordsworth-editions.com/blog/great-expositions

Thanks very much for reading and thanks, as always, to Wordsworth for having me.