Captain Nemo And The Underwater City

Nemonomicon

Captain Nemo And 
The Underwater City
UK 1969 
Directed by James Hill
MGM Blu Ray Zone B (German)

Warning: Some spoilers just below the surface.

There’s a place I know where we can go, it’s such a lot to see,
It’s the fun food, the fun food factory.
Theme song from The Fun Food Factory

Okay... I assume I saw Captain Nemo And The Underwater City on television when I was a kid but there’s not much I remember about it, apart from the music. I wanted to give this one a watch while I was catching up and revisiting stories adapted and inspired by Jules Verne and, in the case of this one, ‘inspired by’ is a polite way of calling this one out in terms of having anything to do with the original source. 

I mean, you’ve got a white actor playing Captain Nemo, Hollywood veteran Robert Ryan and, he has a big submarine called Nautilus. And that’s about it in terms of this film having anything to do with Jules Verne, it’s sad to say. Although it would have been an entertaining, fun romp back in the day and, if you can divorce yourself from the perception of how a modern sci-fi action film should play, you may still have a good time with it now.

While, indeed, Nemo saves a bunch of people from drowning when their ship sinks at the start... unlike the original, he did not cause that sinking himself, he just comes to their dubious rescue and there’s no mention of the original character’s intent on destroying ocean vessels in this. Instead, although those rescued are still his prisoners, he takes them to his big undersea city where they can live a good life, if they so desire. The various rescued even have a small child and his kitten with them so, yeah, we’re definitely in a very different world than that created by Verne.

The main survivors are played by Chuck Connors, Bill Fraser (of Bootsie and Snudge fame), Kenneth Connor (who you’ve probably seen in the odd Carry On film from time to time), Allan Cuthbertson (who is set up as the human villain of the piece but dies already, half way through the movie) and also... Nanette Newman. Now I’ve not seen her in much stuff, it has to be said but I remember her as the host of a really annoying children’s TV programme in the mid 1970s called The Fun Food Factory. It’s a TV show that the IMDB barely registers the existence of, dating it as 1976 but listing it as having zero episodes and... perhaps it’s best this show and its annoying title song has officially vanished from the those seeking the stats.. although at least one episode can be found on YouTube (watch it at your peril is what I say). But I used to tune into it on occasion because I liked Nanette Newman and so it’s nice seeing her in a movie such as this. She has a good presence as the mother of the aforementioned sprog and it’s strongly hinted she will be Nemo’s romantic interest after the story of this one, such as it is, has played out. Alas, although she has good presence in the film, she doesn’t really have much to do and could have done with a better written part, to be honest. 

The other big female role in this, playing one of the community living under the sea and also acting as a love interest for Chuck Connors’ character, is the lovely Luciana Paluzzi... who was, of course, the sultry, sexy SPECTRE assassin who tried to kill James Bond before later taking a shot in the back she intended for him in Thunderball (reviewed here). She has a bit more to do here but... yeah, the film is not really big on building decent characters, I would say. 

Now this was made on a shoestring budget but, even so, the scope of the sets and the design of the production is mostly rather good (there’s even some beautiful Bavaesque lighting at one point). However, the fact that everything is made out of gold in the film is a bit of a problem because, although everything is painted with some kind of gold paint to make it seem expensive, the effect is to just make everything look a bit like it’s made out of cheap plastic. Which is a shame because the shot compositions and colours are pretty good. 

Apart from Captain Nemo’s diving suit, that is. 

This is black with big, glittery patterns on it and looks nothing less like a 1930s - 50s American western, decorative cowboy outfit. In the scenes where Ryan wears this stuff, he does look quite ridiculous, it’s sad to say. And, as it happens, the underwater farm sequence where Nemo is showing his ‘guests’ around the parts of the ocean which provide them all with food, looks more than competent but, honestly, slows the film down in pace and is a bit dull. 

One very good thing, though, is the score by Walter Stott (who later became Angela Morley and is billed like that on the FSM CD release from a few decades ago). That being said... an I’m not suggesting anything underhanded here... but the main theme sounds quite like the love theme that Jerry Goldsmith wrote for the 1984 movie Supergirl and the resemblance is so striking that I wonder if parts of this score turned up on the temp track for that movie, when Jerry was given the job (I guess I’ll never know, now). 

Other things of note is that Paluzzi plays something which is both similar and not at all like a theremin in one scene and, another note, a couple of people who ‘leave’ the city at the end of the picture should surely have decompression sickness when they reach the ocean’s surface. They come up way too quick. And the last note I have on this from when I was watching the movie is that Chuck Connors’ hair here is one of the most scary things you’ll see in this tale. I’m assuming it was a wig but, whatever it is, you certainly wouldn’t miss him and his aggressive locks walking down the street. 

And that’s me done here... Captain Nemo And The Underwater City is a pleasant film with not too much going for it to make it stand out in its own right and certainly nothing to do with the source material. If you like Nemo and The Nautilus then you might give it a look but, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to anyone. Incidentally, I had to pick this one up on a German Blu Ray disc because the film is not available in the UK or US, alas. It’s completely English friendly and has the original UK language track on it but, if you are hard of hearing, know that it doesn’t have a subtitle track on it. 

Doc Savage (Gold Key)

Bronzed Gold

Doc Savage
Gold Key USA 1966

Back in 1966, movie history was almost about to be made…

If things had gone to plan, a certain pulp character favourite of mine may well have been a lot better known internationally than he is these days. The film was Doc Savage and it was to star TV western actor Chuck Connors in the title role and to be based on Lester Dent’s Doc Savage novel, The Thousand Headed Man. Alas, an error about certain kinds of rights residing with Dent’s widow and not solely by the company who thought they owned them meant that the producers couldn’t start shooting the film, which was already scripted, on the date they wanted. So, at the eleventh hour, they retained the cast and crew and instead rushed out a western, Ride Beyond Vengeance, instead. Looking over the cast that they ported over into this other production, you can kinda see who some of the actors might have been intended to play in the Doc Savage movie and, I have to say, there are some good facial ‘types’ that showed that the people doing the casting were actually taking their job very seriously.

Chuck Connors, for example, was a good match in looks for the James Bama version of Doc Savage. Bama was the artist who had recently been doing all those wonderful cover paintings for the 1960s Bantam reprints of the novels which were very popular at the time. Although the style of Savage’s look via Bama was very different to that of the paintings which had appeared on the original pulp printings of the novels in the Doc Savage magazine of the 1930s and 40s, they’ve pretty much defined the look of the character ever since and are still imitated in books and comics to this day. Bama’s original model for his covers was Steve Holland, who played Flash Gordon on a dreadful German/American coproduction on TV in the 1950s show of Alex Raymond's much loved character so, if you want to see what the ‘real’ Doc Savage from this period was supposed to look like, take a look at an episode of that. Connors, though, had the same kind of weathered look to him and would have been a good version, physically at least. One can also deduce from the cast that made it into the western that Claude Akins would have been, again at least in terms of facial recognition, a perfect match for Monk Mayfair (one of Doc’s five aides) and, likewise, Michael Rennie would have been a solid choice for Ham Brooks, the lawyer (someone who the film company could have used in real life if they’d wanted a quick legal fix to their problem).

Alas the movie was never made and we shall never know if it would have been a better, more well loved fit to the original material than the George Pal produced Doc Savage movie of 1975 (which I reviewed here) and how much recognition it might have brought the character. What we do have left for us though, is the Gold Key comic from the same year which was almost certainly adapted from the script of that movie (different kinds of rights issues for comics than for movies) and which may or may not have strayed from the script. Certainly it would have been a fairly condensed version of the script to fit into one tiny comic and it really isn’t a thoroughly good job of adapting the novel, for sure. But what is it like as a comic?

Well, I finally bit the bullet on this thing a few years ago on eBay when I found an issue in not bad condition for a, relatively, reasonable price. I’d always wanted to read it and, well, now I have.

The cover is magnificent, being a blown up detail of Bama’s Doc fighting a large snake lifted from the cover of the Bantam reprint of Doc Savage - The Thousand Headed Man… which is, please note, a completely different cover than was used on the UK Corgi edition of the story, where a doctored reprint of a James Bama cover painting from an entirely different Doc Savage novel in the series was used, for reasons completely unknown to me. However, whoever was responsible for the writing of the adaptation and the interior art is completely unknown. It looks to me like Gold Key, even at that time, were not crediting the writers and artists like DC and Marvel were.

What I can tell you about the interior art, however, is that it doesn't really look like the actors from the ‘movie that never was’ and more like the renditions that Bama used to characterise Doc and his crew on the back covers of those Bantam reprints. This makes sense. Many comics are made from film adaptations and usually all the writers and artists have to go on is the working script and a few stills of the characters. Think back to the original Marvel comics adaptation of the first Star Wars film for example… there were loads of scenes in that which didn’t make it into the movie and, decades later in the era of ‘extras’ like deleted scenes, it became apparent that the majority of those sequences were shot but had not made it into the final cut of the film. These things happen but at least the likenesses of the characters, in some cases, looked as they appear in the film (Don’t get me started on Jabba, okay?) so there’s that. Alas, when it came to the Doc Savage movie, the team at Gold Key obviously didn't have any stills to work with so I’m guessing that production went ahead after they knew the film project was cancelled and the rights holders, by now Conde Naste, wanted to recoup some money by letting the comic go ahead. That’s what I suspect, anyway.

And… it’s not a brilliant comic in terms of action, it has to be said. And the writing is not all that dramatic either.. For example, comic  book shorthand to introduce the characters is used and so Ham is much maligned by being referred to as ‘the toff’. Worse still, given that Clark Savage Jr, The Man Of Bronze himself is not exactly noted for an abundance of verbal commentary and, given this is a comic book and even more of a purely visual art form than a film would be, it’s amazing how verbose he is in this. Talking to himself often and using phrases completely out of character for him such as ‘I’ll bet my shirt…’. Sure, that kind of outburst might be fine coming from a few of Doc’s crew but not the man himself, I would say. I think they might have been better using descriptive boxes more on the case of the scenes where Savage is ‘flying solo’, so to speak, rather than put explanations in his mouth when he famously never explains his actions to those around him.

In addition to this, the drama is fairly flat and, though I last read the original novel back in 1975, I remember the mystery of the thing and the unusual keys that drive the story being fairly suspenseful… in other words, fairly standard brilliance that you would expect from Lester Dent writing under the house name of Kenneth Robeson. Here it’s virtually non existent and, while I concur that the whole story in just 32 four colour pages is a pretty tall order, everything here just seems a bit rushed and really doesn’t allow for any of the characters to shine through, least of all Doc, who almost seems like a guest star in his own comic at times.

The art is, fairly nice but there’s nothing too experimental or wildly interesting here. I’d say it’s pretty competent but there purely to illustrate the text, rather then enhance it. The same can be said of the design of the panels too. There’s a pretty rigid layout of mostly five panels per page (asides from the ones I’ve pictured above, obviously). The majority of pages consist of a basic, vertical two by three panel page but with one panel of each page extended either vertically or horizontally to try and break it up just a little. Looking at some other Gold Key comics from the time and others from about eight years later, this is fairly common for the company at the time and they would later on get a little more dynamic with their layouts by the time they were putting out titles like The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor.

And… that’s about all I have to say about the Gold Key, Doc Savage one-shot based on Doc Savage - The Thousand Headed Man other than to say that, if the film had happened with that script, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have set cinema screens ablaze but, frankly, we’ll never know how closely it would have followed that script and just how much better it may have been on screen. Still, despite the comic not being all that special, I am really pleased to finally own a copy and, it has to be said, I did learn that Croydon used to have an airport, so there’s that (although, by the time this comic was published, there hadn’t been one there for a while but, still, it’s a 1930s period piece so that’s not really an issue). This one is probably not going to appeal to casual readers, for sure but, for long standing Doc Savage readers like myself, this is pure gold and, dull as this adaptation is, it’s a little piece of both comic book and movie history regarding this character and it’s an essential piece of ephemera, as far as I’m concerned. One for the ages.