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. 

Mysterious Island

Minding Nemo

Mysterious Island
UK 1961
Directed by Cy Endfield
Columbia/Impact Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: All the mysterious spoilers on this one.

So Mysterious Island is based on the novel of a similar name... my favourite of Jules Verne’s novels, The Mysterious Island. I first heard of it by reading a Marvel Classics comic when I was a youngster and was fascinated by it, especially the twist towards the end. It was long before I caught up with this version on television (I guess I would have watched it in on a black and white set in the 1970s) and I like to revisit this movie in particular every now and again for a few reasons. One is that it’s easily the most entertaining production of this ‘adaptation’. Two is that it’s got an absolutely fantastic, somewhat blistering, driven score by Bernard Herrmann and thirdly, because the last adaptation of this I saw, as a Columbia serial, also heavily featured the queen of an alien race and her cohorts wearing left over costumes from serials like Flash Gordon (reviewed here) and Buck Rogers (reviewed here), chasing the various protagonists around said island for a lot of the running time and, frankly, that’s about as far from the book as you could get.

That being said, this is in many ways just as bad in terms of taking huge liberties with the original text and, truth be told, I’ve never myself seen a straight version of this done properly. The obvious differences here being: Well, there are no women in the book that I can recall but, in this one, two female characters are inexplicably washed up on the beach to join the main characters in a random shipwreck. This seems to happen a lot with adaptations of Jules Verne’s works, I’ve noticed, since they rarely have any major female characters and, for some reason, movie studios insist on putting them in anyway. So they completely screw themselves in the ‘accurate adaptation’ department before they’ve even started. Secondly... there’s no pet dog in this and the four legged character is sorely missed, in my opinion. 

Thirdly, well... it’s a Schneer and Harryhausen production and Ray needs something to animate so, the ‘mysterious’ benefactor of the island (I’ll get to him in a minute) is working on solving mankind’s hunger problems by having figured out how to make crops and animals grow to huge size (the science here is not elabourated on). So we have a giant crab, giant turkey-like bird, giant bee and giant octopus for some of the characters to fight here. Interestingly for a film utilising the genius of Ray Harryhausen, the crab used is a real crab, gutted and with armatures fitted inside it, rather than a rubber model. 

Okay, so the film starts off strongly with Herrmann’s powerful score crashing in over the Columbia logo before his music gets full on broody as the various credits rise against a moving backdrop of the sea (and you can hear it behind the music too), the various shots of the sea tinted yellow, then purple, then blue and then back to yellow again... constantly cycling between various colours as the credits are raised. And it’s during these credits that we have the films first big clunker of a mistake. A total spoiler... I’ll get back to it in a second.

The plot is about five prisoners (actually, four union army prisoners and one confederate captor) escaping gaol during the siege of Richmond, Virginia in 1865. They take a hot air balloon but circumstances are such that they wash up on a deserted island and have to survive. Strange things... no, mysterious things... happen to them. The captain is washed up separately and unconscious but a fire has been lit where he can be found by the others. Some vine creepers are left by the entrance to two caves in a cliff wall, allowing access. The giant turkey thing is shot from afar, saving the lives of some of the crew. A chest of useful implements such as rifles, ammunition, a compass, charts, a sextant, tools, pots n’ pans, a telescope and a copy of Robinson Crusoe conveniently washes up on shore at a convenient point. And a pirate ship which places the lives of the escaped survivors in peril is mysteriously blown up from beneath with an explosive charge. The whole mystery of the original book comes from trying to figure out who the survivors’ mysterious benefactor is. And it’s wonderful... at least in the book.

But let’s go back to those opening credits because, this is where things get silly. There’s a huge spoiler in them because, instead of just listing Herbert Lom as being among the cast, the studio decide to list the credit thusly: “Herbert Lom as Captain Nemo”. Yeah, so that blows, right out of the water, the mystery of the helping hand being Captain Nemo and the surviving remnant of the Nautilus submarine from the earlier Jules Verne adventure yarn 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (Columbia wanted James Mason from the 1950s version to play Nemo again here but, alas, that didn’t happen). 

Luckily, Lom, along with all the other principal actors consisting of Michael Craig, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill, Beth Logan, Percy Herbert and Dan Jackson... are all brilliant in this and, even though the twist is revealed on that opening credit, the film is hugely watchable and entertaining without being forewarned. Although, just to compound their error, in this version, it’s revealed the rifles in the chest are engraved with the word Nautilus... just in case we forgot the whole “it’s Captain Nemo folks’ vibe of the, well, not so Mysterious now Island. 

There’s still a little suspense left though, as Nemo warns his new companions that the volcano on the island is due to destroy it in two days or less. Can they all work together to find a way off the island before they are burned to a cinder? You can probably guess which characters survive and which one doesn’t, I suspect. 

And that’s me done with Mysterious Island for a while. Always a pleasure to watch this one and, although there’s not a huge amount of Harryhausen’s trademark animation in it, it’s still a greatly entertaining movie, even if they do go out of their way to advertise the twist in both their credits and, preposterously, on the original cinema trailers for the film too. I’m glad that, when I was a lot younger than I am now, Marvel Comics at least didn’t advertise the twist ahead of schedule. Still, if you’re going to see a cinematic version of Mysterious Island, this is certainly among the more fun ones, even if it continues the tradition of being completely inaccurate to the original novel.

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.

20,000 Leagues Under Sea (1916)

Little Slumber 
In Nemo Land

20,000 Leagues Under Sea
Directed by Stuart Paton
USA 1916
Imprint Blu Ray A/B/C

Warning: Some slight spoilers here. 

I’ve been wanting to see this silent version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea for some time now, since I loved the original novel by one of my favourite authors, Jules Verne. I didn’t get the UK release of this because it was bundled in with a bunch of movies I wasn’t that interested in but, I’m glad I waited now because this Australian edition is part of their Tales Of Adventure Collection 8, with some other Verne movies and some slightly adjacent tales in its make-up.

Now, I was both impressed and disappointed in this in equal parts so, I’m not quite sure how to organise this review... 

Okay, the first thing I was impressed with was that, unlike 99.5% of the Captain Nemo films I’ve seen in film versions, they actually get the character’s ethnicity correct to the book.. so an Indian, turban wearing guy (I think they actually got it right in the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen too but, that movie was also an incredibly poor adaptation of its source material). That being said, the caveat here is that he’s portrayed by a white dude, Allen Holubar, in brown face. Swings and roundabouts I guess, people. 

Another impressive thing is the Williamson brothers and their invention. Highlighted in footage before the film gets properly underway, along with a photo of Jules Verne, the Williamsons went with the director on location (the same locations used for the Disney version a few decades later) because they'd invented cameras for underwater photography. So there are lots of shots of divers and fish and coral etc in the movie. I can’t imagine what this might have looked like to the inhabitants of the world at the time, many of whom would never had been able to see what this stuff properly looks like before this motion picture was released. So it’s a landmark film for inventing and demonstrating the world’s first underwater photography, if for nothing else.

However, there are some problems I had with the film. 

Asides from lots of almost superfluous women in the movie… Verne didn’t really do much in the way of meaningful female characters, certainly in his most famous books… the story is an absolute mess and Jules would have been scientifically rotating in his grave at such shenanigans (and don’t get me started on the 50s serial of Mysterious Island, with its alien queen hell bent on world conquest, either). What we have here is very little to do with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea after about the first 10 mins… it’s also taking portions from The Mysterious Island (probably my favourite Jules Verne novel) and then grafted onto it another story featuring a.. ‘child of nature’ as she is credited in the cast list (a euphemism for someone who’s ‘gone native’)… who, most viewers will twig, long before the end of the picture and the big reveal, turns out to be Captain Nemo’s long lost daughter. 

About her... one of the crew of the balloon that lands on the island finds her and, she’s played by a lady called Jane Gail, again in brown face make up. And all I will say about her is… she’s an absolute comic genius. The scene where the poor white guy is trying to show her how to put on a shirt and trousers... and she’s waggling her toes at him… had me in stitches. I need to see more things with this lady in because she tickled my funny bone somewhat. She was the truly bright spot of this film for me, for sure (she died on her 74th birthday, I’m informed). 

Things all come around and she is reunited with her father who dies, is buried at sea and then we also see the Nautilus submarine (which appears to be quite different in long shot as opposed to when it surfaces, it seems to me) sink beneath the waves one final time. Leaving us with a romantic entailment involving one of the crew of the original balloon and Jane Gail’s character. Which also leaves me with the question… was this the first time an interracial romance had been depicted on screen or were there earlier films?

And that’s me done with this iteration of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, I think. It was a pleasure to watch this version, despite the enormous liberties taken with the original source materials… I’d certainly recommend this one to lovers of silent movies and will probably watch this one again at some point (if only for the comical shenanigans of Jane Gail). I’m pleased I finally got to see this one. 

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.

Wordsworth Classics Guest Blog

Will The Real Protagonist Please Stand Up?

My look at the two main archetypes of heroes in literature and film can be found here as a guest blog at Wordsworth Editions.

Mystery On Monster Island

A Verne For The Worse

Mystery On Monster Island
1981 Spain/USA
Directed by Juan Piquer Simón
Midnite Movies DVD Region 1

This film first came to my attention only a couple of weeks ago when I finished reading the excellent book on Paul Naschy promotional material, Muchos Gracias Senor Lobo (reviewed here). I saw some beautiful poster artwork for this movie in this book and, not only did it seem to star Paul Naschy... top billing went to Peter Cushing and Terence Stamp. Furthermore, it was also based on the writings of one of my favourite writers, Jules Verne, so there was no way I wasn’t going to order the cheap Midnite Movies edition off of Amazon for less than a fiver!

I’d assumed, when I first saw the poster, that the Jules Verne tale this one took as its source would have been my favourite of his tales, the semi-sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea... Mysterious Island. There were no monsters in the original tale of that one, of course, but there is a mystery at the story’s heart and famous adaptations of that particular work in the past have often featured giant monsters of one kind or another (heck... I even have a 1950s cinema serial of Mysterious Island which also sees fit to include invaders from another planet lead by a dominant queen) so this was my first guess on the source.

And of course I was dead wrong... something which most reviewers of this movie, it seems, tend to ignore or remain ignorant of when doing their own research on the subject! Being as most of them seem to proclaim that this movie is based on Mysterious Island. Not so!

In actual fact, the film is based on Verne’s work School for Robinsons, which I believe may well have been a partial sequel to one of his many other, interlocking books but unfortunately, my little knowledge of Verne is sadly limited to the 10 or 12 of them which are continually kept in print in the UK... and we have nothing like the whole of his work available to us over here (although maybe if I joined the Kindle revolution?). So, having said that, I obviously can’t judge as to whether this movie is a good adaptation.

What I can say for definite is... it’s a mostly lousy movie. It does have some cheesy looking monsters in it and, obviously, that can only be a good thing... but ultimately, this movie never really succeeds in hitting that mark where, “it’s so bad it’s good”. Instead, becoming a mostly tiresome and plodding effort which you will probably find yourself wishing to end sooner rather than later.

It’s a bit of a strange beast as well because it’s obviously a childrens film - certainly, the comic relief character is squarely and irritatingly pitched at a younger audience in the most over the top manner you wouldn’t even catch on an episode of Playschool and, since he seems to get the majority of the screen time, it’s pretty much a kid’s holiday film at heart. Much less a family film than it is a youngster’s glittery distraction. However, saying that, Paul Naschy is seen taking a few blood squib explosions to his body very early on in the proceedings and is depicted with both his arms literally running red with blood... which is interesting considering the obvious target audience. I really couldn’t imagine this got much, if any, of a release in this country at the time.

Which leads me into Paul Naschy’s demise and the way that he and the two actors who take top billing are treated. This must have been a really cheap movie because Naschy lasts less than five minutes on screen before he is blown up and drops out of the story. Peter Cushing and Terence Stamp fare a little better... but not by much. Cushing and Stamp really only appear for 5 minutes or so at the start of the film and 10 minutes maybe at the end. The budget obviously didn’t stretch to having them on set for very long and, for the rest of the movie, the beleaguered audience has to make do with two male leads who, between them, seem to show either a total lack of personality or, in the case of the comic relief, an overabundance of obvious and overblown comedy enthusiasm. This doesn’t make for good viewing. What’s worse is that Terence Stamp is supposed to be the main villain but for the majority of the picture the main villain and his many henchmen run around with their bodys and heads totally covered in heavy masks and coats... presumably because the cheap budget meant that the producers had to hide the fact that they didn’t have Terence Stamp on set most of the time, instead electing to dub his voice on a hidden actor's lines instead.

Having said all that, there were a few things which made it so, as bored as I was, the movie wasn’t one I actually regretted seeing... although it was a close call. The monsters are mostly fairly cheesy and this lends the few scenes where you actually see some, a certain amount of amusement (or at least more amusement than the official comic relief provides, at any rate).

Secondly, in an effort to defend their desert island home from Stamp’s villainous horde, our irritating heroes construct some defences around the piece of sand they call their home. One of the things they make, although I’ve no idea how, is a homemade Gatling gun made of bamboo chutes which rapidly fires bananas at the turn of a handle. This is, of course, something of a stroke of genius and I am, and always will be, happy to say I’ve seen a film in which a banana firing, bamboo-chute Gatling gun is used to ward off a bunch of antagonists.

A third thing, which is another mixed bag, is the music. The composing credit doesn’t come up until the end of this one but it seems to be put together by three separate composers. So I’m guessing this means the movie has a needle-drop style score, from a library of universal cues written by these particular composers... or the film had a very troubled production history (which I suspect is probably the case). Or possibly, even, a less than thrilling combination of both of those elements. Either way, there’s a really strident and neat tune which is played quite a lot throughout the movie at various points which really does catch the ear. Unfortunately, though, it’s completely inappropriate to any of the scenes it’s used to score. So while I am quite happy to keep this as my own personal earworm, and would rush to buy the score to this movie if anyone is wise (or perhaps foolish) enough to release it... I would have to say that the movie itself suffers from the inclusion of most of the music here and if anything, the score robs the lacklustre shot design and jarring edits of any kind of power it might have had a chance at gaining and kind of makes things a lot worse most of the time.

Nice music though.

And there’s no more really to say about this one. I don’t regret buying this movie (banana Gatling gun, remember?) but this is definitely not a film I’d recommend to many people, even die hard B-movie enthusiasts who have a love of cheesy monsters. It’s just not that noteworthy I’m afraid. For the jaded and curious only, I would say. All others may be best advised to keep their distance. The greatest mystery of Mystery On Monster Island is how the budget holders were persuaded to let loose their purse strings and unleash such a piece of uninspired tosh into the world.