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.

Conan The Destroyer

Crom, But Not Forgotten

Conan The Destroyer
USA/Mexico 1984 
Directed by Richard Fleischer
20th Century Fox Australian Blu Ray All Zones 

Oh, well... I remember looking forward to seeing Conan The Destroyer when it came out in 1984 but, even then, I realised it was a bit of a mess. Fun but... not that great as a movie about Robert E. Howard’s memorable hero. Let’s make no mistake, Conan The Barbarian (reviewed here) was pretty much the last truly great film from the ‘heroic fantasy/sword and sorcery’ genre and still is to this day, in my opinion (Peter Jackson kind of screwed up Tolkien and the nearest thing we have to a modern fantasy adventure of this kind is probably the contemporary set Mandy from a couple of years ago, which I reviewed here). The fact that John Milius wasn’t able to return to the director’s chair here really sealed the fate of this film, I think. 

What we have is an adventure fantasy movie with the emphasis on the more magical and mystical elements of Robert E. Howard’s Conan adventures... at the expense of the absence of a lot of the things that really worked so well from that first movie. The character is way too sophisticated in this sequel and the tone much too light hearted. The idea was to make the film even more box office friendly by making it appeal more to kids so the violence and single mindedness of the plot was kind of toned down in the hopes that it would get a lower classification in cinemas... something which kinda backfired in the UK, where the film still managed to garner an AA rating with nothing much to show for it. So, there’s also a lot less blood letting and goriness in this iteration and... that does kind of betray the spirit of the original stories, to some extent. 

Asides from Sven-Ole Thorsen, who is playing a completely different character and who is in the majority of Arnold Schwarzeneger’s films, we have only two characters back from the first film. At least they are played by the same actors... Schwarzenegger as Conan The Cimmerian and Mako as the minor wizard Akiro. We also have a bunch of new characters payed by Grace Jones, Olivia d’Abo, Wilt Chamberlain, Tracey Walter, Pat Roach (as Thoth Amon, no less, who never even met Conan in the original stories, instead always staying at the periphery of the adventures) and, as the other lead villain (as if Thoth Amon wasn’t enough for them) we have, in the words of the Superman The Movie Topps Bubble Gum card captions, ‘the alluring Sarah Douglas’. 

And, they’re all good actors and they jell quite well (well, I heard Grace Jones didn’t get on with some on the set but, yeah, I kinda expected that) and are all pretty good but, as I said, Conan has moved on and although he is still obsessed with the dead Valeria, the film seems like barely anything to do with the original. It’s a kind of half-hearted fantasy adventure which looks and feels more like Roger Moore’s For Your Eyes Only era films than the gritty, half exploitative, sword and sandal epic it really needs to be. I believe the tone of the film was not favourable to the director and that Schwarzenneger also objected to the ‘dumbing down’ of the character in this way which, I believe, went a good way to him losing interest in doing a third movie in the series (at the time... I’m still hearing the third part, King Conan, is still in development with him attached). 

The one good thing is the late, great composer Basil Poledouris’ sequel score. He does recook several themes from the first one such as the main Anvil Of Crom music, the Wheel Of Pain music (when Conan and another character are trying to lift open a heavy door), a sped up version of the Wifeing theme (during a brief, static effects insert of Sandahl Bergam as the dead Valeria) and several versions of The Orgy (aka the greatest score cue in soundtrack history), which I always thought was supposed to represent the Cult of Thulsa Doom from the first movie and so, therefore, seems somewhat out of place but no less welcome here. Other than these, there’s a new heroic theme which also seems somewhat out of place, while still being fairly listenable but, you know, nothing new which matches the strength of the themes in the first one (nothing as cool as, say, the Theology theme at any rate). Still, Poledouris was a great composer and the score is probably the best thing about this movie, it has to be said. I wish Intrada would finally release that restored version of the score they’ve been working on for years... I really have no desire to purchase the rerecording after the travesty of the Conan The Barbarian re-recording.*

The only other thing I could say is that you do get the odd shade of the visual legacy of Conan thrown in, perhaps sometimes accidentally, from time to time. The main moment, to my mind, is when Conan is fighting the creature that Thoth Amon metamorphoses into in the chamber of mirrors, which strongly resembles, to me anyway, one of the Frank Frazetta covers from the 1960s/70s Conan paperback reprints. Which is nice and a rare flash of gold in an otherwise drab production, it has to be said.

And that’s me done with Conan The Destroyer, methinks. I probably don’t really have to watch this one again in my lifetime because it does kind of leave you with a bad taste in the mouth after the sheer brilliance of the first movie. For years I waited for a third movie to come along which would crown Conan King of Aquilonia but, alas, when a third film did come along it was a rebooted version of Conan The Barbarian (a review of this was forged by me here many years ago, when this blog was still young in the eyes of men) but, alas, it didn’t star Schwarzenegger and it got as much wrong as it got right, it seemed to me. The 1982 movie is still the one great Conan movie, as far as I’m concerned and, as the years pass, I begin to think it will always remain so. 

*Actually, since I wrote this review, they have finally released it in 2022... still havent gotten around to listening to it yet, though.

Fantastic Voyage

Carry On Up 
The Artery

Fantastic Voyage
Directed by Richard Fleischer
USA 1966
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers swarming in to protect the organism.

It’s been a fair few decades now since I last revisited the film Fantastic Voyage but, I thought I’d give it another look in the Blu Ray era, to see how much better the film would look in this format. Well, it turns out it looks pretty good still, which I would expect from a film as visually rich and well designed as this one.

The film starts off very strongly with a pre-credits sequence which includes a truly great shot of a TWA jet coming in for a landing at night... and also a car crash and minor gun battle. Then there’s a wonderful title sequence where various sound effects relating to the medical machinery around a scientist being kept in a coma, acts as a backdrop to the titles and a graphic of a stop watch countdown. 

The plot to this one is very simple but also almost cyclic when you find out the reason of the mission the main characters have to go on. Basically, actor Stephen Boyd is recruited to join up with a team of scientists and a submarine pilot, played by Donald Pleasence, William Redfield, Arthur Kennedy and Raquel Welch (in her first proper staring role after two years of TV bit parts and two films away from the film which, in the same year, would catapult her to international fame and truly put her on the map, Hammer’s One Million Years BC, partially due to the publivity campaign). The top two big wigs where Boyd shows up are played by Edmond O'Brien and Arthur O'Connell (who I best remember in the Marilyn Monroe movie Bus Stop, although I haven’t seen it in well over thirty years... need to catch up with that one again too, I reckon).

Basically, the scientist who is so important has a blood clot on the brain and the only way it can be operated on is from inside the human body. Luckily, he’s taken to the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces and it’s here that a submarine, along with its occupants, will be shrunk down to a very small size and injected into the guy’s blood stream, so the crew can make their way into the brain and operate on the clot with a laser gun. Boyd’s special agent is there to help out and also act out as security because, it’s strongly believed that one of the crew is a saboteur who wants to end the scientist’s life. Why? Because the scientist has discovered the way to keep things miniaturised for longer than an hour but he was attacked by foreign foes before he had the opportunity to pass that knowledge on. The script does everything it can to point the finger at Arthur Kennedy, the surgeon, being the traitor but, any film fan will probably twig the true ‘bad guy in medical science clothing’ from the get go.

And so the crew are injected into the man’s bloodstream in a tale including a number of set pieces where things go wrong - they end up going through the heart (while the people monitoring from the outside stop the patient’s heart for no longer than sixty seconds... can the Proteus, their nuclear sub, make it through in time?), a scene where they have to go through the inner ear and somebody outside drops a pair of scissors (sending the crew inside the body flying all over the place) and the memorable moment when Raquel Welch, in her skin tight diving suit, is attacked by antibodies in the immune system and the rest of the crew have to try and pull them off her before she is suffocated to death. 

It’s a great film with some truly interesting and, at the time, cutting edge special effects with some beautiful colours. Even the scenes outside the body look stunning, with Fleischer using lots of vertical and horizontals to split up the compositions (including a big cage of criss crosses which can be artificially opened and closed in front of the camera to push the patterns in the visuals).There’s also a wonderful shot near the start where Boyd is asked to stay in his car and the floor opens up and the car descends to the underground headquarters where the ‘operation’ will be performed. It’s shot in such a way that the perspective of the angle combined with the car going down makes it look like the car is shrinking... which is, of course, a really nice bit of foreshadowing of just what is going to happen to the submarine and its occupants later in the story. 

The score is kinda interesting too... there’s no music at all for almost the first forty minutes of the film (including no score over the credits... apparently the first American film to do that) and when the sub is injected into the blood stream for the final hour (which is more or less shot in real time because that’s when everyone will start to grow to normal size again), the music immediately comes in, courtesy of Leonard Rosenman’s 12 tone serial score, one of the first movies to employ the technique. In fact, the first film to ever use that style was by the same composer for the 1955 psychological film The Cobweb.

The novelisation duty of this one was given to acclaimed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov but he found so many flaws with the science in the movie, that he spent a lot of time rewriting it and getting it all right before he handed it in. Because of some of the difficulties in production (some of which may have been rewrites when Asimov informed the studio), he still managed to get the novelisation into shops before the release of the film. 

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about Fantastic Voyage other than, many people such as James Cameron have tried, and failed, to get a remake going for any length of time... which is a shame because a modern remake would probably be a good idea for this one. As it is, though, the film is deserving of its reputation as a classic and it even inspired a sixties cartoon series sequel, which I used to watch as repeats in the early seventies. A great film and certainly worth upgrading to Blu Ray, for sure.