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20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA
Rating: 
USA. 1954.
Director – Richard Fleischer, Screenplay – Earl Fenton, Based on the Novel by Jules Verne, Producer – Walt Disney, Photography – Franz Planer, Music – Paul J. Smith, Visual Effects – Art Cruickshank, John Hench & Ub Iwerks, Mechanical Effects – Eustace Lycett & Robert A. Mattey, Production Design – Harper Goff & John Meehan. Production Company – Disney.
Cast:
James Mason (Captain Nemo), Kirk Douglas (Ned Land), Paul Lukas (Professor Pierre Arronax), Peter Lorre (Conseil)
Plot: It is the 1860s and the seas are being terrorized by reports of a monster that is destroying shipping. The US government dispatches marine-life specialist Pierre Arronax aboard the warship Abraham Lincoln to investigate. After a fruitless search, they are about to give up when they come upon a sinking ship that has been attacked by the monster. They fire upon the monster but it turns and rams them. Arronax, his assistant Conseil, and harpoonist Ned Land, survive the sinking and discover that the monster is really a submarine. They are grudgingly welcomed aboard by its captain Nemo. Nemo has built this atomically-powered submarine, The Nautilus, to embark on the single-minded mission of destroying all ships of war.
Jules Verne (1828-1905) is regarded, along with H.G. Wells, as one of the modern founding fathers of science fiction. Born in the port town of Nantes, France, Verne developed a great romantic love of travel and adventure. He even attempted to smuggle away to sea as a child by posing as a ship’s cabin boy. Verne settled down as a stockbroker but his fame began in 1892 when he met publisher Jules Hertzel and proposed to him an essay on balloon travel. Hertzel instead suggested that Verne write the idea as a novel and the result was published as Five Weeks in a Balloon (1862). This began an extremely productive relationship with Hertzel who published all of Verne’s works of fiction under the title ‘Voyages Extraordinaire’. Verne produced other famous works of adventure and speculation such as (best-known English-language titles given) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1872), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Captain Grant’s Children/In Search of the Castaways (1867), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1874), Michael Strogoff (1876), Hector Servadac (1877), Robur the Conqueror (1886) and Master of the World (1904), among many others.
A good part of Jules Verne’s fiction wasn’t science-fiction and that is perhaps the essence of Jules Verne. His work was really adventures and flights of fantasy concerning the geographic world. He invented remarkable flying machines, popularized the notion of the submarine and waxed imaginative about realms under the earth, under the sea and in orbit, but largely he was writing adventure stories. He appropriated science to bolster his explanations but his works were flights of fantasy within geographic realms and never quite took the full flight of conceptually speculative fantasy that much of the work of his contemporary H.G. Wells did around the same time. It is worth comparing, for example, Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon with H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901) – where Verne concerned himself with the building of the projectile and launch and little at all about the world that might be encountered on The Moon, while Wells swept such aside with an imaginary science invention and wrote about the alien society encountered on The Moon.
Jules Verne has been very popular on film. (See below for other Jules Verne adapted films). He was unevenly appropriated by his countryman Georges Melies in films such as A Trip to the Moon (1902), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1907) (which actually had little to do with Verne and adds mermaids) and The Conquest of the Pole (1912). But the defining Verne film came with this beautiful and lavish adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is one of the real genre classics of the 1950s, one of the few films of the era that isn’t fraught with fear and didn’t feature invading aliens or atomic monsters.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was made by Disney. The 1950s was a period where Disney were expanding away solely from being an animation studio and were starting to make live-action films. During this time they made a number of colour adventure films as well as a series of nature documentaries. Like Jules Verne, Disney approach 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea not so much as an science-fiction film but rather as an adventure film. They had also conducted adaptations of other classic adventure stories during this era including Treasure Island (1950), Rob Roy (1953), The Sword and the Rose (1953), Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1954), Old Yeller (1957), Kidnapped (1960) and Swiss Family Robinson (1960).
In adapting Verne’s novel Disney were faced with a certain problem. When Jules Verne had written the book of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea the notion of a submarine was still science-fiction, in 1954 the idea had been commonplace for more than a couple of decades and no longer held any amazement for audiences. The ingenuity of the solution was to cast 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a period piece, to retrograde the milieu and set the film amidst the great Victorian Age of Engineering. Jules Verne adaptations up to that point had almost all been set contemporary and it was Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that placed Verne and Nemo in a fantasy setting of Victorian gaslight technology, something that has been followed by every single Verne film and Verne pastiche writer since. (It was also 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that set the notion of the Nautilus being an atomic submarine, something that was never present in the Verne book. There was some amusement to this when the US Navy launched the world’s first atomic submarine in 1954 and named it The Nautilus, mistakenly thinking that the idea came from Jules Verne rather than the Disney film). And emerging from the Disney team’s design shop the Nautilus on screen is an amazing marvel of Victorian technology, outfitted with pipe organs, iron bulkheads, elegant brass fittings and wrought curlicues.
Disney lavished a then quite substantial five million dollars on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and create a superlative A-class production. The director hired was Richard Fleischer, who had emerged in the 1940s with thrillers such as The Armored Car Robbery (1948), The Narrow Margin (1952) and the Western Arena (1953) and would go onto make a number of adventure films. (See below for Richard Fleischer’s other films). [Richard Fleischer was actually the son of Max Fleischer, the director of (Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and numerous Popeye and Superman shorts, who was Walt Disney’s principal rival during the 1940s].
Richard Fleischer mounts 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a really spectacular adventure film. He makes full and lavish use of the Cinemascope screen and the Technicolor process – the underwater photography is beautiful. In a full cinematic screening today the colour of the film looks amazing in ways that modern films have completely lost. The special effects succeed in standing up even today, bar the odd grainy process shot and the slightly rubbery squid. James Mason gives a marvelously brooding performance as Captain Nemo. The only quibble is in the casting of stilted Paul Lukas as Arronax and Kirk Douglas, who seems to have strayed in from another film altogether and plays with a bumptious lightheadedness more appropriate to a drunken sea shanty. These minor points aside, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a classic.
Other versions of the Jules Verne novel are:– George Melies’s rather silly 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1907), which played the story as burlesque and added mermaids; the silent Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1916), which was the first film to ever shoot underwater; while 1997 saw two simultaneous remakes with the tv movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997) with Ben Cross as Nemo and the ponderous tv mini-series 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997) with Michael Caine as Nemo. Jules Verne’s sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Mysterious Island (1875), wherein a group of castaways are stranded on a desert island and end up being aided by Captain Nemo, has also been filmed a number of time, in fact more times than 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea itself has. These include:– The Mysterious Island (1929), which had little to do with desert islands and instead had Lionel Barrymore’s Nemo/Prince Dakar as the ruler of a kingdom who invents a submarine to travel underwater and investigate a race of mer-people; an obscure Russian-made adaptation Mysterious Island (1941); the serial Mysterious Island (1951), which added invaders from Mercury; Ray Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island (1961), featuring Herbert Lom as Captain Nemo, which added giant-size creatures; the obscure Spanish/French/Italian The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo (1972) with Omar Shariff as Captain Nemo, which is the most faithful of the adaptations and also purportedly the dullest; Juan Piquer Simon’s rather terrible Monster Island/Mystery of Monster Island (1981) in which the desert island adventures and monsters turn out to be set up for a kid as an adventure by his uncle and has no Nemo; and the tv mini-series Mysterious Island (2005), which also adds giant creatures. There have also been several original Captain Nemo films, including Captain Nemo and the Underwater City/Captain Nemo and the Floating City (1969) and Irwin Allen’s tv mini-series The Return of Captain Nemo (1977), which was reedited and released to cinemas as The Amazing Captain Nemo (1978). Nemo also turned up as a member of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), featuring a team-up between various characters from Victorian fiction.
The success of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea created a whole series of other Jules Verne adaptations. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was followed by the Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which won its year’s Best Picture Oscar and introduced the light-hearted buffoonish tone that most of these other Verne adaptations took, Karel Zeman’s charmingly antiquarian The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958), From the Earth to the Moon (1958), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Master of the World (1961), Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island (1961), Valley of the Dragons (1961), Disney’s In Search of the Castaways (1962), Irwin Allen’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962), Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon/Blast Off/Those Fantastic Flying Fools (1967), Zeman’s The Stolen Airship (1969) and The Light at the Edge of the World (1971). Most of these followed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in setting the story in the Victorian period, although increasingly the films became more buffoonish and silly.
Richard Fleischer’s other genre films are:– Fantastic Voyage (1966) about a miniaturized submarine journey inside the human body; the musical version of Doctor Dolittle (1967), The Boston Strangler (1968), the psycho-thriller See No Evil/Blind Terror (1971), the true life serial killer film 10 Rillington Place (1971), the over-populated future film Soylent Green (1973), Amityville 3-D (1983), and the Robert E. Howard adaptations Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2003
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