The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
          
Director: Eugene Lourie
Year: 1953
Rating: 7.5
Isotope Killed the Beast doesn't quite have the ring of Beauty Killed the Beast, but these were different times. At least now we know what started the melting of the glaciers. Atomic tests! Goddamn America. Setting off nukes in the ice up north. And then sending in men to investigate. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a remarkable film - not only for itself but for what it started. There had been giant monster films previous - primarily of the ape variety or Lost World type - but it was this film that really jumpstarted them. Across the world the success of this influenced Toho in Japan to come up with their own monster. But done quite differently. Godzilla was a man in a suit while American giant monster films turned to stop-motion to create the illusion and his surroundings. Ray Harryhausen was the master of this special effect and it is brilliant here. When the beast comes ashore, it is ten-minutes of pure thrills as it thrashes around destroying buildings, picking up cars, eating people and sending hundreds of people running for their lives. That poor blind man. To think of how much work had to go into that sequence is astonishing. I will take that over all the CGI in the world.



So, America in all its wisdom drops a nuke in the artic to study the effect - one man says to another "Every time one of these goes off, I feel like we are helping to write the first chapter of the new Geneses" to which his colleague replies, "Let's hope we are not writing the last chapter of the old one".  Professor Nesbitt (Swiss actor Paul Hubschmid but credited here as Paul Christian) and his friend Ritchie go out to look at things after the explosion and are hit by an avalanche - but not before they see a giant creature walk by. The blast freed it from ice after a million years. Ritchie dies and everyone thinks Nesbitt is nuts. The psychiatrist, the doctors, his superiors - even he begins to wonder until he hears of a small ship being taken under water by a sea monster - then a lighthouse being attacked - another boat. He takes his idea to paleontologist Professor Elson (Cecil Kellaway) who fortunately has a hot looking assistant Lee (Paula Raymond). What would a giant monster film be without a little romance.



Elson looks at the chronology of these attacks and realizes the Rhedosaurus (fictional name as not to libel any other prehistoric creature) is headed for New York City. Well, of course it is. Everybody wants to go to NYC to see a show, the Empire State, the Statue of Liberty and Rhed is no different. Too bad it didn't make it to Yankee Stadium. Jumping Joe DiMaggio could have taken it on. Instead, we get Lee Van Cleef on a roller coaster bringing that baby down. Credit for the film is given to a short story by Ray Bradbury, but his story has very little similarity to this. It is about a sea monster that thinks a lighthouse is romantically calling out to it. Harryhausen was to follow this up with It Came from Beneath the Sea which has similarities in atomic theme, but at least it attacks San Francisco that time. And then a crush of many other giant monster films was to follow in the 1950s.



When I judge a film like this, I try and put myself in the place and time when it was made and seeing this in a theater in 1953 would have been spectacular. It was made for $200,000. It is directed by Eugène Lourié who went on to help a few other giant monster films - The Colossus of New York, The Giant Behemoth and the wonderful Gorgo.