Movies
have a lot to thank Jules Verne for. Some good ones have been made from his
novels - 20,000 Leagues, Around the World in 80 Days, The Mysterious Island
and this one. He had an astonishing imagination during a fertile period in
fantasy literature in the 19th century. Modern literature springs from the
writings of Verne, Poe, Haggard, Shelley, Twain, Stoker, Wells, Stevenson,
Le Fanu and Doyle and all of them have been covered extensively by cinema.
They were the greats. The filmmakers give this adaptation the full works.
It looks brilliant and has two top actors in it - one from the past with
James Mason (who was also Captain Nemo) and one from the now generation in
Pat Boone. Mason is great as the short-tempered commanding chauvinistic professor
while Boone as a Scotsman is almost adequate - fortunately he doesn't really
try for the Scottish accent which would have made him indecipherable. But
he does sing. Hey, you have Pat Boone, you had to have a song back then (he
also got 15% of the profits). The production quality is top notch, great
set designs, the narrative is suspenseful, and the special effects are solid
- though Harryhausen would have been welcome. The scene in which they are
on the raft and caught in a whirlpool was so scary for them that the female
screamed for her life and Mason had to tell her to shut up or they would
have to do it again.
This being Hollywood a few things are changed
from the book - they add a female to the perilous descent as well as a duck.
Yes, A duck becomes a central figure. Gertrude. But at the same time the
film cuts back some of the more fantastical elements of the book but then
throws in the lost city of Atlantis. A fair tradeoff. Verne often tried to
base his books on as much known science at the time - but probably not this
time. I doubt whether science at the time purported that prehistoric creatures
were in middle earth and that there was an ocean. It is easy to see the direct
line from Verne to the fantastic books of Edgar Rice Burroughs that later
films like The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot and At
the Earth's Core were based on.
Mason plays a professor in Edinburgh (he
was German in the book) who is handed a piece of lava as a gift from his
student Boone. Inside it he finds a message from a Swedish man who went missing.
It gives clues how to get to the center of the earth- a natural tunnel in
Iceland. Off they go and hire Hans (Peter Ronson) as a climber and all-around
hunk. They discover that a man that Mason had shared his discovery with has
jumped ahead of them - but been poisoned by another man who wants the discovery
to himself. No such villains were in the book. And neither was the wife of
the first man played by Arlene Dahl, an interesting choice and too old to
hook up with Boone - so likely meant for Mason - though he is a Henry Higgins
type with a more adventurous spirit. Their descent takes about a year - a
long time to go and still looking quite dapper and shaven. They meet up with
various dangers, wonders and giant lizards. Played by real lizards. The book
had many more plus a giant man who herded these giant beasts. A friend sent
me a file from a blue-ray and it looks fabulous. A terrific old-fashioned
adventure tale for the whole family.
