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"The fish that got away is always the biggest one." Between Méliès' dancing mermaids and Cousteau's oversized crustaceans, a deluxe Technicolor tub. The monster marauding the South Seas turns out to be a barbed submersible piloted by one Captain Nemo (James Mason), a sort of eco-terrorist Prospero who subscribes to Shaw's "war on war." Battleships are his main targets, a frigate out of San Francisco gets a taste of the metallic leviathan, the sole survivors are a pair of French scientists (Paul Lukas, Peter Lorre) and a brawling harpooner (Kirk Douglas). Aboard the Nautilus, they learn about the misanthropic genius who plays Bach on a pipe-organ and expounds on the power of hate: "It can fill the heart as surely as love can." Jules Verne by way of Walt Disney, meaning anti-colonial darkness side by side with smooching seals and double-takes over octopus pudding, Richard Fleischer keeps it all balanced in a richly intricate CinemaScope image. Coral crosses and seaweed cigars, "the only independence" of self-styled crusader and spectacle artisan. Gold from a sunken galleon makes for useful ballast, wavering marine blues are smudged by reds from a pierced shark, the "dynamic power of the universe" lends a blinding glimpse ahead of Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly. An immensely influential vision, mined by the Bond series (Dr. No, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me) and reflected in Huston's Moby Dick and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. "A strange twilight world opened up before me and I felt as the first man to set foot on another planet, an intruder in this mystic garden of the deep." The squid battle is borrowed from DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind, the upshot is the Atomic Age peeking from behind the Victorian horizon. Fleischer continues the poetic drift in Fantastic Voyage. Cinematography by Franz Planer. With Ted de Corsia, Robert J. Wilke, Carleton Young, and J.M. Kerrigan.
--- Fernando F. Croce |