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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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7
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7 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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This
1961 film adaptation of the classic Jules Verne
adventure novel was the first Harryhausen movie
I can remember seeing. I must've been about 6
or 7 at the time, encountering it on some Saturday
afternoon TV broadcast. The experience left me
with a serious 'monster jones', placated only
by absorbing as many sci-fi/fantasy flicks featuring
giant beasties as I could find on the boob tube.
(This was long before the advent of VCRs.) In
1970 I was fortunate to see a re-release of Disney's
20,000
Leagues Under the Sea on the big screen,
which pretty much blew my 8-year old mind. Though
the film featured but a single monster — that
unforgettable giant squid — I was entranced by
its story of the enigmatic Captain Nemo and his
incredible 19th Century submarine, the Nautilus.
Copies of Classics Illustrated comic books
now found their way into my hands, battling the
likes of Batman and Captain America for supremacy
of my imagination. When I got a little older,
around 10 or 11, I was still inspired enough to
seek out the written works of Verne, H.G. Wells,
Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Their
Victorian writing style proved a hard slog for
such a young kid weaned on comics, but an excellent
annotated edition of 20,000 Leagues became,
in effect, my Rosetta Stone. Thus movies and comic
books were the catalyst for my lifelong love of
reading, something for which I'm eternally grateful.
So, I'll try not to let nostalgia influence
this review. Not too much, anyway.
During the 1865 siege of Richmond, Virginia,
three Union soldiers and a Northern war correspondent
are captured and held as POWs — Capt. Cyrus Harding
(Michael Craig), a skilled military engineer;
Neb (Dan Jackson), an ex-slave and devoted friend
of the captain; Herbert (Michael Callan), a brash
young private; and Gideon Spilett (Gary Merrill),
the cynical, worldly journalist. Though by this
point the war is clearly nearing its end in the
Union's favor, the men are keen to escape captivity.
Their means of winning freedom: a Confederate
observation balloon, standing idle in a town square
due to bad weather. Overpowering their guards,
the POWs reach the tethered balloon and clamber
aboard, forcibly dragging a Rebel sentry along
with them as the craft lifts off into the storm-wracked
sky. (They can't bring themselves to cold-bloodedly
throw the Reb from the basket.) Their bold plan
has borne fruit; Richmond drops away beneath them.
Escaping the Confederate stronghold, however,
proves the least of their troubles. Caught in
the 'Storm of the Century', the commandeered balloon
is carried aloft above an impenetrable screen
of clouds, driven ever westward by fierce, hurricane-like
winds. Its passengers, unable to control the craft,
are completely at the mercy of the elements. The
tremendous storm rages for days, sweeping the
balloon across the North American continent and
out over the Pacific Ocean. Then the gasbag springs
a leak. What little of the earth that can be seen
through the storm clouds reveals only an empty
expanse of ocean. Gradually the balloon drops
lower and lower; Harding and company are forced
to jettison all provisions, then even the basket
itself, in order to stay aloft. The men are left
clinging desperately to the netting just a few
feet above the crashing waves. Hope is running
out for them when a sliver of land is spotted
ahead. By what can only be an act of Providence,
the almost completely deflated balloon drags the
weary aeronauts onto a beach. But the real adventure
is only beginning.
Stranded on a volcanic, uncharted isle, the
castaways work together to not only survive but
also to greatly improve their living conditions.
(Having an engineer among the group is a major
blessing.) Exploration of their new home leads
to some startling discoveries — this 'Land Unknown'
is not just teeming with life, but gigantic
forms of life, including 20-foot tall birds, bees
bigger than hippos, and a crab the size of a battle
tank. (Which almost makes a meal of Neb.) The
men's lonely existence is brightened by the arrival
of two shipwrecked women (Joan Greenwood, Beth
Rogan), but danger continues to lurk in the form
of the giant beasts and a shipload of bloodthirsty
pirates. The volcano, too, is rumbling threateningly.
How long before it erupts? And how did these fantastic
creatures, seen nowhere else in nature, come to
be? The castaways eventually receive answers from
none other than the legendary Captain Nemo (Herbert
Lom), whose submarine Nautilus lies at
anchor in a hidden subterranean grotto. But will
this mad genius prove friend or foe?
Mysterious Island
is old-fashioned 'Saturday afternoon' fun in the
best sense of the word. The screenplay takes many
liberties with Verne's novel (the addition of
female characters and, most notably, giant monsters),
but the changes afford us a much livelier cinematic
experience. (In the book, Harding and company
spend most of their time hunting game, making
bricks, building a bridge, etc. — not exactly
the stuff of which exciting films are made.) Herbert
Lom makes an excellent Nemo, while Gary Merrill
stands out among the castaways as the sardonic
reporter Spilett. But Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion
monsters are the real stars of the show. Rather
than breathing life into fantastical beasts of
myth and legend, here the effects wizard rises
to the challenge of making leviathans out of small,
real-world animals. This he does spectacularly
with the gargantuan crab and bees. Typically during
this period, such creatures would be achieved
'Bert I. Gordon style' — i.e., real animals would
be filmed and then blown up in scale, superimposed
upon footage of the actors. Cheaper and much easier
to do, this process also tends to look about as
real as a porn starlet's breasts. Harryhausen's
meticulous, painstaking stop-motion technique
gives life to his monsters in a way that none
other can. (Even 40 years later, modern CGI technology
continues to struggle toward achieving a sense
of mass and solidity that is a hallmark of his
best work.) Other effects in the film, such as
the storm-tossed balloon and matte shots of the
island, look pretty creaky by today's standards
but nonetheless work — the movie's infectious
spirit of adventure easily permits our willing
suspension of disbelief.
A significant part of that spirit is owed
to the magnificent score for the film by composer
Bernard Herrmann (7th
Voyage of Sinbad, Psycho).
From his grandiose opening theme, to the balloon
escape and the individual cues for the various
monsters, Hermann's music accentuates the mood
and action perfectly. It's one of my personal
favorites and, I daresay, one of the greatest
fantasy film scores of all time.
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| Sadly,
Mysterious Island doesn't
fare as well as other titles in Columbia-TriStar's
Ray Harryhausen Signature Collection. As
has been reported elsewhere, Columbia made the strange
decision to matte a 1.33:1 fullscreen print to a
1.85 widescreen ratio. (I didn't see too many heads
chopped off at the top, but I still need to screen
my old VHS copy for a true comparison.) This wouldn't
be that mystifying if the original 1.33:1 version
were also available on the disc (as with the 20
Million Miles To Earth DVD), but it is not.
Most of the special effects sequences look substantially
grainier than the non-effects portions of the film,
but this has always been the case with Harryhausen's
stop-motion monster rallies... The print in general
looks like it could've used further restoration.
My biggest beef with the disc, though, is the audio.
While the mono track is clear-sounding, it's also
rather flat. This is a cryin' shame in light of
Hermann's marvelous score; the DVD edition of First
Men in the Moon demonstrated that film music
can sound great in mono. As for extras...
You guessed it — the same documentary featured on
the other Columbia-Harryhausen discs, The Harryhausen
Chronicles, is offered here. Ditto for the This
Is Dynamation featurette (a short promo reel
for 7th Voyage of Sinbad).
3 theatrical trailers are also included, for the
main feature as well as The
Golden Voyage of Sinbad
and Sinbad and the
Eye of the Tiger. There's also an 8-minute
video interview of Harryhausen discussing his work
on the film, previously seen on the Golden
Voyage disc. New to this DVD is a
step-through gallery of promotional stills, poster
art and original concept sketches. (EC's DVD rating
of 7 is conditional on not owning any of
the other Harryhausen DVDs from Columbia-TriStar.
Otherwise, it's "5".) 11/02/02 |
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