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THE
BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
Director: Eugene Lourié.
Writers: Fred Freiberger, Daniel James, Eugène Lourié,
Louis Morheim, Robert Smith.
Starring: Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway.
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Professor
von Cucumber
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There
Were Giants In Those Days – and Harryhausen was the largest!
by
Jon Dunmore © 28 Jul 2005.
His
name was synonymous with SPECTACLE.
View
any movie from the 50s or 60s with a gigantic, roaring,
pseudo-prehistoric, collateral-damaging monster and you
were probably watching one of Ray Harryhausen's herky-jerky
children of fantastic plastic.
Just
as Ed Wood is The King of B-Movie Schlock, as Alfred Hitchcock
is The King of Suspense, as Hayden Christensen is The King
of Bad Actors, as George Lucas is The King of Nominal Directing,
Ray Harryhausen was once The King of Monster Movies.
Though
he was minimally responsible for the production side of
the movies he worked on (only rarely donning the caps of
director, producer, writer or actor) his "stop-motion"
visual effects method was so innovative and startling that
movie-lovers came to refer to a whole genre of films as
"Ray Harryhausen" movies.
And
why not? Were it not for the blind-man's-bane Harpies in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963), or the kidnapped Allosaur in THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), or the damsel-devouring Kraken
in CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981), where would those movies
have been, had the film-makers opted to have some guy in a
rubber suit do Ray's dirty work? Harryhausen's creations brought
character to the movies – in more ways than one. (No,
he didn't do the seminal stop-motion grand-daddy of them all
– his mentor, Willis O' Brien, did KING KONG (1933).
THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, like many of its ilk, sports the barely-legal setup - nuclear
tests in the Arctic - before The Beast is unleashed. (During
the Cold War, it was de rigueur to detonate nuclear
devices willy-nilly, irradiating animals into gigantism causing
45 minutes of cinematic running and screaming...) Then perfunctory wooden acting amidst mundane set design until – more
unleashing! Directors and screenwriters of "Harryhausen"
movies gleaned so
much quality from Ray's creatures that they were off the
hook in providing little more than running, screaming and
military stock footage to bridge the gaps between monster
scenes.
Integrating Harryhausen's footage into the
body of these movies was masterful, utilizing every trick
those oldsters knew to retain the illusion of proximity and size of
the fictional beasts. Eugene Lourié directs this Beast rampaging through city streets,
eating a diving bell, sinking a ship, toppling a lighthouse,
looming above the populace, pushing over office buildings -
no doubt affecting the Dow-Jones Average egregiously –
with nary a doubt it is really performing these feats.
Though
it does look goofy by today's standards, there was
a certain level of pseudo-realism attained that magnificently
satisfied those pre-CGI audiences and allows even a post-EPISODE III
audience to appreciate at least the towering aspirations
of the state-of-the-art back then.
Identifying
The Beast was an exercise in malarky: The Chick (Paula Raymond) gives White
Hero (Paul Christian) a ream of artist's renderings of dinosaurs, to identify the one that may be The Beast from his unnecessary Arctic tests. From the ream of realistic renderings he pulls the
obvious cartoony one (done by a movie studio artist
on the quick&cheap) and The Old Paleontologist (Cecil Kelloway) identifies
it with a name as faux as its rendering –
a "rhedosaurus" ("rhedo" being Latin
for "bogus"?), though I'd be apt to question Old Paleo's credentials with the centerpiece of his lab being
a Glue-By-Numbers, anatomically-imbecilic sauropod skeleton
purchased from Wal-Mart.
Mandatory
running and screaming scenes lead to the mandatory military
stock footage, to Christian's big-chested, square-jawed, all-white
Hero having unbridled access to all levels
of the military and police forces as if he was in
charge – and them obliging his every whim as if he was. The top-level brass in both Army and Navy are
somehow always just a phone call away and eager beaver to
accommodate White Hero simply because he's the tallest and
whitest guy they know (albeit, this particular Hero has
some funky Euro accent sprinkling his American megalomania).
White
Hero determines a solution to the Beast
problem – i.e. how to KILL this wondrous organism.
It seems that after the one paleontologist on Earth (Kelloway) becomes brunch for The Beast, there is no one else to step forward (no zoological
organization, no Greenies, no special interest group) to
speak for this unique animal's Right To Life. (Old Paleo's demise would have been tragic if it weren't so illegitimately
verbose, with him in a diving bell as The Beast bears down on him, as he is in the throes
of scientific orgasm, spouting obliquities like, "the
clavicle suspension appears to be cantileveric" –
whatever you say, doc! Get a closer look at the gullet and stomach and digestive juices for us, wouldja?...)
So The Beast Must Die, in another staple of 50s cinema – The Fiery
Finale.
In
a final sequence so heart-stoppingly boring that test-audiences
couldn't answer their survey cards from being ASLEEP, White
Hero and a boyish Lee van Cleef (!) ride a roller-coaster
to the top of a trellis, to shoot a radioactive isotope
into the bloodstream of The Beast (don't ask), while hundreds
of troops stand watching like statues. If there was any
doubt they resembled statues, the director inserted many,
many cutaways back to them to remind us that yes,
they did indeed resemble statues. While The Beast frolics
innocently amidst the roller-coaster trellis, White Hero
and van Cleef, dressed as beekeepers, shoot it, then take about four hours to descend the trellis, while a runaway roller-coaster crashes and starts the
aforementioned Grand Finale Fire. While the troops stand
like statues. Watching. While White Hero and van Cleef climb
down. Slowly. While the troops watch. While they climb.
Thankfully,
the inanimate humans in the film were overshadowed by the
cutaways of a backdrop ablaze with the roller-coaster trellis,
silhouetting The Beast roaring its long goodbye.
Troops
cheer. White Hero gets The Chick. But the real Hero
of the film was a man who scared the tit-willow out of those
boring humans with a plastic model no more than three feet
high – RAY HARRYHAUSEN.
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THE
BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
Director: Eugene Lourié.
Writers: Fred Freiberger, Daniel James, Eugène Lourié,
Louis Morheim, Robert Smith.
Starring: Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway.
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