I’m not going to bury the lede here. I’m going to go ahead and tell you why you should see 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and that is because of the climatic battle. So, if you don’t want a spoiler for a movie more than 70 years old, stop now and go see the picture. You won’t regret it.
For anybody still around, get a load of this: two guys in radiation suits are on a rollercoaster at Coney Island. One of them has a container holding a radioactive isotope. The other is carrying a rifle to shoot that isotope into a wound in the neck of a resuscitated dinosaur. Oh, and there are oil barrels inexplicably at the base of the coaster, to ensure those catch on fire. Replace giant lizard with same-sized ape and you have a weird version of Donkey Kong. This makes me realize that classic arcade game could have really used a rollercoaster level.
As if that isn’t crazy enough, the dinosaur made the trip to there from the polar region. That is where nuclear tests have broken apart the ice, unfreezing this prehistoric monster. I’m sure that wasn’t the intention of dropping the bomb but, if it was, it’s a shame they didn’t just pollute the air enough to warm the planet a few more degrees, as that is doing a bang-up job melting the ice there at this time.
Swiss actor Paul Hubschmid had been part of those nuclear tests in the arctic and survived an attack from the dinosaur. Naturally, nobody believes him and he ends up having some talks with a psychiatrist at the New York City hospital where he recuperates.
At a local university, Hubschmid talks to dino expert Cecil Kellaway, who laughs off the man’s claims, though he does concede that area was once tropical a long time ago. Paula Raymond, as the professor’s assistant, says she once attended a lecture of Hubschmid’s, and believes the man to be brilliant. She will show him various sketches of dinosaurs to see if any of them resemble the one he saw. It is like some sort of very strange police sketch sequence.
The giant lizard in one of those is a dead ringer, and so it is off to Nova Scotia for a rather pointless tangent where our hero tries to find the captain of a ship that was destroyed, in the captain’s account, by a “sea serpent”. Cappy has buggered off to however far inland he can longer find any white men, whatever that might mean. But his first mate (Jack Pennick), is willing to accompany Hubschmid back to NYC where he chooses the same drawing. Wouldn’t it have been easier to take the drawings to Canada and not have to bring the man back here just for this purpose?
I could go into the script and the performances and all the normal criteria for judging a movie but, let’s face it, the reason anybody is going to see this is the stop-motion creations of Ray Harryhausen. There’s only one this time, but the dino is quite awesome. My favorite moment is when it attacks a lighthouse at night. The animation of the rotating beacon is flawless. The resulting destruction is impressive, with the central spiral staircase sticking out of the broken building like a severed spine. That was the key moment in the original Ray Bradbury story which was the inspiration for this film.
There are also some interesting ideas here. One surprisingly suspenseful scene has soldiers following a trail of giant pools of blood left by the wounded monster. As they progress, the men find themselves getting weak and collapsing. Turns out the dino is carrying a virulent disease not seen since long before the dawn of humans.
There are also some impressive stunts. The first guy in the arctic to see the dino accidentally backs off a cliff and, in an unbroken shot, we see the stuntman fall a couple of stories and land in the right angle formed between what is supposed to be a wall of ice and the ground. I sure hope that guy was OK afterwards.
Something else I want to say about the artic footage is, even with it all being rear projection, it was more believable than what was designed for Ice Station Zebra. Even the protruding sheets of ice here look more convincing than that big-budget film made 15 years later.
I want to wrap my thoughts on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms by singling out a bizarre comment made by Kellaway. He tells Hubschmid there are enough articles about sea serpents that, if they were put end-to-end, they would reach the moon. First, that reminded by that Dorothy Parker bon mot about a certain woman who, if one took all the men she knew and laid them end-to-end, Parker wouldn’t be surprised. Second, I thought that would be a really interesting way to do a lunar mission, just have the astronauts climb that rope of newspaper articles to the lunar surface. Were they training the kids of yesterday for that when they always had us climb that goddamn rope to the ceiling of the gym in phys ed?
Dir: Eugène Lourié
Starring Paul Hubschmid, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway
Watched on Warner Bros. blu-ray