I love the movie Cabin Boy and it is partly because of the weird sub-genre of cinema it lovingly parodies.  The 1954 Disney version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is very likely one of those inspirations.  It has a large creature; albeit, a giant squid and not a giant store manager.  It may not have Chris Elliott forced to dance to entertain a ship’s crew, but it has Kirk Douglas do a song to do the same, and it’s actually a pretty funny one.

What confused me at the first is the film opens in what looks to be a wild west town.  When Kirk Douglas first appears, he has a saloon dancin’ floozy on each arm, and I like to think those women weren’t cast—that Douglas just happened to bring them with him.  As happens in such a town, somebody will get punched and fly through a window and, since Douglas is there, it is a given he’ll be the one to throw that punch.  Memo to self: if I ever find myself in a wild west town, keep to the middle of the streets.

We’ll soon learn this is a sea port, where Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre had arrived in hopes of recruiting people for a scientific expedition to hunt a sea monster that has been sinking vessels.  It is obvious to the viewer, regardless of one’s familiarity with the source material, the menace is mechanical.  Still, it is a watercraft stylized to give the appearance of a monster, with green, glowing windows in the front that look like giant eyes and iron embellishments along the top like the spines of some prehistoric beast.

This is the Nautilus and James Mason is our Nemo for this iteration of the oft-told story.  Mason is solid as expected in this role, despite close-ups revealing his beard appears to be some sort of black spongy material that looks patently fake. 

The inside of the ship is a steampunk wet dream, and I keep forgetting the fetishization of wood, brass and giant glass gauge really happened long before it became a modern trope.  There’s also those great diving suits with the giant helmets that makes the wearer look like they’re hunting for a tiny treasure chest with a lid that keeps getting lifted up by a stream of bubbles.

Instead, Mason has his crew hunting for various foodstuffs the sea provides.  At the first dinner aboard the ship, Douglas reveals the only utensil he knows how to use is the knife, but we’re denied the opportunity to see him try to use that to eat soup.  Instead, he, Lukas and Lorre squirm as the consume a menu of various gross things from the ocean.  I think the pudding was pureed unborn octopus, which made me wonder why anybody would even consider making such a dish.  Douglas is repulsed when he discovers the cream he is about to consume is milk from a sperm whale, but at least it wasn’t sperm from a sperm whale.

In his first venture out of the sub, Douglas finds and returns with a great deal of treasure in the material sense.  He gets a reaming from Mason for not getting food as he was instructed.  Mason throws open a door to reveal a treasure room so overflowing it would give Daffy Duck an aneurysm.  The captain somehow simultaneously regards material wealth as useless while taking up valuable space with a great quantity of the stuff.

That isn’t Mason’s greatest contradiction, as he has been destroying military watercraft as an act of pacifism.  I have always wondered whether Captain Nemo’s use of violence to achieve peace was meant to be a dig at pacifists.  That element in a movie made less than a decade after the conclusion of WWII feels especially suspect.

The technological advances in the film are interesting.  It appears the ship is atomic powered.  It’s that or power through psychedelic light shows, given the groovy, colored flashes of light we see through the many tiny portholes into the energy chamber.  I guess you’re going to need a lot of steam for that giant organ Mason has also installed.  When you’re a villain, nothing less than a pipe organ will do when you’re playing “Fugue In D Minor”. 

It sure wouldn’t sound as good coming from the banjo Douglas fashions from a turtle shell as the body and the neck looking the spine of some of sort of creature with vertebrae perfectly sized as to make frets.  I’m still wondering what he used as strings.  He uses this to serenade a trained seal which, while cute, is the clearest evidence you’re watching a Disney film. 

The effects are very good for the time.  Given this is a Disney film, I was surprised there weren’t any animated touches, or at least none that I noticed.  There’s great matte painting work, which I always appreciate.  There’s also good miniature work that, while often not completely convincing, at least uses large scale models that allow for more detail.  And I’m still wondering if nascent bluescreen technology was used for a bit where fishes “swim” between us and Lukas looking out through a porthole, though there obviously isn’t any water between that window and the camera.

I enjoyed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, though not quite as much as I hoped I would.  It’s hard to say where the fault lies, as I appreciate the types of effects employed here and the casting is pretty good.  Maybe it is that this is a story I’ve seen in too many incarnations already.  Face it: even Disney essentially remade it in space for The Black Hole. 

One last thing: I’m strangely bothered that the sounds in the Nautilus are all those we expect a sub to make, except Nemo’s vessel is supposed to precede submarines and so would not have any standards to follow.  At least there’s never a sonar ping, but I wouldn’t have been too surprised if there had been one.

Dir: Richard Fleischer

Starring Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas, Peter Lorre

Watched on Disney Movie Club (R.I.P.) blu-ray