THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS: Blu-ray (Warner Bros., 1953) Warner Home Video

Shot on a shoestring for what it would cost to make a 30-second commercial today, director, Eugène Lourié’s indie-made, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) remains a landmark in sci-fi picture-making, not the least for the combined efforts of Fred Freiberger, Eugène Lourié, Louis Morheim and Robert Smith on a very persuasive screenplay (balancing the ‘factual data’) with master stop-animation specialist, Ray Harryhausen’s mind-blowing triumph in the creation of ‘the Rhedosaurus’ – a wholly fictionalized prehistoric creature, presumably startled from its ice-age hibernation by an atomic bomb near the Arctic Circle. Aside: those with keen eyes will recognize the bomb footage as the Baker test, discharged in the tropics, near the isle of Bikini Atoll on July 1, 1946. Double aside: I sincerely encourage anyone who has never seen this actual footage to seek it out on YouTube. It is terrifying! But I digress. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms picks up where all this radioactive fallout leaves off – resuscitating man’s worst nightmare; a creature, impervious to our modern-age weaponry, and one, seemingly hellbent on mankind’s annihilation. By today’s impatient standards, it takes a while for this beast to appear. We do catch glimpses of the Rhedosaurus as it terrorizes a pair of scientists caught in a perilous blizzard while on a routine survey near the U.S. observatory. But otherwise, the first act is almost exclusively devoted to the shared disbelief in this fantastic finding when one of the survivors from this first attack, physicist, Tom Nesbitt (Swiss-born, Paul Hubschmid – a.k.a. Paul Christian) is routinely dismissed by his superior, Colonel Jack Evans (Kenneth Tobey – who reached the apex of his fame two years earlier in another low-budgeted sci-fi masterpiece: Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World).  

Lest we remember, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was made at a time when ‘story’ was as important – perhaps (gasp!) even more so than special effects. So, it takes a while before this ‘beast’ resurfaces; this time, to capsize a pair of fishing boats, and later, topple a lighthouse from its craggy perch. This latter incident was, in fact, what inspired Harryhausen to partake of the picture; stripped directly from Ray Bradbury's short story. Bradbury’s tale would serve as inspiration in other ways too. First announced in the trades as ‘The Monster from Beneath the Sea’, it was Harryhausen who brought Bradbury’s story to the attention of Jack Dietz, whose production house was gearing up to make the picture. Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Bradbury’s tale would later be anthologized under the less-impressive title, ‘The Fog Horn’. Central to the plot of Bradbury’s work was the marine-based prehistoric dinosaur’s destruction of the lighthouse, depicted in the stark light of day. In the movie, Harryhausen stages a similar sequence on a moodily lit and slightly foggy night, with bone-chilling effectiveness; the super-imposition of miniatures on models and live-action footage, re-combined in the camera to achieve an uncanny level of verisimilitude. Shooting in silhouette also hides a lot of sins and imperfections in the process itself. Let us be clear, here. While Harryhausen was a master in his craft, his effects, in no way compare to the smoothly executed CGI we are used to seeing today. However, what they maintain, spectacularly well, despite changing technologies and tastes, is a queasily unsettling sense of dread that not even today’s CGI can top.   

Harryhausen’s creature effects are veteran paradigms in stop-animation, honed from his early tenure and experiences at RKO, working under Willis O'Brien, the man who created the original King Kong (1933). The monster in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms looks nothing like Bradbury’s described Brontosaurus-esque animal; Harryhausen, preferring the Tyrannosaurus-Rex as his prototype, with slight modifications to add a more reptilian quality, and, for menace, quadrupedal in size. Plans to have the Beast snort fire were scrapped when the effect proved well beyond the SFX allotted budget. Nevertheless, poster art depicted a flame-throwing Beast’ and would, in hindsight, prove the inspiration for the Japanese-produced Gojira (1954 – a.k.a. Godzilla). Also, to keep costs manageable, the original ‘fabricated’ dinosaur bones, toppled by a scatterbrained Kate Hepburn during the climax of RKO’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) were borrowed and reassembled inside a set depicting University Professor, Dr. Thurgood Elson’s (Cecil Kellaway) paleontology lab. For the imaginative finale, a showdown between the Beast and the military at New York’s Coney Island, real footage of the Cyclone Racer in Long Beach, California was wed to Harryhausen’s split-matte process, allowing for an almost seamless integration of foreground miniatures of coaster track, decimated by the marauding dino, fire effects, and stop-animation of the beast to ‘interact’ with terrorized riders and the advancing military.

In the eleventh hour of production, Jack Dietz was offered, what appeared to be, a lucrative wholesale price from Warner Bros. to buy the picture outright. Overwhelmed by his ‘good fortune’, Dietz sold his interests to the studio and was thereafter left kicking himself when The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms became a colossal hit, grossing $2.25 million in the U.S. alone. With Warner’s acquisition of the movie, Michel Michelet’s original score was replaced by new compositions commissioned from David Buttolph. Harryhausen had expressed his own fervor to have Max Steiner write the music.  It would have made sense, as Steiner – renown as the Dean of American film scoring – not only had written the music for the original King Kong (so, he came well versed to the milieu of sci-fi) but was, in fact, under contract to Warner Bros.  In this instance, however, Steiner’s slate of pending projects proved too overwhelming. So, Buttolph did the picture, contributing what is still regarded as the singular most influential cues ever written for vintage sci-fi. It set the tone for an entire generation of fifties’ monster movies yet to follow it. For its sheer ferocity, Buttolph’s score is immensely satisfying – punctuating the Beast’s maniacal attacks with ominous flourishes.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms begins with Buttolph’s haunting main title. From here, we digress to ‘Operation Experiment’ in the Arctic Circle. Immediately following the detonation of a nuclear bomb, physicist, Thomas Nesbitt rather prophetically muses, “What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be…only time will tell.” Good call, as this particular explosion has stirred a 200-ft carnivorous Rhedosaurus, long thought to be extinct, from its suspended animation of nearly a million years. This Beast is hungry. And Nesbitt is narrowly its first snack, surviving the assault while another colleague is eaten alive. Nesbitt’s shell-shocked account is dismissed outright and credited as frost-bitten delirium by Colonel Evans. While Nesbitt recovers in an army hospital, placated by the kindly Dr. Morton (Frank Ferguson), who can find no outward signs of physical trauma in his patient, but clearly thinks Nesbitt’s mental acuity requires closer observation, the Beast strikes, sinking a fishing ketch off the Grand Banks; then, destroying another near Marquette, Canada. The sole survivor of the first attack, French-speaking Captain George LeMay (Leo Mostovoy) is criticized as having lost his mind, and refuses to speak to Nesbitt. Meanwhile, the Beast wrecks a lighthouse off the coast of Maine. Discovering another survivor from the first disaster, Jacob Bowman (Jack Pennick), is suffering from devastating flashbacks in a Canadian hospital, Nesbitt encourages Bowman to return with him to New York, to help identify the creature from a series of drawings, provided to him by Dr. Elson’s assistant, Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond). Initially, only Lee believes Nesbitt’s story. Now, with corroboration from Bowman, Elson concurs there may be something to these increased sightings of a ‘beast-like’ creature.

Charting a map of the beast’s path of destruction thus far, Elson proposes it is returning to the Hudson River where fossilized Rhedosaurus remains were first discovered. To support his theory, Elson gets the military to lower him in a diving bell into the Hudson River Canyon. Alas, Professor Elson’s worst nightmares are realized when the beast materializes from out of the murky waters. Unable to send a warning topside, the beast consumes the diving bell with Elson inside it. Now, the beast makes its way to Manhattan, to devastate the neighborhoods near the docks. We momentarily digress to a furious montage of newspaper accounts, estimating the gravity of the situation: 180 confirmed dead, 1500 injured, and damages at roughly $300 million. Proven wrong, Colonel Jack Evans rises to the occasion, constructing an electrified barricade that momentarily delays the Rhedosaurus’ onslaught.  He has his men blast a gaping wound in the beast’s throat with a bazooka. This drives the creature back into the sea, but it also unleashing a toxic contagion that kills many more civilians.  As this precludes blowing up the Rhedosaurus outright or even setting it ablaze, lest it trigger an all-out plague, Nesbitt comes up with the intriguing solution: shoot the beast full of radioactive isotopes. These will burn it from the inside without releasing the contagion. The finale to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, while exhilarating, is just a tad silly to say the least. Luring the Rhedosaurus to Coney Island, military sharpshooter, Corporal Stone (Lee Van Cleef) rides the Cyclone roller coaster to the apex of its first hill, taking dead aim with a rifle grenade loaded full of radioactive isotopes. Skillfully, he fires the necessary kill shot into the Beast’s gaping wound. This causes it to uncontrollably thrash. The coaster sparks and is engulfed in flames; the Rhedosaurus, succumbing to isotope poisoning and – wait for it – heat stroke.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is amusingly ridiculous, but so imaginatively plotted as to easily allows for our suspension of disbelief. Ray Harryhausen’s stop-animation succeeds, not only at instilling terror, but giving the Beast its unique soul and personality. The effects, while dated, work because the movie is not entirely hinged on these action-oriented vignettes. All of the human actors involved play their part with great sincerity; particularly, Paul Christian, who cuts the figure of an amiable and very handsome leading man. The son of a Swiss accountant, Christian trained at Max Reinhardt’s Seminar of Dramatic Art in Vienna and reached the zenith of his European acting career in the mid-forties. Miraculously, his presence in several well-received German movies made under the Nazi occupation did nothing to impact his move into Hollywood in 1948. And although he worked steadily, the pictures assigned him were hardly of the star-making caliber.  Despite initially signing a 7-year contract, Christian’s disillusion with how Hollywood perceived his talents caused him to buy out his contract after only 4-years and return to post-war Germany where his prospects were infinitely better served, and, where he continued to work until 1992. He died of a pulmonary embolism, in 2001, age 84.

The other great performance in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms belongs to twice-Oscar-nominated, South African-born, Cecil Kellaway – at age 63, in 1953, a very spry old soul with plenty of charm to recommend him. In Kellaway’s youth, the family relocated to Australia where he studied engineering before succumbing to the acting bug. Touring as a stage actor for 3-years throughout Asia, North and South America and Europe, Kellaway eventually broke into the then fledgling Australian movie industry in the early 1930’s, and, by the end of the decade, secured a screen test at RKO, leading to a contract.   He appeared in undistinguished parts in studio-ground B-movies, achieving his first sizeable role in Blond Cheat (1938). Steadily, his prospects improved, particularly after playing the doting father in 1939’s weepy, Wuthering Heights (1939). At this point, Kellaway was repeatedly loaned out to rival studios. Although he frequently tired of playing ‘second fiddle’ to other stars, Kellaway’s nature adapted itself spectacularly well and he became one of the hardest-working, and most memorable ‘character’ actors of his generation – never, to carry a picture, but always adorn it with breezy aplomb. Twice, Oscar knocked on his door – always the bridesmaid, but never the bride: nominated for his whimsical portrait of a wily leprechaun in 1948’s The Luck of the Irish, and again, as the effervescent Catholic priest, in 1967’s Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. After a lengthy illness, Kellaway died at the West Los Angeles’ Convalescent Home on February 28, 1973. He was 83.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms has been available on Blu-ray for some time. That it has taken me this long to get around to reviewing it is a mystery, as it has been one of my favorite go-to’s for a night of hokey good-natured sci-fi adventure. Warner Home Video’s 1080p offering – one of their last released outside of WAC’s archive, offers a spectacular transfer, with stunning clarity, a light smattering of grain looking very indigenous to its source, and some gorgeous tonality and contrast in its grey scale. It goes without saying, the stock footage of the Bikini Atoll detonation is grainier than the rest of the studio-bound stuff. It’s newsreel – not Hollywood, folks! However, there seems to be some discrepancy among the noted websites, whether or not The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was originally released in tinted sepia. This disc is in B&W, the way I first discovered this movie waaaay back in the mid-1970’s, perpetually resurrected as part of Saturday afternoon’s double-billed ‘Creature Feature’. This Blu-ray looks great and will surely not disappoint fans. The audio is a bit of a muddle. Certain scenes suffer from dialogue that is inaudible at regular listening levels, while sound effects and Buttolph’s score tend to dominate the sound field. Extras are informative, including a Q&A with Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury, and a brief ‘making of’ featurette with both men affectionately waxing about their participation on the movie. We also get a vintage newsreel and theatrical trailer. Bottom line: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a must have for die-hard sci-fi collectors. This Blu-ray affords it the class ‘A’ treatment it justly deserves. Highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

3.5