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Seminal
is such a great word that's thrown
around a lot when talking about film,
but I wonder if people realize that the
root of the word comes from semen, ya
know -- sperm, seed, source of life and
all that. When relating it to film,
we're talking about the originators of
the species: Films that spawned sequels,
imitators and countless copycats. And The
Beast from 20000 Fathoms
definitely fits that bill in a lot more
ways than you think. Read on.
Stock
footage, HO!
Our
landmark feature begins with the soon to
be prerequisite, nonsensical stock-military
footage, and an overly stern and
incredibly redundant narrator ties it all
together and clues us in to just what in
the hell we're looking at.
Thanks
to Mr. Redundant, we find out we're
somewhere around the Arctic Circle on
X-Day, and we're 59 minutes away from
H-Hour (that's less than an hour
the narrator adds. Like I said,
redundant.) That's military
newspeak for a top-secret operation: The
detonation of a nuclear device, for
strictly scientific purposes, and it's
about to go boom. As the
clock winds down, Col. Evans (Ken
Tobey -- Hurray!) and a couple of
scientists from the Department of Atomic
Energy, Tom Nesbitt (Paul
Christian) and George Ritchie (Ross
Elliot), anxiously tick off the
seconds. (The
movie never addresses Christian's French
accent, so I won't either.) The
device detonates without a hitch (unless
you count all the fallout, but, hey, ya
know), but one of the radar men who
was monitoring the blast swore he saw a
large blip on his screen; but it's long
gone before any of the brass see it (and
sharp eyes will spot James Best as one of
the operators.)
Nesbitt
and Ritchie don their parkas and head out
to check radiation levels. They make it to
the first checkpoint okay, but a blizzard
is fast approaching. So they decide to
split up to cover more ground before the
weather forces them to head back. As the
weather deteriorates, Ritchie
believes the snow might be playing tricks
on him. That, or he just saw a 150-foot
long dinosaur tromping along a glacier (the
aforementioned big blip on the radar
screen). Moving in for a closer
look, somehow, the large beast manages to
sneak up and scares him, and this causes
him to fall into a crevice. His leg
broken, Ritchie shoots off a flare, which
brings Nesbitt to the rescue. Unable to
move Ritchie by himself, he heads back for
help promising that "he'll get him
out". But before he can, the monster
reappears above them and triggers an
avalanche, burying them under a ton of
snow and ice. (Ritchie a little
more critically than Nesbitt.)
Nesbitt
manages to fire off another flare before
succumbing to shock. He's found and hauled
back to the base. He's in bad shape,
though, and the base medic states that
they have to get him to a real hospital or
he won't make it. Slipping in and out of
consciousness, Nesbitt raves about seeing
something. Something about a giant
monster. A giant monster that's coming...
*
* * *
Producer
Jack Dietz, the head of Mutual Films,
was developing a project tentatively
titled The Monster From Under the Sea.
The production's biggest obstacle was that
Dietz wasn't sure how to realize the
film's monster: A man in a suit, or glue a
dorsal fin and some horns on an alligator.
Ray
Harryhausen, who really wasn't Ray
Harryhausen -- the father of Dynamation
-- yet, got wind of the project, needed
the work, and contacted Dietz. He gave the
producer the hard sell, showing his work
on Mighty
Joe Young
and some conceptual work from a proposed
project called Evolution. In his
autobiography, An
Animated Life,
Harryhausen admits that he wasn't sure he
could accomplish all that he promised
Dietz, but his enthusiasm and low cost
estimates (and
I'm positive that was the clincher)
got him the job.
The
original story was to have a creature,
called a minotaur (not the mythical
creature), defrosted by an atomic
blast and then run amok, eventually
destroying the Statue of Liberty before
being refrozen by a special freeze jets
mounted on helicopters.
One
of the biggest misconceptions about this
movie is that it's based on Ray Bradbury's
short story, originally titled The
Foghorn -- a tale where a dinosaur
from the deep mistakes a foghorn for a
mating call, gets horny, investigates, and
dry humps a lighthouse -- published
several years earlier in The Saturday
Evening Post. That's not quite true.
Now, depending on which story you believe,
either Bradbury was interested in what his
old friend was working on, so Harryhausen
let him read the script, and he noticed
the similarity between a scene in the film
where the beast destroys a lighthouse, or
Dietz found the article and wanted to
incorporate it into his film. He also
liked the Post's new title of the
story: The Beast from 20000 Fathoms.
Regardless,
the film was already in production, and
not wanting any legal hassles, Dietz
quickly offered to buy the rights to the
story and the title. Luckily, Bradbury
agreed. Six screenwriters and
several punch-ups later, the film started
to resemble what we wind up seeing (including
Harryhausen's suggestion that the climax
should take place in the amusement park.)
While
first time director Eugène
Lourié, a production designer and F/X man,
himself, and the rest of the production
crew went to work on the live action
elements, all
Harryhausen had to do was deliver what he
promised Dietz. Designing
the creature as an amalgamation of several
dinosaurs, he doesn't claim, or denies
credit for, coining it a Rhedosaurus.
Being that the first two letters are R and
H one has to wonder. Dietz
delivered the promised camera and
equipment from RKO that the
animator had used while apprenticing with
Willis O'Brien on Mighty
Joe Young.
Harryhausen then set up his studio, built
the Beast out of a metal armature, cotton,
sponge rubber and latex skin modeled from
an alligator, and started tinkering around
with a few ideas on how to combine live
action elements with his animations.
And
the rest, as they say, is screen history
as we rejoin our film already in progress...
Nesbitt
is flown to New York where he recovers in
a hospital. His health improves, but the
doctor feels he's delusional with all the
monster talk and brings in a psychiatrist.
When Evans stops for a visit, Nesbitt
demands to know what Washington plans to
do about the monster. But that little
tidbit was left out of the official
report. Evans lead the investigation,
himself, but couldn't find any tracks or
traces of the thing Nesbitt described.
Nesbitt blames that on the blizzard but
the psychiatrist assures him that in times
of trauma, the mind can play tricks on
you. All it was was the snow and wind
causing his delusional hallucinations.
Meanwhile,
Nesbitt's "delusional
hallucination" attacks and sinks a
ship near Baffin Bay. With
more and more news reports of sea serpent
sightings -- and another sunken freighter,
Nesbitt decides to try and convince Dr.
Elson (Cecil
Kellaway), the Dean of Paleontology
at NYU, that it's his monster that's doing
all the damage. Being
a scientist, Nesbitt wants to mount an
expedition to capture and study the beast,
and he wants Elson to lead it. Elson
doesn't believe him, either, but he finds
a sympathetic ear with his assistant, Lee
Hunter (Pamela Raymond).
Nesbitt conjectures that the monster he
saw was a dinosaur, somehow, frozen a
million years ago, and then defrosted by
their experiment. Elson doesn't buy it,
thinking nothing could
survive in the ice that long. Hunter
brings up the perfectly preserved
mastodons found frozen in Siberia. Elson
doesn't discount this, but rightfully
points out that those mastodons were quite
dead.
Defeated,
Nesbitt returns to work. Hunter stops by
to see him -- she believes him, or at
least believes that it should be
investigated further, and wants him to try
and identify what he saw by coming over to
her place and look though her dinosaur
sketches. (That's an odd come on
pitch.) Several
hundred or so pictures later, Nesbitt
still hasn't found his monster but the
seeds of a budding romance between these
two are planted over small talk, coffee
and sandwiches (I'm
guessing it's that foreign accent. Chicks
dig Euro accents). As the love buds
start to sprout, the process is brought to
a screeching halt: Nesbitt has finally
spotted his monster.
Needing
further corroboration, Nesbitt
tries to contact the sole survivors of the
two shipwrecks. The first refuses to talk,
but the second, happy that somebody
doesn't think he's crazy, agrees to help.
Nesbitt brings him to New York and takes
him to Elson's office, hoping this will
finally convince him. Hunter is there with
several sketches, including the one
Nesbitt identified, and the old salt picks
the same one. Elson identifies the sketch
as a Rhedosaurus -- a dinosaur from the
Mesozoic Age. The only fossils found were
in the canyons at the bottom of Hudson
Bay, 150 miles from New York. With all the
mounting evidence, Elson finally comes
into the fold. The military may not heed
Nesbitt's warnings, but they'd better
listen to his.
So
they've convinced Elson, but now they've
got to convince Col. Evans and he proves
an even harder sell. He doesn't want to be
accused of wanting a Section-8, but
promises to use his contacts in the Coast
Guard to keep them up to date on any
"strange happenings" in the
area.
Do
you think the Rhedosaurus surfacing and
destroying a lighthouse counts?
You
bet. While the Coast Guard is put on alert,
Elson wants the use of a Navy diving bell
to explore the canyons of Hudson Bay. He's
convinced, judging by the trail of damage
and destruction, that the beast is
instinctively heading home. Once they find
it, they can devise a way to capture and
study it. And if that proves unfeasible,
the military can always just blow it up. Despite
Hunter's protests, the elderly Elson goes
down in the diving bell. Incredulously,
with all that area to cover, luck is on
their side as on the second try they find
the beast as it swallows some film-padding
whole (the padding being a stock
footage shark and octopus in a not too
friendly wrestling match.) Elson
radios the surface and excitedly tells
Hunter that it is, indeed, a Rhedosaurus.
He can barely contain his excitement
describing it. And he's also so excited
that he doesn't notice the beast is
closing in on them -- with it's mouth wide
open.
Up
above, Elson's broadcast is cut short.
When the order is quickly given to haul
them up, the winches engage, but all they
reel in is a severed cable.
There
is little time to lament Elson's death (at
least he died for his beloved science,
Nesbitt consoles the distraught Hunter,
wotta guy), because the beast
decides to come ashore and take in the
sights of New York City. As
the beast rampages through the streets,
causing pedestrian stampedes, it becomes
an insurance adjustor's worst nightmare as
it stomps cars and knocks over buildings.
Then the beast makes one critical mistake
-- it messes with New York's finest by
first biting the head of a patrolmen and
then consuming him (a nice morbid
little piece of animation as the officer
goes down kicking and screaming.)
This brings out the riot squad and
shotguns (and the
officer-who-just-got-ate's twin brother.
Hey, waitasecond!)
While
the hospitals fill up with the injured,
the National Guard is called in, and soon,
lower Manhattan is a no-man's land;
cordoned off and barricaded while heavier
artillery is brought in (I guess
the capture and study plan is out the
window.) The
beast is spotted but even 50mm shells
can't penetrate it's thick hide. A bazooka
team has better luck once Nesbitt tells
them to aim for the fleshy part of the
beast's neck (and shouldn't Hunter
be the one pointing that out?)
Wounded and bleeding, the beast retreats
into the darkened canyons of New York. Evans
sends in several patrols after it to
finish the beast off. And as the soldiers
follow the blood trail, they start
dropping like flies, succumbing to some
mysterious malady. Word comes that the
ancient beast has brought something else
with it from the Mesozoic age, a deadly
virus, and exposure to it's blood could
prove fatal.
With
the risk of unleashing a new plague,
blowing the beast to smithereens is now
out of the question. It doesn't matter,
because they can't find it, and a search
of the area confirms that the beast must
have made it back into the water. While
the brain-trust mull over their now
limited options, Evans wants to use
flamethrowers but Nesbitt warns the smoke
particles would spread the disease even
further. Since the beast must be
incenerated, completely, Nesbitt finally
has the answer: Shoot a radioactive
isotope into the beast; that'll poison the
creature, and should render the virus
harmless. (Uh, sure. Okay...What?!)
Word
comes that the beast has resurfaced near
Coney Island. Wounded and angry, the beast
manages to get itself corralled inside the
amusement park's roller coaster. Seizing
that opportunity, Nesbitt loads the
isotope into a rifle grenade (a
more accurate applicator couldn't be
found?), and Evans rounds up his
best shot since they'll only have one
chance.
And,
yes, that's Lee Van Cleef who joins his
future co-star Clint Eastwood as the
deliverer of fatal blows to giant movie
monsters. Clint would get his turn a few
years later in Tarantula.
Nesbitt
and the sharpshooter don some radiation
suits and move in. With all the wreckage
they can't get a clear shot from the
ground, so they take the roller coaster
carts to higher ground. The trooper takes
aim at the open wound in the creature's
neck, and his aim is true, and the grenade
scores a bulls-eye. (With an M-1
rocket propelled grenade? On a moving
target? Man, that guy is good.)
Our
heroes return to backslaps and
congratulations, but only one of them gets
a hug from Hunter. Then they all turn and
watch as the beast goes into it's death
throes, hamming it up until it finally
falls still. The world is saved.
The
End
It
took Harryhausen five months and money out
of his own pocket to finish his part of Beast.
He'd underestimated his budget projection
but had picked up valuable experience that
would serve him well as he perfected his
process in later films.
Lourié
delivered on his end, too, wringing
everything he could out of the limited
budget. And that's the one thing I've
always enjoyed about all of Harryhausen's
productions. And it's not really fair to
call them "his productions." His
creatures are the selling point, but,
without something interesting or
entertaining framing them, his films
wouldn't be remembered nearly as fondly as
they are. The man was blessed with good
producers, solid scripts (I
especially like the wild card element of
the deadly virus in this film, but you
have to wonder if it was originally
supposed to be caused by radiation from
the monster?), solid casts and
competent directors. And there was always
one other important element that helped
his films that is often overlooked --
everyone I can think of had a fantastic
musical score, including this one.
Dietz
and co-producer (and former Bowery
Boy) Hal Chester were delighted
with the end results. Dietz, however, was
concerned with the current landscape of
motion pictures. Would audiences, who were
growing accustomed to color and
cinemascope, be willing to watch an old
black and white, standard-ratio format
monster movie? Not
wanting to take the financial risk of
distribution himself, Dietz sold the
picture, lock, stock and Rhedosaurus to
Warner Brothers for $400000; meaning
instant profit on a film that was brought
in for around $200000. Warner
Bros spent an additional $200000 to
promote the film, including exploiting the
medium that was killing movies at the time
by advertising it on TV, tinted the film
and declared it to be in "Glorious
Sepiatone." When 500 prints,
accentuated with some fantastic poster
art, hit the theaters, The
Beast from 20000 Fathoms
became the sleeper hit of 1953 grossing
over $5 million in it's initial run.
We
all know what happened to Harryhausen
after that, but Lourié also stuck with
the giant monster motif and went on to
direct The
Giant Behemoth
with effects provided by Willis O'Brien (and
I think it's actually a better movie than Beast.
Not necessarily the effects, mind you, but
story wise. I really need to review that
movie), and even did a non-animated
monster movie and dressed up a guy in a
monster suit for Gorgo.
Dietz
would try a monster movie again, too, with
The
Black Scorpion,
also with O'Brien -- although he didn't
treat him near as good as he did
Harryhausen, as half of the film's effects
are unfinished matte shots. Hal Chester
would go on to ruin Jacques Tourneur's Curse
of the Demon,
for some, by insisting that he add in the
shot of the monster. But
it was the incredible financial turnaround
of their first collaborative feature that
officially started the Atomic Age
of monster movies; and I say, God bless
'em for that. Soon people were
crawling out of the woodwork to produce
these low-budget actioneers, and realize,
mind you, the lower the budget and the
less spent on the film, the bigger the
profit when you add up the ticket sales,
resulting in some real howlers that had
nothing to do with film as an art form.
Not
only independent producers, or smaller
production companies like American
International, but the big boys at Warners
and Universal took note and started
producing their own features. Then,
throughout the '50s, we were overrun with
rampaging atomic mutations, square-jawed
heroes teamed up with old fuddy scientists
and their buxom female assistants, who
must first prove the creatures existence,
follow it's pattern, devise a way to fight
it, and then call in the military to blow
it to kingdom come before the ending
credits (or slight variations
thereof.)
And
we can trace it all back to The
Beast from 20000 Fathoms.
The
Thing from Another World may have come
two years earlier, but this film is the
rightful granddaddy of the sci-fi boom of
the '50s. And sci-fi film fans of
everything from revered classics like THEM!
and Godzilla
to the inept, gonzoid anti-classics like The
Giant Claw and Beginning
of the End owe this film a huge debt.
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