It’s a tremendous adventure tale. I first saw it at a drive-in back in the early 60s, and it captured my imagination. I think it’s the only movie that features Kirk Douglas singing a sea shanty. It has to be my favorite Verne-inspired film, followed by Mike Todd’s Around World In 80 Days and Mysterious Island.
As I’ve mentioned before, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, and other 19th century (and early 20th century) writers have suffered badly at the hands of the movies. The adaptations are extremely far from the originals, and that hasn’t always been good.
Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea departs from Verne’s story, but it does so in a way that turns the episodic novel into a tighter, more coherent story line. It also boasts some great special effects, both in model work and in matte painting (by Harrison Ellenshaw), and a little seldom-noticed animation. It was directed by Richard Fleischer, the son of Disney’s competitor in the world of animation in the 20s and thirties! The model of the Nautilus used departed from Verne’s description (his looked like a streamlined cigar, basically – there are websites devoted to precisely this), but I agree with the decision to change it – it is visually much more interesting. I’m ambivalent about the decision to make it look as if the Nautilus was nuclear powered. James Mason makes a great, enigmatic, and tortured Nemo, and the rest of the cast is excellent. The matchup of Disney and Verne is great, and I’m disappointed they didn’t do more films (but see below).
My second favorite Verne movie is the 1916 silent version of 20,000 Leagues, which is available both on VHS and DVD. It was the first film to be extensively shot underwater, and the extremely clear waters they used were the same ones Disney used foirty years later. This is the only version of 20,000 Leagues to depict Nemo as an Indian (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen also did, years later, following Alan Moore’s graphic novel – but that’s not a version of 20KLutS). It also, amazingly, manages to adapted The Mysterious Island. An impressive film.
Disney and Verne came together again for In Search of the Castaways, which I rather liked, but which actually strays rather far from the book. I’ve learned that there are a couple of Russian adaptations that are faithful and highly regarded, and I’d love to see them. It’s too bad Disney never did another Verne novel. Their film The Island at the Top of the World is very Verne-like, but not based on any Verne book.
The Czech production Vynález zkázy, marketed in America as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, is an extremelty interesting flick. It’s done in a mix of live action and animation that is meant to look like the steel-plate engravings of the original books, which is pretty neat. It’s also based on one of Verne’s lesser-known books, For the Flag, his third novel to feature a submarine, and also guided missiles.
It might not be completelt faithful, but A Journey to the Center of the Earth does feature some good writing and a great cast, including James Mason (again), as a Professor Lindenbrock transplanted from Germany to Scotland (!) and Thayer David as a modern-day Saknussem descendent. Even the addition of Pat Boone (as Axel) and Arlene Dahl (as the onbligatory female lead) isn’t too intrusive. And they used the incredible Bernad Hermann for the music. Even the prehistoric reptiles (they substituted lizards with fins glued on their backs standing in as dimetrodons in place of the book’s icthyosaur and plesiosaur) were the most convincingly done in that style I’ve ever seen.
Most of the others are pretty far from the original, or really bad. Much as I love Harryhausen, his Mysterious Island ain’t Verne’s (although I have to give him props for making his Nautilus look like Ivan Goff’s from the Disney 20,000 Leagues – it makers the film look like a sequel to Disney’s). The quasi silent version of The Mysterious Island from 1930 is a really weird mishmash that isn’t Verne – or even comprehensible. All the relatively recent adaptations of 20,0000 Leagues are pretty dismissable, despite the talent involved. Brendan Fraser’s Journey to the Center of the Earth just borrows the name. the Lighthouse at the End of the World shoulda been better – It has Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, and Ursula Andress, fer cryin’ out loud, yet it manages to be boring. And the 1960s From the Earth to the Moon has to be the worst Verne adaptation ever.
Mike Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days is interesting as spectacle – especially if you ever had a chance to see it in the original Todd-AO projection system (I did) – the film wraps around you like a present-day Omnimax flick, and none of the video version can come close to capturing this. It’s enormous cast of stars, with their cameos, show you that the film is really shallow (most of those stars appear in cameos that are little more than glimpses, with Peter Lorre – Conseil in 20,000 Leagues – reduced to a few lines as a very unconvincing Japanese). The spectacle is gorgeous, however. And Todd’s innovation of spicing up the opening segment by having Fogg use a balloon to get from England to the Continent has convinced generations of people that there’s a balloon in Verne’s novel – there isn’t. But two of my copies of the novel feature that damned balloon on the cover.
That, and conflation with Verne’s first novel, Six Weeks in a Balloon, and the fact that in the book Fogg does consider crossing the Atlantic in a balloon, but discards the idea as too risky.
There’s no reason to conflate it with that particular novel (which was turned into its own movie). Verne used balloons in other stories and novels (Mysterious Island, An Encounter in the Air). He obviously liked balloons (His friend “Nadar” famously photographed from balloons, and was caricatured doing so), and he probably wouldn’t have been displeased by the change (Todd later got an award from the Jules Verne Society for the film), but the fact remains that it’s not in the book.
I was actually going to mention this because it was made by one of my favorite animators ever, Karel Zeman. It’s been years since I’ve seen it (and I can’t speak to the faithfulness to the source material), but it has some marvelously realized flights-of-fancy and is definitely worth checking out if you can (I don’t think it’s available on DVD).
I really enjoy the dining room scene in 20,000 Leagues where Nemo is describing the various dishes. Kirk Douglas’ expressions are a hoot when he learns he is drinking sperm whale milk and sauteed unborn octopus.
I’ve seen most of the movies discussed in this thread, and the Disney 20,000 Leagues is head-and-shoulders above the rest–mostly because of the superb production design.
But, there was a version of 80 Days that I loved as a very young kid. If my memory is worth a damn, it was definitely European, probably English, and almost certainly animated. Is that enough to ring any bells?
20,000 Leagues is the best…they spent a lot of money and did it right. The worst was probably “Mysterious Island”-that was a low rent production.
Has “Michael Strogoff” ever been done in film?
“Low Rent”? I don’t think either the 1929 quasi-silent nor the 1960s Harryhausen film were “low rent” The reason more people didn’t do animation was that it was too costly, in both time and money. I love Harryhausen, and my objection to his “Mysterious Island” is that it changes the plot so radically.
Michael Strogoff has been done several times on film. see the listing in the OP, or look it up on iMDB. I’ve never seen any of the versions, but I’d like to – that novel has a great “twist ending” to it.