I can still remember the feeling of acute disappointment and disillusionment when I dug into 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Here was not the exciting adventure story I had been promised, with giant sea creatures and whizz-bang invasions. Here, instead, was a very long, very plodding book that devoted pages, endless fucking pages, to lists of different kinds of fish and oceanic flora. I started that book as a bright eyed youth, and finished it older, darker, with a certain light stamped out of my soul. I vowed then to never read again. And I never have.
Anywho, Journey to the Center of the Earth is a pretty swell adventure movie, now available on Blu-ray thanks to Twilight Time. While not featuring any moment as immediately iconic as the giant squid lose on a submarine, or a character as multi-layered and fascinating as Captain Nemo, Journey is still a very enjoyable reminder of the kind of epic Hollywood could create before superheroes became the name of the game.
Irascible professor Sir Oliver Lindenbrook (James Mason at his most droll) and his student Alec McEwan (Pat Boone [both characters are supposed to be Scottish, by the way, but outside of a few half-hearted ‘laddies’ tossed out by Mason, the two leads expend negative energy to sell that particular illusion]) stumbled across evidence of a renowned expedition to reach the center of the earth. Following the clue, Lindenbrook and McEwan head to Iceland seeking to follow in the first expedition’s footsteps and reach the center of the earth their own selves. They are joined by Carla (Arlene Dahl), the recent widow of one of Lindenbrook’s competitors, and Hans (Peter Ronson), an athletic Icelandic local with a pet duck named Gertrude.
There is no reason for a pet duck named Gertrude to be in this movie. She’s just there, and the world is a better place for it.
There’s also a sniveling villain or two — those are always fun — but the bulk of the movie rests in the actual expedition through a descending network of caverns, the landscape growing more surreal the closer our heroes get.
If there’s one major flaw in the fabric of the film, it’s right there in the title. Unlike other epics of similar ilk, like your Ray Harryhausen creature features, etc., far too much of Journey to the Center of the Earth consists of characters wandering around dark, claustrophobic cave sets. There’s really no way around this given, you know, what the movie is about, but the limited visuals keep the film from becoming truly engrossing. It’s hard to get swept up in the adventure when the adventure consists mostly of people spanning arbitrary points in identical cave sets.
Luckily, the film continuously opens up as the crew gets closer to the center, and that affords director Henry Levin (who would later direct Mason in an Omar Sharif-starring Genghis Khan biopic, titled Genghis Khan, with Mason playing a character named “Kam Ling” and no, I am not shitting you) and writers Charles Brackett (Billy Wilder’s original co-writer) and Walter Reisch a chance to bring in new obstacles, like giant lizard people and new visual settings such as a giant mushroom forest and other, even odder sights.
Boone and Ronson spend much of the film running around with their shirts off, but the unquestioned center of the film is Mason. He plays the whole ridiculous affair just this side of straight, acknowledging the absurdity of the film without breaking the reality. Mason ends up imbuing the film with more legitimacy than it deserves, as it appears that he is simply incapable of surrendering his dignity (then again…Kam Ling). He’s paired with Dahl for much of the film, and their bickering rat-a-tat exchanges show the hallmarks of Brackett’s time writing in the screwball era. Dahl can’t keep up with either Mason or the script, but she does score some solid moments all the same. Modern audiences may wince at the number of times that Dahl’s supposedly self-sufficient lady finds herself literally tripping into danger, the better to have said-shirtless individuals swing into action.
And modern audiences may also find themselves rolling their eyes at some of Earth’s goofy earnestness, but this is actually what endeared the movie most to me. Sure the special effects and acting styles have been left far behind, but there’s something wonderfully human and optimistic about the way that Earth broaches its subject of exploration.
Released in 1959, Journey to the Center of the Earth hit cinema screens right as the certainty of nuclear annihilation seemed most, well, certain. It wasn’t ‘if’ we were going to nuke the world into a giant crater, it was a question of when, and which side was going to leave the bigger hole. Much of pop culture reflected that, as nuclear ravaged beasts levelled cities and armies alike, while advanced alien technology swept down from the sky and rained fire upon terrified civilians (and cinema-goers).
“Watch the skies!” cried a survivor at the end of one such picture. “You’re next!” cried another. These weren’t warnings. These were promises.
So there’s something boldly heroic about throwing down the gauntlet in favor of science, exploration, and the furthering of human understanding. Even as the main crew in Earth are terrified and traumatized, battered and beaten, they never stop pushing forward, never waver from their drive to bring illumination to the darkest reaches of our planet. The film concludes with Mason calling the next generation to arms, daring them to pick up where he has left off and adding even more knowledge and insight into the world.
It’s a simple message, not dwelled upon for very long. But there’s something profound about that idea, about maintaining a sense of joy in discovery even during a period when it seemed that humanity only had interest in learning the best ways to destroy itself. As we see more and more modern films really pushing an agenda of optimism and pro-science thinking, I’d like to believe that we are still on that path, still capable of bringing that illumination to the darkest reaches.