Allen Ashley is training his eye on classic genre films for us, looking at not just the film but the context in which they were released. Here’s the latest instalment in his blog series.
Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island (1961)
Directed: Cy Endfield
Colour
97 minutes running time (on DVD)
(All images taken from imdb.com)
(Note: Time stamps are of author’s own noting)
This is an enjoyable, much-loved adventure film that pops up from time to time on the UK afternoon TV schedules. Loosely based on the great Frenchman’s novel “L’Ile Mysterieuse” and something of a sequel to “20,000 Leagues under the Sea”, the use of Verne’s name in the British title is wholly deliberate—a mark of quality and provenance like, say, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Agatha Christie’s Poirot.
Along with H. G. Wells, Jules Verne is seen as the grandfather of science fiction, and as recently as 2021 the BBC produced a high quality miniseries adaptation of his classic “Around the World in 80 Days” starring David Tennant, Leonie Benesch and Ibrahim Koma.
Civil War strife
Of course, the term “science fiction” wasn’t invented until the 1920s, by Hugo Gernsback. Verne (and Wells) believed they were writing “Scientific Romances”—stirring adventure stories full of and founded upon speculation—and it is in this context that “Mysterious Island” succeeds so well. Even if its tone and pacing are a bit variable. Indeed, for the first 19 minutes or so the film presents as an action-packed American Civil War adventure—“1865 Siege of Richmond, Virginia”, say the titles—full of smoke, fire, guns and explosions that punctuate the nocturnal rain.
It’s breathless stuff as our Unionist heroes Captain Cyrus Harding (Michael Craig), callow recruit Herbert Brown (Michael Callan) and Corporal Neb Nugent (significantly played by a black actor, Dan Jackson) make their frenzied escape in a silver skinned weather observation balloon during the storm, acquiring two extra passengers along the way: war correspondent Gideon Spilett (Gary Merrill) and Confederate captive / balloon pilot Sergeant Pencroft (played by Percy Herbert).
That the Yankees don’t ditch Pencroft overboard proves that they hold the moral high ground, and one of the subplots is Pencroft’s redemption. To be fair, he never displays any animosity towards Neb. However, maybe they should have ditched this British actor for his awkwardly assumed Southern States accent that grates occasionally and at times sounds more like a parody of an Irish brogue.
Are we nearly there yet?
There’s food and water on the balloon as they are blown westwards for four days, crammed into the woven basket. Is it just me, or do other viewers wonder how—a mile up in a rickety, windblown contraption—the guys manage to go to the toilet? Note: I touched upon this issue in my article “New Strictures of the Catastrophe” (“Dark Horizons 57”, 2011).
The music, by Bernard Herrmann, starts to take on a dreamy quality for a while as they float serenely over the Pacific before we return to frantic action as technical problems—a stuck valve, a rip in the fabric—sees our quintet crash land on the strand of the titular mysterious island.
A matte painting of volcanic rocks with animated birds on the wing above the beach (c20mins) marks the gearshift into the fantastic.
This is what we’ve signed up for as the plot now becomes a lush desert island survival tale full of ingenuity, pleasure and danger. This latter comes from both outsize animals and offshore pirates.
It’s taken a while to get us to this tropical would-be paradise but once we arrive the film settles into luxurious bright colours and a series of enjoyable and involving set pieces.
Girls just wanna have fun
This portal-accessed proto-Eden at first lacks the necessary feminine presence but at about 36 minutes two shipwrecked Eves arrive to enliven the sunlit existence of our five Adams. Elena (Beth Rogan) presents like a drowned maiden from a Victorian painting by Evelyn de Morgan or G. F. Watts. There’s an exchange of dialogue that must be tongue in cheek: From young Herbert – “She’s beautiful.” To which Captain Harding responds, “Better than that, she’s alive.”
Elena’s aristocratic aunt Lady Mary Fairchild (the gurgle-voiced Joan Greenwood) also washes up, barely a hair or corner of her red robes out of place, and pointedly enquires, “How soon may we leave?” (c38m).
The film having been made in the early 1960s and being set in the 1860s, we get a couple of outmoded voiceover lines outlining the value of these two new castaways. For example, the party settles into living in a high cave known as “The Granite House” where “the women added a few welcomed feminine touches,” and later, “Lady Mary turned out to be quite handy with a needle and thread” and fashions “a trim garment” for Elena that allows her to display plenty of leg to the smitten, red-blooded Herbert.
To be fair, by the very end of the film all five of the original males have divested themselves of shirts and waistcoats. It’s hot at this latitude!
Stop-motion
I’ve gone on for a few hundred words and not mentioned legendary model-maker and animator Ray Harryhausen, for whom “Mysterious Island” was something of a vehicle. His “Dynamation” stop-motion sequences kick off with a beach fight against a twenty-foot crab (c28-30m) and that is followed by a giant bird attacking the settlement (c54-56m).
The outstanding segment of the whole film, though, comes when young lovers Elena and Herbert follow a trickle of dripping honey up a rocky outcrop and find themselves trapped in a giant honeycomb with a huge bee excreting propolis to seal them in (c59-63m). This is a compelling scene, beautifully lit in reds, oranges and blues and is the part of the film I find myself winding back to watch again, with Harryhausen’s split-second by split-second adjustments of the model bees giving their wings wonderfully convincing jerky movements.
This is the captain speaking
There’s one further fight to the death later in the film, this one set in the blue-lit undersea world against a giant cephalopod. Specifically, a nautilus. Neat. Which brings us cleverly to the other major character in the film—the complex genius / madman that is Captain Nemo (played by Herbert Lom), designer and pilot of the submarine the “Nautilus”.
Prefigured in a speech by war correspondent Spilett, Nemo doesn’t appear in person until minute 72, emerging from the waves like King Neptune with his spear, his black wetsuit and a huge conch shell for an air tank. Although not quite having the same mesmeric effect as Orson Welles (playing Harry Lime) in “The Third Man”, Nemo and his concerns and schemes dominate the remainder of the film.
His aforementioned submarine has an ergonomically curved retro-futurist metal shell and is plushily furnished and colourfully lit within. It comes complete with a pipe organ, and Nemo with his glass of brandy and green velvet jacket is every inch the suave, sophisticated saviour-devil, Hammer horror count or Bond villain one would later come to associate with the actors Christopher Lee and Vincent Price.
That sinking feeling
Oh gosh, it’s confession time again from yours truly. In my story “The Rule of Three” (“BFS Horizons 10”, 2019), I had a mysterious island suddenly disappear into the ocean at the end. Guess where I borrowed that idea from? …
“Mysterious Island” was initially conceived as a variant on Conan Doyle’s notion of “The Lost World”. The evidence is there in that image of the prehistoric birds swooping across the volcanic vista and in the planned but unused effects such as an attack by a man-eating plant. Harryhausen refers to this in an accompanying archive interview and I’ve seen the sketches in the British Library’s “Fantasy” exhibition.
Beth Rogan in her skimpy goatskin costume might even be considered as a trial run for Raquel Welch in the later much-loved but scientifically dubious “One Million Years BC” (1966) in which the father of Dynamation gets to animate a pterodactyl.
The conceit of “Mysterious Island” is more plausible and it’s so often quite beautiful to look at. Enjoy.
What did you think of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island? Let us know in the comments below ⬇️
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