Stadt im Meer

City Under the Sea is directed by Jacques Tourneur and written by Charles Bennett and Louis M. Heyward. It stars Vincent Price, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, David Tomlinson and John Le Mesurier. Filmed in Pathecolor it features music by Stanley Black and cinematography by Stephen Dade.

Inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe/Roger Corman/Vincent Price series of films, with some Jules Verne flavourings, City Under the Sea turns out to be a disappointment and a far from fitting farewell to cinema for Tourneur. A shame because visually it's a treat for the eyes with its striking set designs and character clobber.

Derived as an idea from Poe's poem The City in the Sea, the story just isn't interesting enough. It's based in olde Cornwall, England, and finds Hunter (dull) and Tomlinson (out acted by his chicken companion) discovering an underwater city when Hart (err, she is just there!) disappears from her room via a secret passage. Turns out the city is presided over by an unhinged Price (on auto-pilot but still engaging enough) who believes Hart to be the reincarnation of his long dead wife. There's some gill men ancients, a smuggling back story, ageless oxygen and a volcano just waiting to explode in the finale. What transpires is a load of talking and nothing much happens until the expected chase and explosive ending that really isn't worth the wait.

Price and the visuals ensure it's not a total wash out, but all told its pretty ordinary. 5/10

City Under the Sea is one of several movies based on an Edgar Allan Poe poem and starring Vincent Price.

A lost undersea city is discovered off the Cornish coast after a local woman goes missing. She was kidnapped by one of the smugglers who have made it their home. None of the people there seem to age, this is due to the air. Gill men are used as slaves. After several adventures, a volcano erupts and the two men who went to look for the woman rescue her and they all make it back safe, after fighting the gill men off. The woman reminded the leader of the city, Sir Hugh of his late wife. When Sir Hugh escapes from the city at the end, he ages suddenly due to the change of atmosphere.

Sir Hugh is played brilliantly by Vincent Price and the movie also stars Susan Hart, Tab Hunter, David Tomlinson and John Le Mesurier (Dad's Army). Also in the cast is Tomlinson's pet hen, Herbert.

I have seen this movie several times and found it enjoyable. A treat.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

As I watched this film I kept imagining kids in the year 1965 watching this at Saturday afternoon matinees and thinking this was the coolest thing they had ever seen in their lives. What more could you ask for: a handsome and likable hero in Tab Hunter, a stunningly beautiful leading lady, the delightful David Tomlinson as comic relief, the masterfully sinister Vincent Price as the villain, an undersea world filled with mysterious and treacherous caverns, monstrous mer-men, and a nearby volcano threatening destruction at any moment. That's a pretty good Saturday afternoon if you ask me. And if you can approach this film in that way, allowing for the time and place in which it was made to inform your judgment, I think you'll find this a very enjoyable picture. For the most part it looks great (especially when one considers how tightly AIP held their purse strings in those days) if a bit dated by today's standards, but that too can be part of the fun.

When a body is washed ashore on the coast by a small English village it sparks an investigation in the mind of Ben Harris. He visits the home where the deceased had been a lawyer and finds clues that indicate that the beautiful Jill Tregillis may be in danger. Seeing off a mysterious figure who he caught in the act of stealing a portrait of Jill leaves him in no doubt and he stays the night. In the night Jill is kidnapped and Ben and Harold pursue. Finding a tunnel system going under the sea they investigate but find a hidden world controlled by one man who has found the secret of eternal life but is desperate to prevent his world being destroyed by a volcano.

I taped this film by mistake when I wanted to watch `City Beneath the Sea' which was on a day after this. Realising my mistake I watched it anyway as I noticed it had Vincent Price and was based on a work by Edgar Allen Poe. The film starts with a bit of a gothic feel to it but quickly it becomes surprisingly straightforward. The mysterious `fishmen' are quickly replaced as the focus by The Captain and his crew, personally I felt that to make a different species of man and then sideline them was pointless – where they did they come from for goodness sake!?

The Captain and his age-old crew are interesting but nothing can be fully explained as to how they really managed to set up down there as well as they did and it quickly becomes just a bunch of men living in caves as opposed to a city beneath the sea! There is no real feeling of mystery here and the end result is that it falls a little flat for the most part. The attempts at escape late on in the film lose excitement due to being quite slow and filmed in clunky diving suits, happily the return of the fishmen add some fluidity to events. The underwater filming is quite good considering, although the regular close-ups of the actors' eyes in the helmets would only convince a child that they were really in the water!

Price is always a good villain but here he lacks threat – even when he executes people, he seems to be in full control but without that masterful stroke of eccentricity that many of his better performances have had. Hunter is quite a dull lead and even seems out of his depth (sorry) when acting alongside the support cast, let alone Price! Hart is pretty and Tomlinson adds value with some comic touches (especially at the start of the film). An actor as well known as John Le Mesurier shouldn't be wasted but really is – he still has to give his usual pottering character but is still badly cast and underused. The fishmen are suggested as the monsters of the piece by the first 10 minutes but are revealed to be toothless, given little screen time and handled as easily as a hooked salmon.

Overall the quality of the film can be summed by the fact that the drama is all relying on the audience accepting a very active underwater volcano of the English coast. However once you get past this the delivery is quite flat and lacking in excitement to the extent that, by the time things come to a head, you'll not really be that bothered what happens.

This film is supposedly based on a Poe work (which is quoted a couple of times) and the writer himself is mentioned(a character even finds a vintage edition of his writings), but it strays far from the source material.

It is a mildly interesting flick with a spooky manor house atop a cliff, secret passages, sea creatures and a chicken of dudious gender named Herbert.

Price does a fine job--even though it is an uninspired character. Overall, I'd say this film is worth watching if you happen to catch it on the tube, and you have an hour and a half to waste.