Les enfants du capitaine Grant

A message informs the interested parties that Captain Grant and his crew are shipwrecked; the message is faded, so only the latitude is known. Grant's son and daughter, a Scottish laird and comic relief go a-journeying, a trip that takes them from the wind-swept deserts of Chile to the wind-swept shores of Australia.

The first feature film from the works of Jules Verne offers one of his voyages extraordinaires with a stunning variety of outdoor environments, including glaciers, deserts and rough sea shores, exciting tumbles down mountains, a flash flood, and fleeing from enraged Maori warriors. Those of you who have never read the novel this was based on, or whose memory, like mine, has faded, may recall the 1960s version with Hayley Mills and Maurice Chevalier. With the addition of color and sound, that might have been modeled on this version. I don't find the exciting moments as exciting as they might have been intended -- director Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset's compositions are too formal for that. However, the camera seems always pointed in a direction where some interesting vista can dominate, and that helps make it highly watchable.

The only version I have seen of this is drastically abbreviated (23 minutes of the original 97) and so very difficult to assess in any way. Several of the action scnes (the mountain scenes and the floods) are very well done and it would have been nice to have seen the whole film, a very major and ambitious production at the time. As it is there is a pretty good Russian version of the story from 1937.