20,000 leguas de viaje submarino

Robust adventure, albeit one filled with murder, suicide and a bloodthirsty squid, involving nefarious Captain Nemo (played by a bearded, monotone James Mason), arguably the darkest villain in the pre-1979 Disney canon. He is nothing short of a mass murderer, ramming his futuristic submarine into ships on the ocean circa 1868. He explains these are war ships and he is preventing world destruction, but after the unblinking, humorless Captain downs a ship full of sailors, it's clear he's a cutthroat. This makes the future of three shipwreck survivors he has taken aboard all the more desperate, although Kirk Douglas' Ned Land, scalawag and guitar picker, takes all the abuse in stride (indeed, he's flexible in any circumstance). This Disney production has a few lags in the special effects arena, but does have awesome moments. The confined space of the main set can't help but to work against the action, but what a beautifully designed set it is! The actors are colorful, the direction is tight, but there's not a big sense of danger however, as the three survivors don't even seem to fear their fates. *** from ****

There's something out there roaming the Pacific Ocean destroying a whole lot of shipping and killing a lot of people. The more maritime the nation, the more losses it's suffering. Jules Verne's story has the United States of America taking the first crack at finding what's going on in the Pacific.

On a ship commanded by Ted DeCorsia are two Frenchmen, renowned scientist Paul Lukas and his assistant Peter Lorre. Also along is Kirk Douglas who is crack whaling harpooner.

Of course they meet up with the beast and it's no living thing, but a submarine. This was all new back then, although prototype submarines were used in the Civil War they had limited effectiveness. In fact this particular kind of submarine was something unheard of until the middle of the last century. It's captain is a misanthropic fellow named Nemo, played by James Mason. He's taking it out on the nation's of the world for some personal losses sustained.

His brilliance as a scientist, his refinement also attracts Paul Lukas. But Kirk Douglas just wants to escape because for all of Douglas's carefree philistinism, he sees Nemo as a murderer and a menace. The conflict between both is what drives the story.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea won Oscars for both Special Effects and Art direction. It is probably Walt Disney's most successful live action film ever done, even beating out Mary Poppins dare I say. Even in this day of computer generated effects, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea still holds its own with more modern films.

Kirk Douglas enjoyed the part of Ned Land the harpooner and it's a favorite of his today. He might have made a few more films for Walt Disney but for an incident that took place after the film.

Disney was also at the same time creating his first theme park, Disneyland in Anahem, California. When it was opening he invited Kirk and his family to spend the day there on him and he even agreed to furnish a camera crew to follow the Douglas family around as they enjoyed the park attractions.

So Kirk took his wife and his sons and they had a grand old time and got some free home movies as a souvenir. But Walt Disney kept the negative and the films showed up on his Walt Disney Presents television show. Of course Kirk never got paid for this appearance and neither did any of the rest of his family including young Michael Douglas.

Even though this left a sour taste in Kirk Douglas's mouth as he related in his memoirs, The Ragman's Son, he liked his work in this film very much and the part certainly has the same kind of exuberance we expect from a Kirk Douglas movie. Kirk even gets to sing in the film, a nice little sea chantey called A Whale of a Tale. He even made a record of it and I'm sure if you can find it, the item might be worth a few dollars as a collectible.

Right around the time 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was released the United States Navy launched it's first atomic submarine. In tribute to that most popular of French authors with American audiences, the Navy named the ship the Nautilus. A great tribute to a great writer of fabulous tales of imagination. And Walt Disney couldn't have gotten better publicity had he paid for it.

Don't believe me, I swear by my tattoo.

Below is a transcript of a hand written letter from Harper Goff in 1974 of which I have a copy which I think might be of interest. This is an unusual comment entry, but I hope you will find this letter a fasinating rare glimpse into the process of creation, and will give a better appreciation of the artistry of the design of the Disney 'Nautilus'. Harper Goff was responsible for the 'look' of the submarine in the Disney Production, along with much of the film's set designs. Enjoy!

Harper Goff writes....

I was assigned the task of getting together a 'true-life' adventure film using some exceptional underwater footage shot in a laboratory aquarium, by Dr. McGinnity of Cal-Tech's Marine Biology lab in Carona Del Mar. Walt (Disney) thought inasmuch as "20,000 L.U.T.S." was in public domain we might do worse than use the title for a current True-Life adventure short subject. Walt went to England and I stayed in Burbank and made a story-board of a live action version of the classic using McGinnity's footage as a sort of ballet episode where Nemo shows Aronax the wonders of the deep. Walt liked the story-board well enough to have me give an 'A.R.I.' (Audience Reaction Inquiry) to a group of exhibitors who were in town. They were enthusiastic and the rest is history.

In motion pictures, the text of a classic like this subject is sacrosanct like the Bible! The 'word' of Jules Verne is not to be made light of, so the duty of the production designer like myself is to take the sometimes arbitary discriptions of the Nautilus as recorded by 'J.V.' and "make it work".

a. Jules Verne while foreseeing brilliantly the atomic submarine of today, did not at that time invent the periscope, the torpedo tube, or sonar. He did not prophesy closed curcut television. According to Verne, if Nemo wanted to see what was going on the surface, he simply poked the glass ports of the conning tower out of the depths and took a direct look. He risked his vessel, himself, and his crew by ramming the enemy at frightening speed. If he wanted to study the marvels of life under the surface, he reclined in his elegent bay window lounge, and passed the hours studying the marine life outside the amazing pressure proof window of his luxurious salon. These items dictated much of the direction of my production designs.

b. Nemo is quoted by Verne as telling Aronax that "I need no coal for my bunkers. I have instead harnessed the very building blocks of the material universe to heat my boilers and drive this craft". No one can doubt Verne meant Atomic Power.

c. It is not sound economics to study and design obviously unnesscessary parts of the Nautilus if it will not appear on screen. The crews quarters were thus unaccounted for. In Verne's original text Nemo from time to time leaves the chart room and steps directly into other diversified areas of the submarine. Directors do not like to slow down the action and clutter up a dramatic moment by showing actors leave a room, lift a hatch, enter another room.

d. At the time Captain Nemo constructed Nautilus on Mysterious Island, the iron riveted ship was the last word in marine construction. I have always thought rivet patterns were beautiful. I wanted no slick shelled moonship to transport Nemo thru the emerald deep and so fought and somehow got my way. On Mysterious Island Nemo had the white hot heat of a volcano to help him build his dreamship, but I am sure that flat iron plates profusely riveted would have been his way. His stock pile of material was always the countless sunken ships uniquely available to him alone. Even the Greek amphora and the works of art that graced his great salon was salvaged from wrecks.

e. The free diving suits - (self-contained) were developed by myself with the assistance of Fred Zender, and exceptionally able underwater man. The helmets were souped-up Japanese pearl diving helmets. We masked the scuba gear, let water into the the helmet, put a breathing tube in our mouth, the clamps on our nose and one night in 1952 Freddie and I walked slowly from the shallow end to the deep end of the Santa Monica pool. Lead around our middle and 16 lbs. shoes...it worked! Many had predicted failure. This formed the basis of the suits that appeared in the film. We spent 9 hrs. a day, 7 days a week for 8 weeks at Lyford Key in the Bahamas, underwater! Never lost a man, Fred was in charge of safety.

f. 20,000 Leagues was the second cinemascope picture to go into production. Fox had the worldrights to the anamorphic lenses developed by a French inventor named Cretien. This lense "squeezes" the horizontal dimensions of a scene into half the normal area on a cinema frame. If projected thru an anamorphic projection lense it "unsqueezes" this image and the resulting image is widescreen. Fox had only one lense to lease and this meant that Disney could not shoot miniture set ups while the main action sequences were before the cameras. I hit upon the idea of having the prop miniature shop build a "squeezed" Nautilus miniature. The model was built half as wide and half as long, but just as high. Even the rivets were "squeezed". This one miniature was shot with a normal lense. If care was taken to insure the Nautilus remained on an even keel, the resulting footage was more than adequate. When "unsqueezed" by anamorphic projection, the image of the Nautilus was stretched to normal proportions. Of course the bubbles looked strange, but no one seemed to mind. The success of this experiment made it possible for the special effects department to make its necessary footage of many of the underwater miniatures simultaniously with principal photography of the actors.

g. My idea has always been that the shark and the aligator were the most terrifying monsters living in the water. I there for combined the scary eyes of the aligator that can watch you even when it is nearly submerged....with the dangerous pointed nose and menacing dorsal fin - its sleek streamlining and its distinctive tail. The discusting rough skin of the aligator is well simulated by the rivets. As Verne insists that the Nautilus drove its way clean threw it's victim, I designed a protective sawtooth spline that started forward at the bulb of the ram and slid around all outjutting structures of the hull. These included the conning tower, the diving planes, and the great helical propellor at the stern.

Sincerely,

Harper Goff

Artist and Production Designer Harper Goff's film credits include 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, 'Fantastic Voyage', 'The Vikings', 'The Great Locomotive Chase', and Disney's '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'. Mr Goff died March 3, 1993 at his home in Palm Springs at the age of 81.

Corfman

The Walt Disney film of 1954, "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" is nothing short of a masterpiece within its genre. While comparing it to "Gone With The Wind" or "Citizen Kane" might be done by others in calling "Leagues" a 'masterpiece', it would be comparing apples to oranges, for this epic, while not overlong as are most masterpieces, it is completely contained to tell a gripping story with wonder acting, production values and the special effects of the day.

It is had to know where to begin to list the wonderful achievements here, especially in adapting a book of almost a thousand pages, much of it filled with endless lists of the fish and fauna of the sea, of which Jules Verne was especially fond. Such was unfilmable, of course, and the script writer, Earl Felton, was wise in paring down the verbosity of the novel, which, of course, was the usual for the prolix Victorian style of Verne's day. From that wonderful opening of the titles shown against lush drapery illuminated by rippling water reflections of the undersea cast upon it, to the beginning of the inspired, majestic score by Paul J. Smith, one is transported to a fantastic time and place and the artistry to come is well intoned. Customarily, the Director is given the lion's share of the credit for a film's success, but here it is an almost perfect melding of the story, the acting and the visuals as well as the music that combine with seeming effortlessness to entertain.

James Mason as Capt. Nemo is superb, with his wonderful bearing and diction lending the aura of both contained madness and yet sympathetic grace to a character who could have been so easily overplayed. Disney wisely selected Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorre as the physical foils of Nemo and to provide the comic and action relief. Had this not been done, the intellectual bearings of Nemo and Paul Lukas' Professor Arronax would have overloaded and stilted the film, rather the way they do in the novel. Some take exception to the device of "Esmeralda" the seal, but that too is a needed counterpoint to the otherwise dark theme of the implied mission of the Nautilus: the destruction of warships that spread "man's inhumanity to man." Such is the skill of the spare dialogue in the film that one never is hit over the head with the sermon of the hopelessness and wickedness of war and the nations that sponsor it. This film carries the message of the novel, but it never looses sight of its first purpose, which is to entertain. Even the implied nuclear destruction is not trumpeted, but only alluded to, since such energy source was unknown to Jules Verne in the 19th Century, of course, but was highly topical in the 1950s.

One of the glories of the movie is the marked artistry in all the careful details in the film. It was just then that the USA was planning its first nuclear submarines, the first of which was even named the "Nautilus" in memory of this immensely popular film. But the art director, John Meehan, the production designer, Harper Goff, and the set decorator, Emile Kuri, were never carried away by allusions to then modern technology, but kept faith with the setting of the day, by making the ship a wonderful creature-like form, the interiors a skillful blend of needed science for function, coupled with a lush decor that bespoke not only the Victorian times, but also the sensitivity of man of its genius of design. Look at the touches: the electric iris covering the massive bubble window, the fountain in the captain's drawing room, complete with an artistic pipe organ properly intoning Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D-minor, as most appropriate. Even the uniforms and upholstery are embroidered with the 'N' of Nemo's monogram as are the galloons on the edges of the draperies. The inventiveness of the electric charge upon the hull is also one of the clever devices to invoke the future, yet help make the existence of the undersea ship believable.

Everyone who sees this epic will always remember, the night scene of a hand-to-tentacle fight with a giant squid, as truly unforgettable and most appropriate again, for it was only a few years before that the first complete corpse of such a squid was found in complete form and thereby documented what others had only written of. This film exceeded its class in that day and age, yet even if equal actors could have been found for the earlier versions, they would have been too early to truly depict the vision of Jules Verne's technology of the future.

Some have criticized that the entire novel was not on film, but were the entire book to be filmed, it would exceed five hours, and Disney knows that even with the finest production, a film must be limited to approximately two hours in order to get both an audience willing to sit through it, as well as exhibitors willing to show it. In making a movie, the constraints are much more severe than in writing a novel; a movie is a collaboration of many people and many conflicting desires and egos must be assuaged. The flow of an entertaining story is paramount, since this was never to be a documentary. Each actor's agent works to try to get the maximum time on screen for his client, which gets maximum credit and fee for the actor. The limitations of filming such an imaginative novel also created large costs which the producers would try to show on screen to justify it all to the accountants, since a film is created with the aim of making a profit for the studio and its investors. We must agree that they succeeded in making one of the most interesting and visually spectacular films ever made, whereas the book contained a great deal of unfilmable ichthyology that was more of an excursus into the expertise of Jules Verne than any dramatic device. All in all, I think that were Jules Verne alive in 1954, he would have been well pleased with this celluloid version of his epic story.

In 1868, shipping becomes a nightmare, since vessels are vanishing the in the South Seas. The tabloids attribute the disappearances of the ships to an existence of a sea monster. The US government invites Prof. Pierre Arronax (Paul Lukas) and his assistant Conseil (Peter Lorre) to investigate what is really happening and they embark in a ship navigating to the Orient. In the crew, Ned Land (Kirk Douglas) is a happy member. After a long period on the open sea, a submarine, the Nautilaus, commanded by Captain Nemo (James Mason), attacks the steamship. Prof. Arronax, Conseil and Ned are rescued by the submarine, and share the dreams and madness of Captain Nemo. Although being a 1954 film, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is a great and funny adventure, which has not aged. The adaptation of Julio Verne's novel "on the screen" is a great entertainment recommended for all families. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "20.000 Léguas Submarinas" ("20,000 Leagues Submarines")