Movie Monday: Captain Nemo and the Underwater City

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1959 fantasy adventure Captain Nemo and The Underwater City!
 
A few days ago I went to a screening of one of my all-time favorite movies, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, part of a series of classic films shown every week at the Cinemark theater chain. I had never seen the movie on the big screen before, and I just loved it. I'm a sucker for any Jules Verne-esque story of underwater monsters, amazing machines, secret cities, etc. Of course, the Disney version of Leagues remains the gold standard for all such adaptations, but the 1954 film was neither the first or nor last appearance of Captain Nemo in the movies.

Case in point: the ungainly-titled Captain Nemo and the Underwater City, a British production with a unusual tough-guy cast: the two main leads are Robert Ryan and Chuck Connors!

The film opens with a ship being violently tossed by a massive storm. It gets so bad that the lifeboats are deployed and everyone is ordered off. Unfortunately, a handful of passengers end up in the drink, where they are sure to die. Except--they are rescued by a team of people in high-tech scuba suits! Six people are brought on board an amazing underwater craft. One of them, Senator Robert Fraser (Connors), is introduced to the ship's commander: Captain Nemo (Ryan):

Nemo explains to Fraser that he and the others are aboard the Nautilus, a ship of enormous power and technology, build by Nemo and his people, many of whom reside in an underewater domed city known as Templemir:

Templemir seems like a paradise its filled with peaceful people who read, play, eat, and frolic:

Two of the surface dwellers, a young woman named Helena (Nanette Newman) and her young son Phillip (Christopher Hartstone) seem to take to their new surroundings immediately. Two brothers, Barnaby and Swallow Bath (Bill Fraser and Kenneth Connor) also like Templemir, but for an entirely different reason: the city is filled with gold! Gold is a natural by-product of the food mining that the citizens of Templemir do to feed themselves, so them gold is essentially worthless. But the Bath Brothers see an opportunity. 

The one person not happy with all this is Lomax (Allen Cuthbertson), who finds living under the water a claustrophobic nightmare and desperately wants to return to the surface.

We get to see some of the daily operations of Templemir (featuring some unfortunately silly costumes, as you can see above). Nemo is a gruff but essentially kind host; he offers his visitors the opportunity to stay in perpetuity.

Lomax is having none of it--he decides to try and steal some scuba gear and escape, which fails. He then goes a little bughouse by trying to sabotage Templemir's life-support system, which only ends up flooding the room Lomax is in. Nemo, having had enough, seals off the room, which saves Templemir and also consigns Lomax to a watery death:

The Bath Brothers, also determined to escape, attempt to steal a second sub, the Nautilus II. They are not trusted by Nemo or his second in command Joab (John Turner), so they rope in Fraser in their plan. Fraser wants to leave as well, so he befriends Nemo and learns how to pilot the Nautilus. Its during this training we meet Mobula, a manta-like creature accidentally created during the building of Templemir.

Fraser tells Nemo he wants to leave, but Nemo, fearful his world will be discovered, refuses to let him go. In an attempt to keep him, Nemo offers Fraser a role in the running of Templemir, and the other cities under construction. This doesn't sit well with Joab, who is worried about being replaced, both by Nemo and the woman he and Fraser both like, the comely Mala (Luciana Paluzzi, from Thunderball). Joab offers to help Fraser and the Bath Brothers escape.

Unfortunately, it doesn't all go as planned, and only Fraser and Swallow survive to make it to the surface:

They are picked up by a ship, where they tell their story about an undersea city, which is met with incredulous laughter. It appears Nemo and Templemir will remain a secret after all!


Captain Nemo and the Underwater City is a fairly fun movie--I mean, how could it not be?--but it's made up such individual weak parts that it never really congeals into something truly remarkable. Robert Ryan seems miscast as Nemo--he's more grumpy than driven, and I can only imagine what he thought when putting on the ridiculous costumes he's forced to wear. Chuck Conners is okay as Fraser, but he seems like a warmed-over version of Kirk Douglas from the Disney film. The two Bath Brothers are by far the weakest part of the movie, however--they practically have Comic Relief stamped on their foreheads, and the even get their own "wacky" music motif on the soundtrack. I feel like the movie stops dead every time they do their schtick.

My favorite part of the movie is the scene with Lomax as he tries to sabotage Templemir--it's got some nice grit to it, and it's well executed (no pun intended). The stuff with the irradiated manta ray is interesting, but it seems more like a distraction from the main story, like they really didn't want to pursue it too far. I would have enjoyed Nemo fighting more giant sea creatures, myself!

Apparently David Fincher, of all people, is keen to remake 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, which is not a sentence I'd ever thought I'd type. No matter how that film turns out, I'm just happy knowing that Captain Nemo will be returning the movies again soon!

Movie Monday: The Legend of the Lone Ranger

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1981 mega-bomb The Legend of the Lone Ranger!
 
With the big-budget Lone Ranger "reboot" (with Johnny Depp as Tonto) on the way, it reminded me of the last time Hollywood tried the Lone Ranger story, the infamous 1981 movie starring the unfortunately named Klinton Spilsbury. I didn't see it as a kid, so I had zero memory of it; is it bad as everyone says?

The film opens with the Lone Ranger (John Reid) and Tonto as young boys. Reid's family is killed, so he is taken in and raised by a Comanche tribe, and grows up with Tonto as his surrogate brother.

Flash forward a decade or two, and Reid is traveling with his lone relative, his older brother Dan--who is now a Texas Ranger--along with the rest of the Rangers when they are ambushed by the Cavendish Gang. All the Rangers are killed, and the younger Reid nursed back to health by his old friend Tonto. Reid declares revenge against Cavendish (Christopher Lloyd) and his gang by donning a mask and becoming...The Lone Ranger!

It turns out that Cavendish has grander plans than just robbing stagecoaches and stealing land...he plans to kidnap visiting President Ulysses S. Grant (Jason Robards) and hold him for ransom. He wants part of Texas declared a sovreign state (oh, how things have changed) and will return Grant only if his wishes are...um, granted (sorry).

While Cavendish squirrels Grant away (where they play pool together, with Grant even amending Cavendish's ransom note to make it more effective), the Lone Ranger finds and tames his horse, Silver, find where Cavendish is hiding the president, and sneak in to make their daring rescue. It ends with President Grant congratulating the masked man, who promises to continue to quest to fight for justice!

The Legend of the Lone Ranger is barely more than 90 minutes long. I am normally a fan of letting things build, but it takes the movie way, way, too long to get to the creation of the titular hero...it's almost an hour into the movie before we finally see him don the mask, and by then we've only got about a half hour left! I wouldn't be surprised if they had shot a much longer, Superman The Movie-esque epic, only to trim it way down when it became clear they probably had a turkey on their hands.

Speaking of post-production meddling, the most famous piece of trivia to come out of this movie is that the lead actor, Klinton Spilsbury (oh, that name!) had his entire performance dubbed over by actor James Keach. We have no idea what Spilsbury sounded like--he's pretty much disappeared from the public eye ever since--but never once hearing the actual performance adds a really odd, discordant note to the whole thing.

That said, I have to say The Legend of the Lone Ranger isn't all that terrible, certainly not as bad as its reputation suggests. Christopher Lloyd makes a particularly nasty villain (a nice companion piece to his role as Kruge in Star Trek III, just a year or two after this), and the scenery is nice. The plot involving Ulysses S. Grant is kinda cool, and the retrofitted relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto works well.

There is an ongoing "Ballad of the Lone Ranger"-type song, sung by Merle Haggard, that is awful, and its sheer cheesiness at times makes the movie feel like an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard. The main love interest, Amy Striker, (played by Juanin Clay) is a dud, so every time the film veers in that direction you're itching for them to drop all this boring mushy stuff and get back to the silver bullets, dammit! Luckily she's not in it all that much (unlike Tarzan The Ape Man, released the same year, which pushes the hero to the side for the sake of the love interest).

The soundtrack, once Reid dons the mask, uses the classic Lone Ranger theme--a lot. I totally appreciate the insistence on using it, since it's so iconic, but it doesn't fit well with the film, which has a fair amount of bloody violence (perhaps Sam Peckinpah was brought in for reshoots!). Also, over the end credits there's a repeat of what sounds like narration from the Lone Ranger radio show; again, it sits uneasily with the finished film.

Obviously the studio thought The Legend of the Lone Ranger was going to be a huge hit; there was an action figure line that was advertised on the back of comic books for what seemed like a year. But the film was pretty much DOA, leaving the stink of failure on the masked man for decades. I guess we'll see if he has better luck next year.

Movie Monday: Houdini

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1953 bio-pic Houdini!
 
Paramount went all out for this portrait of the legendary magician, springing for color photography and big stars:

The film opens at a circus, where young Bess (Janet Leigh) is with her girlfriends, enjoying the attractions. When they see the wild beast man, Bess pipes up, decrying the cruelty with which he is treated by the carnival barker.

Later, Bess wanders away from her friends, and makes the wild beast man's acquaintance:

Of course, the wild beast man isn't a real "missing link"; rather, he's Harry Houdini, an aspiring magician who appears in disguise for the opportunity to go on stage with his illusions, which don't attract much of a crowd:

 

Bess departs, but when she comes back to the circus, it's clear that Houdini is smitten with her. As he lays strapped to a table, headed for certain death via buzzsaw, all he can do is look longingly at Bess, as she watches, horrified, from the crowd:

 

Eventually Houdini and Bess get together, and get married, living in a small apartment with his mother. Bess becomes his on-stage assistant, but it doesn't take long before she tires of the grind--the endless travel, the low pay, and the rough crowds. At one point an audience member hurls something at Houdini, only for the magician to reappear, as if by magic, in the crowd, where he exacts some revenge on the heckler:

Eventually Bess convinces Harry to quit the life, and he gets a job at a safe factory, where he is bored, working on the assembly line. The only thing that keeps him involved is the work of another man at the factory, an old hand who brags of crafting uncrackable safes. Houdini offers to be locked inside, just to see if he can escape, but is gruffly rebuffed.

On Halloween Night, Houdini and Bess go to dinner at a fancy hotel, which just happens to be holding a banquet for a club of magicians. An offer is made for five members of the audience to try and escape from unbeatable strait-jackets. Bess tries, and fails, to keep her husband in his seat, but of course destiny calls:

As the four other magicians struggle, flopping around the stage, Houdini stays still. He focuses on a glowing ball dangling from chandelier, and begins to sweat profusely. Bess looks concerned, as done the head magician. Seconds tick by, and Houdini frees himself from the strait-jacket, almost as if he was in a trance. The prize is two tickets to Europe, but they come with a warning: Houdini is told by the head magician to stop pursuing this new line of illusions; that it might be dangerous.

Houdini ignores this, and after a brief fight he and Bess go to Europe. Houdini tries to track down a master magician named Von Schweiger. He is told by the man's assistant, Otto (Torin Thatcher) that the great man died just a few days earlier. Otto decides to become Houdini's assistant and travel with him and Bess.

During one series of sold-out shows, Houdini is challenged to break out of an English jail cell, considered impossible to escape from. He takes up the challenge, and while he makes his escape, we see Bess pretend to be Houdini on stage, giving the real man time to get to the stage, stunning everyone:

They return to America, where Houdini's fame grows. His tricks grow ever more dangerous, like being dropped into the icy waters of the Detroit River while being locked in a box. Things go wrong when a cable snaps, dropping him into the river before he is ready, and Houdini barely escapes with his life, lost beneath the ice, desperately looking for a hole to the surface.

When reunited with Bess, he tells her the only way he found his way out was following the voice of his mother--who he learns, died at almost that exact same moment, many miles away. It's at this point Houdini becomes obsessed with communicating with "the other side", which of course would be the ultimate trick.

Two years pass (where, strangely, Houdini and Bess seemed to have aged by more than a decade), and in that time we learn through a reporter that all Houdini has been doing, in lieu of stage appearances, is trying to find someone who can truly communicate with the dead. They go to visit a medium, who seems to be the real thing:

Of course, it doesn't take long (mere moments, in fact) for Houdini to reveal the woman to be a fraud--all the ghostly goings-on are faked. Houdini's quest continues.

He returns to performing, looking to perfect the "Water Torture" escape, which worries Bess to no end. One night, on Halloween, Houdini feels ill, suffering from appendicitis. He ignores the pain, and goes on with the show--but something goes wrong, and Otto must free Houdini from the tank:

Bess rushes to the stage, where Houdini, about to die, promises that, if he can, he will come back. As Bess sobs, the camera pans on a poster of The Great Houdini. The End.



Houdini is a lot of fun; it's fairly well acted--Curtis is a bit of a cipher as Houdini, but Leigh is great, and they have a lot of chemistry (no surprise, they were a real life couple off screen when this movie was made). The film is nice to look at, and gives us the inside scoop on how Houdini pulled off some of his tricks (though not all; a nice touch). Historically, it takes a lot of liberties with real story; Houdini didn't die on stage--it was that infamous punch to the gut, combined with the appendicitis, that slowly killed him a few days later. But dying on stage is very dramatic, and I guess the movie makers thought it was just too good to resist, ending the movie like it began--on stage.

Other than the seance scene, the movie doesn't do a whole lot, visually, with the whole world of magic. The film was directed by George Marshall, who did a lot of "B" comedies and thrillers, and (later) TV work; it's kind of a shame Paramount didn't get someone with a little more flair to tackle this story--Orson Welles comes to mind.

Still, Houdini is a solid classic Hollywood biopic; it's kind of amazing there's never been another version of this story done in the sixty years since the film came out; it's seems like such ripe subject matter. Until that time, though, Houdini does the job.

Movie Monday: Scorpio

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1973 spy thriller Scorpio!

Scorpio stars the legendary Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon as spies during the Cold War:

Lancaster plays Cross, and Delon is the titular Scorpio. They were once mentor and student, but Scorpio has since gone on to a "great" career as hired killer (we get to see him pull off an assassination at an airport, and as usual Delon shows no emotion while doing the grisly work).

Scorpio has now been hired by the CIA to take out his mentor, because they believe Cross has become a traitor and is now working for the Soviet Union.

Cross learns he's been targeted by his own country, and he escapes to Europe. This sets up the bulk of the film, which is the classic cat-and-mouse set-up with Scorpio chasing after Cross, and Cross escaping, etc.

In between, Cross visits an old friend, a Russian spy played by Paul Scofield with the awesome name of Zharkov:

 

Cross and Zharkov have a couple of big talky scenes together, where they debate all sorts of issues. While they are technically enemies, it's clear they deeply respect one another and have a similar code of ethics. They are similarly put off by the new generation of spies, who seem more like ruthless killers who will do anything for a buck, rather than patriots willing to work for their country's benefit.

Lancaster was a pretty physical guy, in real life and the movies, and he frequently did his own stunts. There's a well-paced, lengthy shoot-out at a construction site, where it's clear that Lancaster is really doing a lot of the running and jumping himself. He gets the drop on the guy chasing him (not Scorpio), and deals with him the most effective way possible:

 

Finally Scorpio catches up to Cross, and the two of them have a stand-off in a parking garage:

I won't say what happens, of course, but this is a 1970s movie, a political thriller produced during Vietnam and the build-up of Watergate, so you can imagine this film's attitude is more than a little cynical: the final scene pulls a metaphorical shroud over all the proceedings. The End.


I enjoyed Scorpio fairly well; at almost two hours its a bit too long and at times fairly confusing. We never learn if Cross indeed has gone rogue, I guess maybe that's the point--that it doesn't even matter anymore. Lancaster is as good as always, though he was looking a bit long in the tooth for some of the scenes where he's in disguise (which at one point is so comically bad that it reminded me of a scene from Fletch) or lustfully bedding down his main squeeze.

Scorpio was directed by Michael Winner, who did the mega-hit Death Wish a year later. The man loved his gun play, and he, er, executes those scenes well (the airport assassination is particularly well done, as it goes from real time to a news report covering the event. And the back-and-forth between Lancaster and Scofeld is fun to watch; as two old pros debate Big Ideas.

So all in all, Scorpio is pretty good, with some great moments, but certainly no undiscovered classic. I guess it's a only matter of time that they remake it with Ryan Reynolds and Denzel Washington.

Movie Monday: Time Limit

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1957 war drama Time Limit!

I had never heard of this film before, but I dig Richard Widmark, and the movie had a good cast, so I thought why not give it a spin (or click, more accurately):

Time Limit stars Widmark as Colonel William Edwards, who is charged with investigating a case against Major Henry Cargill (Richard Basehart), who is accused of collaborating with the enemy while he was imprisoned at a North Korean POW camp.

But right from the get-go, Edwards feels there's more to this story than the open-and-shut case everyone is telling him it is:

First off, Cargill refuses to defend himself. Second, the supposed collaboration occurred immediately after the deaths of two other men in the unit, and third, the surviving soldiers all have the same story about what happened, repeating each other almost verbatim. That includes Lt. George Miller (played by a very young Rip Torn):

Pressure mounts on Edwards just to wrap the case up, but he resists. The father of one of the dead men is also a General, and he strongly suggests that Edwards stop digging and just move on.

Edwards talks further with Cargill and Miller, as well as Cargill's wife, who reveals that her husband has been a shell of a man since he got home. Edwards
right hand man, Sgt. Baker (the great Martin Balsam) also provides pressure, but in a different way: fiercely loyal to Edwards, he tries to talk his boss into dropping the whole thing, afraid that it will ruin his career in the Army.

For most of the film, all the action is centered around Edwards' office and the homes of who he visits. But as the truth of what really happened in the POW camp starts to come out, it flashes back to Korea:

Cargill starts to crack under the pressure, as does Lt. Miller, their stories start to fray at the edges, which only emboldens Edwards further. In a crackerjack extended sequence we see how the two soldiers ended up dead, which is full of tension and excitement, as good as anything in the classic Stalag 17.

Edwards finally gets to the truth, and Time Limit wraps up with a long, talky, but superbly delivered scene of Cargill and the General arguing about what, exactly, a soldier's duty is. Widmark's character is mostly standing off to side, watching these two men go at it, which (IMO) was a gutsy thing for the movie to try--pushing your main character out of the action for the final third. Dramatically it makes total sense, but it's still something you don't see much of in movies.


Time Limit was the sole directing effort by legendary actor Karl Malden, who took on the project as a favor to his friend Widmark, who produced. While most of the scenes in the various offices and homes are solid, if unremarkable (they feel and look a lot of the low budget live dramas in TV's Golden Age), the sequences set in Korea are superb; Malden knew how to sustain a level of tension and dread that, like I said above, compare favorably against the more renowned war thrillers like Stalag 17 and The Manchurian Candidate.

Also helping make the film an underrated gem is the screenplay by novelist/playwright/screenwriter Henry Denker--it's taut and sharp, with the characters interacting in a very direct way (even when they're being evasive). He/it manages to get away with pushing the envelope as to content, as well: while talking with Cargill's wife (June Lockhart!) she mentions that she and her husband "haven't been to bed together in five months." The line is hardly shocking now, but even mentioning a sexual relationship in 1957 was still pretty risky; maybe it's was Lockhart's fairly de-sexualized look that helped the line get by the censors, who were probably busy dealing with Otto Preminger's movies, which were pushing buttons all over the place.

Time Limit is a really solid war/legal drama, full of good performances and some exceptional scenes; it deserves more recognition than it currently has. It's well worth taking a look at, especially for free on Netflix WI.