20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)

Director:

Stuart Paton

Writer:

Jules Verne (novel)

Release Date:

24 December 1916 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Sci-Fi

Plot:

Captain Nemo has built a fantastic submarine for his mission of revenge. He has traveled over 20,000 leagues in search of Charles Denver...

Plot Keywords:

Public Domain | U Boat | Octopus | Kidnapping | Giant Monster

Cast

Lois Alexander	...	Prince Daaker's daughter as a child
Curtis Benton	...	Ned Land
Wallace Clarke	...	Pencroft
Howard Crampton	...	Cyrus Harding
Jane Gail	...	A Child of Nature
Joseph W. Girard	...	Maj. Cameron
Dan Hanlon	...	Prof. Aronnax
Allen Holubar	...	Capt. Nemo
Ole Jansen
Noble Johnson
Leviticus Jones	...	Neb
Matt Moore	...	Lt. Bond
Martin Murphy	...	Herbert Brown
Edna Pendleton	...	Aronnax's dughter
William Welsh	...	Charles Denver (as William Welch)

Also Known As:

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (USA) (alternative spelling)

Runtime:

105 min | UK:84 min (video)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Certification:

Argentina:Atp | UK:PG

Filming Locations:

Leonia, New Jersey, USA

Company:

Universal Film Manufacturing Company

Trivia:

This film became famous for its groundbreaking work in actual underwater photography by George M. Williamson and J. Ernest Williamson.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Jules Verne & Walt Disney: Explorers of the Imagination (2003) (V)

Very interesting, thought not faithful to Verne

OK, this movie isn't at all faithful to Verne's novels (both 20000 leagues & Mysterious island), but who cares. It was too difficult for that time to stay close to the characters and to the relationship between Arronax and Nemo, which is based on the talking, showing different philosophical points of vue. So there we stick to a melodrama full of suspense and action. The pacing is quite fast, for a 1916 movie. A lot of characters and settings are involved, the cinematography is most of the time quite good and the actors are... so so. But it's the editing that attracts attention here, in a griffithian narration full of "parrallel editing" as we say in french. Some sequences are composed of four or five parallel actions, and sometimes flashbacks are used to add another dimension to the melodrama. The same fact is related three times by three different characters, each flashback being longer than its predecessor until the final revelation (that we can guess early in the film, but, as for most of gender movies, the pleasure for the viewer comes from the combination between waited events and surprising elements) narrated by Nemo himself. I don't know anything as for the origin of the version I own on DVD, so this editing question is to stay questioned. But as it is there (I saw the 1h45 version, a Jokanan copy), it's a really imaginative movie, a sort of serial with a complexer narration. It is sometimes a little boring anyway, especially when it deals with Arronax and co (Ned Land is useless, and the real hero of the movie arrives later on) and with submarine sequences (no so many, in fact, but a little childish sometimes). The documentary aspect is anyway interesting (the shark scene, an early Cousteau sequence) and from an historical point of view those sequences are very important.

A good movie, not as brilliant as the Fleischer version, but entertaining and representative of the evolution of American cinema at that time.

Just for the record: it's quite possible that the Nadia anime series by Anno Hideaki have been highly inspired by this movie (I won't say anything else, avoiding spoilers. Watch for yourself).