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The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

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There Were Giants In Those Days – and Harryhausen was the largest., 28 July 2005

Author: dunmore_ego from Los Angeles, California

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

His name was synonymous with SPECTACLE.

View any movie from the 50s or 60s with a gigantic, roaring, pseudo-prehistoric, collateral-damaging monster and you were probably watching one of Ray Harryhausen's herky-jerky children of fantastic plastic.

Just as Ed Wood is The King of B-Movie Schlock, as Alfred Hitchcock is The King of Suspense, as Hayden Christensen is The King of Bad Actors, as George Lucas is The King of Nominal Directing, Ray Harryhausen was once The King of Monster Movies.

Though he was minimally responsible for the production side of the movies he worked on (only rarely donning the caps of director, producer, writer or actor) his "stop-motion" visual effects method was so innovative and startling that movie-lovers came to refer to a whole genre of films as "Ray Harryhausen" movies.

And why not? Were it not for the kidnapped Allosaur, Gwangi, or the damsel-devouring Kraken or the blind-man's-bane Harpies, where would those movies have been had the film-makers opted to have some guy in a rubber suit do Ray's dirty work? Harryhausen's creations brought CHARACTER to the movies – in more ways than one. (No he didn't do the seminal stop-motion grand-daddy of them all – his mentor, Willis O' Brien, did King Kong.)

This film, like many of its ilk, has barely any set-up (nuclear tests in the Arctic) before The Beast is unleashed (During the Cold War, it was de rigueur to detonate nuclear devices willy-nilly, irradiating animals into Gigantism causing 45 minutes of cinematic running and screaming...) Then some wooden acting amidst mundane set design until – more unleashing! It seemed to be a staple of "Harryhausen" movies that the directors and screenwriters gleaned SO MUCH QUALITY from Ray's creatures that they were off the hook in providing little more than running, screaming and military stock footage to bridge the gaps between monster scenes.

Though it must be noted that integrating Ray's footage into the body of their movies was masterful, utilizing every trick they knew to retain the illusion of proximity and size of the fictional beasts. This Beast rampages through city streets, eats a diving bell, sinks a ship, topples a lighthouse, looms above the populace, pushes over office buildings - no doubt affecting the Dow-Jones Average egregiously – with nary a doubt that it is really performing these feats.

Though it DOES look goofy by today's standards, there was a certain level of pseudo-realism attained that magnificently satisfied those Pre-CGI audiences and allows even a post-Episode-III audience to appreciate at least the towering aspirations of the state-of-the-art back then.

Identifying The Beast was an exercise in Malarky: The Chick gives White Hero a ream of artist's renderings of dinosaurs, to pinpoint what he may have seen during his unnecessary Arctic nuclear tests. From the stack of realistic renderings he pulls the OBVIOUS CARTOONY one (done by a movie studio artist on the quick&cheap) and The Old Paleontologist identifies it with a laughable name as faux as its rendering – a "rhedosaurus" ("rhedo" being Latin for "bogus"?), though I'd be apt to question the Paleo's credentials with the centerpiece of his lab being a Glue-By-Numbers, anatomically-imbecilic sauropod skeleton purchased from Wal-Mart.

Mandatory running and screaming scenes lead to the mandatory military stock footage, to the mandatory big-chested, all-white, square-jawed Hero having unbridled access to all levels of the military and police forces as if HE was in charge – and them obliging his every whim as if he WAS. The top-level brass in both Army and Navy are somehow always just a phone call away and eager beaver to accommodate White Hero simply because he's the tallest and whitest guy they know. (Albeit, this particular Hero has some funky Euro accent sprinkling his American megalomania.)

White Hero (in Harryhausen movies, who knows OR CARES what the stars' names were?) determines a solution to the Beast problem – i.e. how to KILL this wondrous organism. It seems that there's only one paleontologist in the world – and after he becomes brunch for The Beast (in a scene which might have been more tragic were it not so illegitimately verbose, with the Old Paleo, in the throes of scientific discovery, spouting syllogisms like, "the clavicle suspension appears to be cantileveric" – whatever you say, doc! – while the Beast bears down on him), there is no one else to step forward (no zoological organization, no Greenies, no special interest group) to speak for this unique animal's Right-To-Life. So die it must - in another staple of 50s cinema – The Fiery Finale.

In a final sequence so heart-stoppingly boring that test-audiences couldn't answer their survey cards from being ASLEEP, White Hero and a boyish Lee van Cleef (!) ride a roller-coaster to the top of a trellis, to shoot a radioactive isotope into the bloodstream of The Beast (don't ask), while hundreds of troops stand watching like statues. If there was any doubt they resembled statues, the director inserted many, MANY cutaways back to them to remind us that yes, they did indeed resemble statues. While The Beast frolics innocently amidst the roller-coaster trellis, White Hero and van Cleef, dressed as beekeepers, shoot it, then cautiously – read as "tediously" - descend the trellis, whilst the runaway roller-coaster crashes and starts the aforementioned Grand Finale Fire. While the troops stand like statues. Watching. While White Hero and van Cleef climb down. Slowly. While the troops watch. While they climb.

Thankfully, the inanimate humans in the film were overshadowed by the cutaways of a backdrop ablaze with the roller-coaster trellis, silhouetting The Beast roaring its long goodbye.

Troops cheer. White Hero gets The Chick. But the REAL Hero of the film was a man who scared the tit-willow out of those boring humans with a plastic model no more than three feet high – RAY HARRYHAUSEN.

(Movie Maniacs, visit: www.poffysmoviemania.com)

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