Tags

, , , , ,

Time, once again, for some early childhood memories. Do I dare stir the depths? Will I find that what my preadolescent mind remembers so fondly is tainted by my having grown up and the general passing on of society?

I remember two movies that I enjoyed as a kid. We’ll address them in the order that they came out, which for both was long before I had a chance to watch them. 1954 saw the release of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This starred a young-ish Kirk Douglas* and sparked the imaginations of generations. As a monument to its greatness, the last time I was at Disneyland, the movie-inspired**-submarine-ride still stood (although it did retire some 50 years after the film was out, ~1994), despite its obvious lameness for the Star Wars flight simulator generation.

Second up is a movie that came out in 1961 but was all the rage in the 70s, perhaps because it played for us on broadcast TV. That movie is The Guns of Navarone, starring a not-so-young***** Gregory Peck along with Anthony Quinn and David Niven (near-equal billing this time). One of the kids in the neighborhood even had the Guns of Navarone toy-soldier set***, which was the envy of the rest of us. Was the movie on TV because the toy came out? Was the toy out because the movie was on TV? Did Mattel sponsor the showing of the movie and plug its toys during the break? I wouldn’t have thought about any of this at the time.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea

But first, back to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I remember really liking this when I saw it (roughly the same time I watched Guns, FWIW) but also being a little disappointed. The one scene that has always stuck in my craw is the fight with the giant squid. As I understood the plot, the leviathan was encountered after the standard submarine movie trope about diving to maximum depth. So why does the fight with the squid take place back on the water’s surface? I’ve never read another complaint about this so I’m willing to credit my young-child-inability to follow the plot properly rather than crappy screenwriting… but the point is, it bugs me to this day.

For a few years now, as movies of all sorts have becomes readily available through streaming, I’ve thought I’d watch that movie again. Maybe I could see just how wrong (or maybe right) I was in the critiques that I remember. How many more annoyances will I encounter, issues that I didn’t notice at the time? The film was a 50s take on a 1869-70 story, which creates its own set of baggage resulting from that mixing of ingredients. Somehow the submarine and its adventures had to both look futuristic AND historical while being rendered by the effects-capabilities as the times and the film’s budget allowed. For better or for worse, it created an image of what this story should “look like” that has stuck with me all my life. I’m sure it is not just me.

It is strange to me how so few of these “classics” have become available through streaming. With respect to 20,000 Leagues…, it shouldn’t surprise one in the least that the Walt Disney Company is keeping the intellectual property rights locked down hard on a 66-year-old work. It does surprise me how few of the fifties “classics,” those same films that I watched on network TV or on a free-screening at the elementary school, are actually available today. To the point, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is going to have to wait a while longer for a re-viewing.

What I found instead is a copy of the book.

Lire un livre!

Now the book, too, takes me back to my childhood, even though I never read it. Instead, I remember seeing a copy at my grandfather’s house when I was there for vacations. It had the look and feel of the typical 40s or 50s printing and, on the inside cover, trumpeted how great the book was as wholesome enrichment for young men. It may have been sponsored in its printing by an organization like the Boy Scouts or similar. I was occasionally, over those summer vacations, tempted to pick up this volume and read it but I never did. It is probably at my parents’ house by now, still tempting each successive generation of reader.

I could only evade the wily Captain Nemo for so long and, now, he has finally caught me. The novel is available on Amazon for free (although you can pay for it as well, should you want to do so). The free version is the Project Gutenberg translation. While it is not perfect, it is a fairly good version both in terms of quality and readability. In fact, I for one trust “the crowd” as much or more than today’s random for-profit ebook publisher to stay true to the original french. Reading is obviously a very different experience than re-watching the Disney film and one far superior. This is something I should have done when I was young and, failing that, certainly should have done in the interim. Well, no time like the present.

A handful of chapters into the work I came to a realization. What I’m reading is essentially a techno-thriller, just with 150-year-old technology. The story is of the mystery/thriller genre and rolls out as as the characters travel with the mysterious Captain Nemo while attempting to discover his secrets (and still escape with their lives). There is also that travel part. Like so many novels before and since, the book transports the reader to places they’ve never been and, probably, to places they will never have the chance to go. The islands of the South Pacific and the clear, blue waters off their coasts are open to the reader’s exploration. Furthermore, we are shown the footsteps of the explorers who discovered those islands for the European nations, letting us learn a bit of history along with our geography. We’re also enlightened as to the studies of Darwin and his ilk, who built upon this mapping and exploration with a fresh understanding the natural world. The book can get somewhat heavy in the listing of exotic species but consider it within the context of its own time. Many readers have learned/are learning about the vast bounty of flora and fauna that thrive beyond the shores of England, France, and the East Coast of North America and this is a way to bring it all to life, as it were.

Beyond that, there is the cutting edge technology. Verne is sometimes seen as a prophet in the cast of da Vinci, telling tales that predict the future path of technology. However, Verne futurism is less exotic as one might imagine and, furthermore, where he is wrong, he is wrong. His gift is in imagining that the cutting-edge technologies of the day – undersea travel and life-support, electrical power, etc. – are advanced to the mundane usage (as they eventually would be). Again, the results vary. That an all-electric submarine could easily circumnavigate the earth seems prescient. That it could use that propulsion to find the South Pole in the middle of an antarctic sea seems absurd.

In an interesting historical footnote, it would take until the Nautilus (the 1955 version, SSN-571) before reality began to challenge the capabilities of the fictional boat. Verne imagined that fairly-conventional batteries could provide virtually-unlimited electric power. In the event, it would require a nuclear reactor to make it work. However, even that paradigm-changing SSN-571 had, in many ways, only a fraction of the capabilities of Nemo’s boat. It could move at only half the speed of the fictional version and was limited to diving a mere 700ft below the surface. Verne desperately underestimated the structural limitations of iron and glass. Then again, what kind of story would it be if the reader were stuck in a windowless submarine, navigating by sonar. We need that steering cupola and those observation windows to witness the world that Nemo’s Nautilus explored.

Board Beyond Belief

All this reminiscence renewed my hankering for a board game – it is one that’s been out since 2017. Nemo’s War is a solo game (although it can be played multiplayer) and one that has garnered a very good reception. One key to the appeal of the book, the movie, or the amusement park ride is that they provoke a desire to live the story – to travel the seas unearthing mysteries. Perhaps this is a medium which can do that justice.

In just looking at the pictures of the (very attractive) components, one stuck in my craw. The design for the game’s Nautilus is very organic looking – it, in fact, resembles the sea creature nautilus. This would always represent a challenge for a game designer; we have the heavy burden of the Disney rendering of the submarine to contend with. Unlike**** Verne, the Walt Disney Company had a major World War’s worth of undersea vessels shaping the public’s understanding of what a submarine should be. Disney had to make the vessel both futuristic and archaic at the same time. The aesthetic was stylized steampunk (before that was even a thing). It was also limited by the plot point – that everyone mistook Nemo’s boat for a sea creature. Within the book this is simply because no other explanation was even conceivable. With 1950s submarines being fairly common, it was probably felt necessary to make the Nautilus look considerably more fishy than its literary counterpart – a counterpart described (and sketched, in contemporary illustrations) to resemble a cigar. This also would have been the appearance of the submarine designs of the day (see ****).

Thus the biological appearance of Nemo’s War‘s Nautilus is but a natural evolution with respect to today’s audience. It nonetheless bugs me in that it is so far afield from what Verne imagined. Verne’s technological extrapolation was also mirrored by Disney in another way. The battery technology obviously having been shown to be inadequate for its mission, Disney decided to have Nemo invent a nuclear-electric power system which then adds the horror of nuclear weapons into the story. Disney is hardly the visionary that Verne was – both the nuclear powered Nautilus and the submarine-launched cruise missile (Regulus) were nearing production at the time and the public lived in fear of impending atomic doom.

One last comment on the book. I’ll remark on the glee with which every man in the story responds when presented with a fancy new firearm. I can relate – and it does seem natural to me. It is also a joy that has been mostly purged from our culture; i.e. you’d rarely read such a scene in a book today. The remaining attitudes are fairly in line with our current sensibilities. We love world peace, seek harmony with nature, and appreciate art and literature just like our counterparts 150 years ago. Some men even love their guns and are as eager to shoot something with them as the gentlemen of the 1870s were.

Which brings me to…

Bringing Out the Big Guns

…the second movie I’ve been watching. Netflix put The Guns of Navarone on their streaming service. This was nice of them, as they had the tantalizing-but-deceptively-named Force Ten from Navarone available for a while. I didn’t watch the latter but it got me to wishing I could watch the former. So when it showed up, I did just that.

I wrote that “I’ve been watching” this movie without thinking too much about the implications behind my choice of words. The Guns of Navarone lasts for a mighty 2 hours, 36 minutes and so I’ve been watching it in installments – and I’m still not done. By watching it piecemeal, I’m certainly losing something of the experience.

It is also almost certain that I didn’t watch the whole thing way back when. First of all, I watched it on network TV. That meant it was “edited for content and formatted to fit my television screen.” Oddly enough, I always thought it was a black and white film because I watched it on a black and white TV. Until I started watching just now, I didn’t know it was in color! To add to any butchery by the networks, my parents were pretty strict about my bedtime and didn’t bend their dicta even when I was in the middle of watching something. So, the chances are good that the movie had been cut down to well below 2 hours and that I, myself, lost last 30-40 minutes of that for having been sent to bed.

All of this reminds me that the real object of my desire in this whole excursion was that Guns of Navarone battle toy. Although my memory is fuzzy, I have to think I was slightly disappointed with the film. Although often thought of as “action” it has a very heavy focus on character. I’m sure that wanted more big guns blowing things up and less of officers struggling with the morality of war.

To the adult me, the film has more to be appreciated. Not depicting a real battle, it doesn’t have the hurdle of representing the “history” fairly. Being essentially a small-unit, special forces***** action, it doesn’t need to represent large-scale warfare on the screen. It was filmed outdoors and on location, making it a thing of beauty but also making it one a very expensive film for its time. I still don’t consider it a cinematic classic but I definitely appreciate it for its contribution to the art.

Ein Buch lesen!

Like with the first film, I wondered if I could turn to the book upon which the movie was based. Unfortunately for my under-populated wallet, Guns of Navarone, along with the other works of Alistar MacLean, are still under copyright. I was going to complain about books being out-of-print but it seems that sands are shifting even as I type this.

When I first started watching the movie, I checked for availability on the book. On Amazon the paperback was only available through third-party sellers and either in used condition or very expensive. I also recall seeing a review of the ebook (oddly listed as an eTextbook) saying that it was poorly converted and inadequately edited. This left the choice between overpriced and undervalue, neither of which I would choose.

Just to fact check, I went back to the reviews as I typed this yesterday and none of my recollection bore out. A new print version of the paperback was for sale ($15.99, which seems like a “going rate) and I could find no complaints about the digital version. Yet when I checked one last time before “going to print,” the paperbacks are once again unavailable. While I still can’t find that negative ebook review, the reviews based upon the printed work are less than stellar. Dated language – dated plot. One review says this is a rare example of a movie that has improved upon the original material.

I guess I don’t see a need to read this one.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

*I doubled checked and, yes, Kirk Douglas did have the top billing on that movie. He played Ned Land who, story-wise, was more of a supporting character. I say youngish was because Douglas (who died only last year at the age of 103) was already in his late 30s. He had been in a number of films, including as the lead, and was well-received. Nonetheless, this is the first of his movies that I have seen or would even recognize.

**When the film came out, Disneyland featured a walk-through of some of the film set (I assume a mixture of mockups and actual film sets/costumes) as part of Tomorrowland. The “ride” through the pond on little submarines wasn’t built until 1971. With the retirement of the ride in 1994, Disneyland Paris installed an updated version of the 1950s walk-through. As far as I know, that one is still open.

***Follow the link and then the link-within-the-link for some interesting points. I had this vague memory of the events of this movie of being “inspired by history,” and some of these marketing materials seem deliberately designed to make me think that. It was entirely fictional, of course, which leads to some interesting copyright questions for that toy based on a 15-year-old movie.

****Again, let us not forget the time in which Verne lived. The American Civil War saw the USS Hunley sink a Confederate vessel (while also sinking herself). Post war, the French had developed a design of a mechanically-powered (via compressed air) submersible. Verne’s concept is fairly similar to his nation’s reality, the Plongeur (Diver).

*****The absurdity of having a commando unit consisting entirely of elderly men did not pass unnoticed even at the time. The British Press referred to the film as “Elderly Gang Goes Off to War.”