20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne
This photoplay edition that I obtained is a real oddity. The stills from the film don't match the Verne story!! I guess the attempt was made to try to capitalize on the "Jules Verne" name while at the same time feeding the film promotion.
Well, anyway...
I enjoyed reading the Verne story again.
But the biggest kick that I got was from the foreward by Stanly H. Twist dated February 20, 1917. Some quotes:
"Who among us, at that time, ever thought that the inventive brain of man, inspired by the dream of Jules Verne, would one day - and a very near day at that - evolve an actual submarine which would prove as practical as that imaginative creation of the then ridiculed author? And who among us, even in the wildest flights of fancy, ever imagined that the time would come when we would be able to sit in a comfortable theater seat and witness in actual reality the wonderful exploits of Verne's mythical Captain Nemo and his phantom adventure ship, the Nautilus, as it prowled the ocean floor?"- - -
"Though the medium of the cinema camera and the marvelous submarine photographic inventions of the Williamson Brothers we are now transported bodily to the bottom of the ocean ..."
"These words kinda set the table for me with a "sense of wonder".
My thoughts on the film? I guess that there are some s.f. movies that are timeless. Then there are others where a person needs to try to put himself in the time and/or place that the film was created in order to fully appreciate it (think Destination Moon perhaps or Japanese anime). Under this standard, the Williamson Brothers photography in "20,000 Leagues...." makes it a great movie.
Final Notes: The 1916 adaptation was not the first. George Melies made "Deux Cent Milles sous les Mers ou le Cauchemar d'un Pecheur" (trans: * Two Hundred * Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) in 1907. It is one of the 200-odd Melies films still in existence but unfortunately is not among the 60 or so films available for the home market. Biograph seemingly adopted the novel even before that.
written: 1/3/2002