Set in the 19th century, which framed the great era of individualism in American history, the story juxtaposed Ned Land, a common roughneck but a brave and decent person, and Captain Nemo and his brilliantly misguided elitist, and sociopathic instincts. The uneducated, hard-drinking, aggressive harpooner scores no points for gentility, but ultimately he earns admiration as a pragmatic man of action with a streak of crude vitality and heroism. Before the others, he perceives that Nemo is a “mad dog”. Land also displays strong principles, becoming outraged when the captain wantonly destroys ships full of common sailors like himself and, later, leaping into the battle with the giant squid to save Nemo’s life even though he despises the man. Land’s keen native wit and initiative also come to the force when he breaks into Nemo’s private quarters, calculates the latitude and longitude of the island, and secretly scatters messages in bottles to announce this position. When these missives bring warships to surround the Nautilus, he does not shrink from responsibility but declares, “Somebody had to strike a blow for freedom!”
– Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life
The Victorians loved the sea and everything in it.
In 1865, one of the earliest practitioners of sci-fi, and one of the most-read authors in the world, received a letter of admiration that meant a little extra to him: “Soon I hope you’ll take us into the ocean depths, your characters travelling in diving equipment reflected by your science and your imagination.” The letter was from George Sand, another author of the day. She wasn’t just courteous – she spoke on behalf of everybody’s current itch for the mysterious things of myth and legend in the realms of the great and unexplored oceans. She was urging Jules Verne (1828–1905) for an extravagant underwater ride. Verne’s new work was ultimately published in France in 1870, the wildly popular Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, Jacques Costeau’s shipboard bible.
When Professor Pierre Aronnax – the collected narrator of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – ponders about the ocean, he comes up with this mesmerising Victorian soup of fears and fascination: “The deepest parts of the ocean are totally unknown to us. What goes on in those distant depths? What creatures inhabit, or could inhabit, those regions twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the water? It’s almost beyond conjecture.” In her strange but partially very engaging book The Artificial Kingdom, Celeste Olalquiaga deals with the Victorians’ faiblesse for the ubiquitous Atlantis legend: “[Atlantis] boasts of that microcosmic quality whose self-containment is the basis of both emerging scientific discourse and Victorian interiors, models of 19th-century public and private organisation respectively [...] Atlantis reached such heights of mass hysteria in the late 1800s that in terms of news value it was compared at the time to the second coming of Christ.” The first-ever thorough deep-sea exploration took place two years after the publication of Verne’s story about the toxic avenger Captain Nemo and his ravishing sub Nautilus.
“Walt Disney, far and above any of the others, saw visions. And it was always in terms of what can we do now and how can we improve,” explained film historian Rudy Bellmer. “He was intrigued by Jules Verne, because Jules Verne had this imagination which Disney could relate to.” Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea became the company’s first live-action feature, a smashing classic and the definite version of Verne’s story. “Real life is only beginning to overtake Jules Verne,” wrote Life magazine on February 22, 1954, when Disney commenced to take the novel through the spectacle of the cinema. The sets were splendid (just marvel at Roland Hill’s interiors of the Nautilus), the special effects were lavish, the locations (including the scenic, clear waters off Nassau, Bahamas, and Montego Bay in Jamaica) were new and colourful, and the cast and crew delivered Technicolor–Cinemascope perfection in spite of the Herculean tasks that were a tough row to hoe for just about everyone involved.
“1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident,” reports Professor Aronnax in the novel’s opening. “For some time past vessels met by ‘an enormous thing’, a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale.” In Disney’s highly impressive and entertaining movie we find the Professor from the Museum of Natural History in Paris boarding the US frigate Abraham Lincoln in San Francisco, together with his dumpy and tactile aide Conseil and a bunch of salty dogs on a compelling governmental assignment to capture this dangerously glowing creature and render it harmless.
The origin of the film is described in Stephen Youngkin’s biography on Peter Lorre, The Lost One: “[Set designer Harper] Goff worked on the idea of translating live-action ‘ballet inserts’ into several animated sequences from Jules Verne’s classic futuristic adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, one of his favourite stories. He began his storyboard with the tour of Captain Nemo’s undersea garden. From there, he created an entire script in rough outline, then integrated larger sketches in more detail and colour, along with notes on the use of underwater photography. Since he was not a cartoonist, his storyboard looked like an outline for a live-action film.” This was exactly what Disney needed; he’d been waiting in vain for some time for the chance to do an animated adaptation of the novel. Somehow still, he thought that his younger brother and co-founder of the company would say no to this risky high-cost project (which ended up at 4.5 million dollars). Roy Disney gave the non-animated movie his go-ahead.
Jules Verne’s brawls with his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel are quite famous, and Hetzel told Verne that the novel, which eventually received the title 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, was unprintable. Captain Nemo of the first version of Verne’s script was a Polish aristocrat who had witnessed all his loved ones being massacred by tsarist troops – a man who had set out on an undersea crusade of vengeance and damnation against world tyranny. Like most Europeans, Verne had been greatly disgusted by tsarist Russia’s defilement of Poland in 1863. But at the time when Verne was working on his book, France was very much Russia’s ally and the author had to go through several revisions of his novel before the story was considered in level with meek diplomacy. The readers had to wait for the “true story” about Captain Nemo’s sad past until The Mysterious Island came out in 1874.
The story had to be Disneyfied anyway for the film, a venture supervised by Disney’s creative director Bill Welsh, who then engaged scriptwriter John Tucker Battle for what Disney called the “Empirical Script”. Earl Felton produced the screenplay that became the movie. It was subjected to nine revisions before everyone was happy. Disneyfied or not, Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea surely has its wonderful dark moments. Like when the initially impressed Professor (played by the Hungarian-born actor Paul Lukas) looks at Nemo’s creation – when they have rescued themselves aboard the Nautilus after the attack – and claims that there is great genius behind it all, and then Conseil’s (Peter Lorre) surly but true response to that: “Yes, and great evil. Don’t forget this, this is an engine of destruction.” Or when Nemo (James Mason) tells him off properly: “I am not what is called a civilised man, Professor. I have done with society for reasons that seem good to me. Therefore, I do not obey its laws.”
Every time Nemo blows up another ship (assisted by his faithful crew mutes), it is just another empty orgasm for the bitter old sod. Nemo translates as “no man”, a nobody.
“A strange twilight world opened up before me, and I felt as the first man to set foot on another planet, an intruder in this mystic garden of the deep.” This is so beautifully narrated by Paul Lukas – as Nemo and his obedient servants and hostages take a walk in the film’s Victorian-looking diving gear (invented by Disney’s own techies). There is also a stunning seafloor burial for a passed crewman, a silent ballet in the big blue, shot 90 meters under water.
A French league – une lieue métrique – is exactly four kilometres. The submarine’s deepest position in Verne’s novel is four leagues down, which corresponds quite well to the greatest depth in the Mariana Trench. The title itself is referring to the length of the voyage that Nemo was undertaking with the help of the relentless powers of Nautilus’s mythological engines – an 80-kilometres-per-hour cruise twice around the radius of the Earth – 80,000 kilometres through a strange twilight world.
It’s funny but Walt Disney hired Max Fleischer’s son Richard to make his dream movie come true. “When you call Walt, tell him Max Fleischer said he has great taste in directors,” teased the old animator when his son brought him the news. M Fleischer was the man who created Betty Boop, and he was also Disney’s most obvious competitor during the 1920s and 30s. R Fleischer couldn’t be happier to work with Disney: “Walt was very good to me,” he said. “He trusted me with a very difficult and expensive film. He knew what he wanted, and he spent whatever it took to get it.” Disney had to build a completely new soundstage for the scene with the killer squid. 60 technicians were operating the wires for the fierce latex monster, and it cost 250,000 dollars just to get the sequence on film the first time around.
But the footage was useless all the same – which one of Disney’s best friends, Canadian-born entertainer Art Linkletter witnessed firsthand: “The scene took some time to film. There were close-ups and retakes, finally the director came over and said, ‘Walt, I think we got it.’ But Walt said, ‘The action on those tentacles wasn’t right, I could see the wires.’ So they had to rebuild the set and shoot the entire sequence again another day at enormous additional expense. Walt wouldn’t hesitate to spend the money to get it right. He was fanatic about quality.”
There was more to the joke when the toady but great Peter Lorre said that the squid got the part that he was used to play. Lorre had firm beliefs that he possessed an inherent talent for comedy – “I have always wanted to ‘kill’ people with jokes – and I end up just plain killing them” – and he lamented the fact that he’d been pigeonholed to play that kind of character since Lang’s M (short for Murderer) in 1931. “He exuded humour. His joy was in wringing humour out of every moment he could find,” assured director Fleischer. “His screen image was not without validity – he really did have a morbid sense of humour. He knew what his eyes could do and he didn’t hesitate to do it. My biggest problem was holding him down. Peter always gave more and was constantly improving or trying new things.”
However, the weakness of the movie is not at all Lorre “ad libbing” humour to the scenes; it’s the overly sprightly (and indeed Disneyfied) Ned Land, the Canadian “King of the Harpooners”, played by the brawny Kirk Douglas. He and Nemo’s “singing” pet seal Esmerelda should have gone directly to the kids’ junk food boxes if it were today. But Douglas is truly amusing when he is improvising to Lorre – “Don’t look at me with those soft-boiled eggs” – and Walt Disney’s daughter was mad about him so there he is. And when the Captain of the movie says that, “The world does not want new continents, but new men”, Disney found their all-American hero in Ned Land – a man who responds with violence to any feeling of danger, a somebody.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a great success when it premiered on Broadway on December 23, 1954. (And the Oscars went to Art Direction and Special Effects.) It is still a gorgeous film, a fantastic ride through liquid space, through a wicked man’s unconscious. “Nemo doesn’t take refuge in the ocean to surrender his hatred, but to sublimate it,” writes Celeste Olalquiaga. “Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo sought refuge from Western civilisation in the ‘bosom of the waters’, where he created a unique version of his time: the Nautilus, metaphor of a self-contained society that turns inward.”
Walt Disney disclosed that, “I don’t want the public to see the world they live in. I want them to feel they’re in another world.” He built a Cinderella castle for the fortune he earned on a brilliantly misguided elitist who incinerated his perfectly arranged universe in the uncharted seas.
