After King Kong (1933), Eugène Lourié’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms can legitimately lay claim to being the most important of all American monster films. Its success in Japan prompted Toho to try something similar of their own, resulting in Gojira (1054), the first of the Godzilla films and it’s not hard to see just how important Lourie’s film was to Honda’s. In both, the eponymous monsters are summoned by reckless testing of nuclear weapons, both begin their campaigns of terror by attacking ships and both have encounters with high voltage wires before rampaging through a major metropolitan area.
In the Arctic, the curiously named “Operation Experiment” sees a small group of scientists testing a nuclear bomb that accidentally frees a 200-foot long dinosaur known as a Rhedosaurus. Released from its suspended animation, the creature makes its way down the eastern seaboard of the United States, destroying fishing boats as it goes. In a tip of the hat to the Ray Bradbury story on which it’s based, The Foghorn (in which a lonely dinosaur mistakes the mournful cry of a foghorn for the call of a potential mate), it attacks and destroys a lighthouse in Maine before making landfall in New York. Ranged against it are the might of America’s military and the scientific minds of physicist Thomas Nesbitt (Paul Christian), paleontologist Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway) and his assistant Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond). When wounded, the creature sprays blood over the streets of the city which releases a virulent contagion that adds to the mounting death toll. Unable to blow the creature up for fear of releasing more of the contagion, the scientists hatch a plan to inject the creature with a radioactive isotope, the military cornering it in the amusement park on Coney Island island, ready to deal the hopefully fatal blow.
The chief draw of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms are the “technical effects” by Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion wizardry brings the beast to live. Harryhausen had been making animated shorts since the 1930s and had assisted stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien on Mighty Joe Young (1949) but Beast was his first solo flight. And he’d clearly learned his lessons well from his mentor. Though technically cruder and rougher around the edges than the work he’d do later in his career (Harryhausen struggles a little here with scale, the dinosaur seeming to change size in different scenes), it’s still a remarkable creation. It perhaps lacks some of the character of his later menagerie of beasts but it was never really intended to be anything more subtle than just a very big and rather blunt metaphor, the physical embodiment of a growing concern about the use and mis-use of nuclear power.
Sadly, like many of the films it would inspire, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms goes off the boil rather whenever the monster is off screen, which tends to be quite a lot of the time in the early stretches. There are too many scenes of people sitting around in offices yakking, using huge maps to explain things to us that we’d much rather have seen or even visiting the ballet. It is, at times – dare we say it? – a little bit dull. But these doubts are soon forgotten whenever the Rhedosaurus (an entirely fictional creature) turns up, especially in the undeniably exciting extended climax. Along the way we get a number of iconic monster movie moments – the attack on the lighthouse, the descent into the depths of the ocean aboard a perilously vulnerable bathyscaphe, the creature’s rampage around New York – and its influence can be felt not only on Gojira but in the British Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959), also directed by Lourié, which tried to relocate the story almost beat-for-beat to the UK on a much reduced budget. It didn’t go well…
The cast do well to hold their own against the real star turn, Kellaway as the palaeontologist Dr Elson being particularly good. Kenneth Tobey turns up as Colonel Jack Evans, the leader of the military response to the monster and would go on to tangle with another Harryhausen creation, a giant octopus, in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955). Keep an eye open in the late stages for a young Lee Van Cleef who turns up as sharp-shooter Corporal Stone. All are saddled with some unwieldy info dumps and often clunky dialogue (“This is such a strange feeling. I feel as though I’m leaving a world of untold tomorrows for a world of countless yesterdays”) but battle these and the script’s longueurs to bring a likable human element to the mayhem, The only weak link is Swiss-born Paul Christian (who also acted as Paul Hubschmid) as the physicist hero, a rather bland character with a strange and never explained accent that proves impossible to pin down.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms earns its place in cinema history as the first film to show us a giant monster revived by the folly of nuclear testing, gave us the spectacle of the first large scale destruction of a major city (Kong had run amok in New York but the infrastructure damage was remarkably limited) and gave birth to a whole cycle of similar films – not just Gojira and Behemoth the Sea Monster but the likes of Them! (1954) and Gorgo (1961). Five decades later, when a giant monster again menaces New York in Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield (2008), the makers inserted an almost subliminal frame from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (along with similar flash frames from King Kong and Them!) into the film as acknowledgement of what had gone before.
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