The Rhedosaurus attacks a lighthouse in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953).
This is
about the day Jean Renoir watchedThe
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. I’m not making this part up. He went to a
matinee.
To repeat:
Jean Renoir—a giant among film artists, director ofThe Rules of the Game(cited by some sophisticated and
astute people as the greatest film ever made) and other masterpieces, ranked as
the fourth greatest director of all time in the 2002 BFISight and Soundpoll, son of the famed impressionist
painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir—had a grand time at a matinee in summer 1953
watchingThe Beast from 20,000
Fathomsaccompanied by EugeneLourié, the movie’s director.
Years
later, writing his 1985 memoirMy
Work in Films, Lourié remembered: “Renoir reacted just like the youngsters
surrounding us. ‘Eh bien, mon vieux,’ he said. ‘You surely had a
wonderful time making this film.’”
I’d give
anything for a photo of Jean Renoir and Eugene Lourié in that movie theater,
surrounded by a happy sea of monster-loving children and thrill-seeking adults,
enjoying the first of the 1950s cycle of giant-monster-attacking-a-city movies.
According to Lourié, it made Renoir feel like a kid again.
Monster
movies have a way of doing that. Apparently, even the most sensitive and compassionate
of directors can enjoy an afternoon of popcorn, rampaging dinosaurs, and urban
mayhem. It’s good for the soul.
This is my second contribution to the Top 100 Science Fiction Countdown at Wonders in the Dark. There’s a little
hint at the end regarding what my third contribution will be. Enjoy!
Count
me in as an Invaders from Mars boy.
(Are there Invaders from Mars girls?
All the Invaders from Mars obsessives
whom I know are baby boomer male nerds. The movie feels completely locked into
an adolescent boy perspective.)
While Invaders from Mars enjoyed some
popularity upon release in 1953, its real impact came when the movie was
released to television in the late 1950s. Although it inevitably lost the power
of its weird Cinecolor process and its depth of field, it strangely gained in
resonance as well. In their comfortable suburban homes, boys could watch the
story of a boy who looked out the window of his suburban home. And there was a
curious leveling of the image in those old TVs—low budget science fiction came
out looking eerily similar to the 6:00 news.
I
think I must have seen Invaders from Mars
for the first time between 1965 and 1970 (when I was five to ten), probably on
a Saturday afternoon. Although I watched it approximately 15 years after the
movie was made, the movie’s main protagonist—a preadolescent boy—could have
easily been a neighbor on my block. His bed looked like mine, his telescope
looked like mine, and his window looked like mine. I could easily imagine
rising from bed at 4 a.m. and looking out my window to see a UFO descending.
This key scene was grounded in my reality. For a suburban 60s kid, it felt
archetypal.
I
contributed this piece to the Top 100 Science Fiction Countdown at Wonders in
the Dark. For the next three months, Wonders blogmaster Sam Juliano will be
sharing 100 essays on these great films, written by dozens of his knowledgeable
film-buff friends. It’s an honor to be counted among them!
Sometimes as
adults, we forget how lonely and confusing childhood can be. Produced in
England in 1948, The Fallen Idol
(1948) resonates long after its final scene for its moving central depiction of
vulnerability and helplessness.
Fade in on Bobby
Henrey as Phillipe, an inquisitive-looking boy peering through a second-floor
railing, watching the clockwork precision of the embassy staff below. Everyone
has a job to do but him. In his privileged position as the diplomat’s son, Phillipe
is simply an observer, like a child in a movie theater (or, more
pessimistically, like a prisoner behind bars). Being so young, nine-years-old
at the most, he watches intently but probably understands only a fraction of
what he sees.
I contributed this piece to the Childhood Films
Countdown at Wonders in the Dark. Wonders ringleader and mastermind Sam Juliano has organized dozens of his knowledgeable film-buff
friends to write in-depth essays on 80 great films that explore childhood and
adolescence. It is an honor to be participating!
Skip on over to Wonders in the Dark to read my whole piece on Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948). Meanwhile, here at 21
Essays, I’ll just tease with some tasty images from the film, a favorite of
mine for many years.
"... a panic-stricken Phillipe dashes down deserted city alleys..." And
a friendly policeman finally calms the child down. The Fallen Idol
displayed director Carol Reed's skill at capturing the ominous
atmosphere of the city at night.
Director Carol Reed liked using Dutch angles where he tilted the camera
to suggest a world out-of-balance. This image shows a tense scene
between Bobby Henrey and Sonia Dresdel. In his next movie, The Third Man (1949), Reed's use of Dutch angles hit an all-time high
as he filmed the streets and sewers of post-war Vienna.
There aren’t many testaments to the achievements of 19th century women in the British Museum. In
those days, the British Royal Society and its offshoots acted as gatekeepers
for recognizing scientific achievement, with their memberships strictly closed
to women and lower-class riff-raff.
Science and exploration were activities reserved for gentlemen.
So who let Mary Anning in?
In gender-suppressing, class-conscious early 19th century England, Mary Anning forced her way into the museums and science books
by sheer genius of observation. Better-educated
men trolled the countryside for fossils, but lower-class, under-educated Mary
ran circles around them. She was so good
they eventually had to take notice.
The Mary Anning display case
at the British Museum.
While preparing for our London vacation, a friend had advised me to check out the rather drably
titled Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum. It’s where the museum displays many of the
original collections gathered during its early years, imposingly displayed in
the King’s Library (which really WAS home to the King’s Library, being George III’s
collection donated to the British Museum by George IV). Row after row of display cases stand as
silent testimony to England’s greatest scientists and explorers when the Empire
was at its peak.
I settled in to pay my respects at the Mary Anning
display case. Raised in a poor family
that earned a little extra cash each summer by selling fossils to tourists
visiting Lyme Regis, Mary was just 12 years old when she and her brother Joseph
made their first great discovery—a remarkably intact fossilized icthyosaur
skeleton from the long-ago Jurassic world.
At a time when would-be amateur geologists and paleontologists were
scouring England for prize specimens, Mary Anning nurtured a talent for finding
the very finest pieces. Although lacking
formal education, she intuitively grasped the biology of the strange animals
that she discovered along the limestone and shale cliffs that lined the Lyme
Regis coast.
The Blue Lias cliffs at Lyme Regis where Mary Anning
made her great discoveries.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
On long-time loan from the Natural
History Museum, London, the little sampling of icthyosaur bones in the British Museum display
cabinet came from a later 1821 discovery, when Anning was slowly gaining a
reputation for being uncommonly knowledgeable and talented. As the label in the display cabinet describes: “Her knowledge and expertise were sought by
the most important geologists of the day.”
Mary Anning tribute at the
Natural History Museum, London.
Several days later at the Natural History Museum,
I enjoyed seeing fossils associated with prominent and respected Victorian scientists such as Gideon
Mantell, William Buckland, and Sir Richard Owen, but their antique fossil
discoveries didn’t thrill me a tenth as much as stumbling upon more Mary Anning
tributes, including a complete Plesiosaurus skeleton discovered by Anning when
she was 25.
If, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed, the arc of the moral
universe is long but bends toward justice, then Mary Anning is now justly
receiving her due in 21st century British museums.
History vindicates.
Mary Anning rules.
The Mary Anning plaque at the Natural History Museum, London,
with one of her discoveries: a Rhomaleosaurus.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
After we returned home and shared pictures of our trip on
Facebook, a friend of my wife’s inquired if we knew about Remarkable Creatures, a recent novel by Tracy Chevalier,
best-selling author of Girl With a Pearl
Earring. Well, I’ve been reading
about Mary Anning all my life, starting with my earliest dinosaur picture
books, so I couldn’t resist. Remarkable Creatures is a fine addition
to the Mary Anning legend and a fitting tribute to one of the 19th century’s most remarkable pioneers, who fearlessly ventured back into time
along the rocky ledges of her little tourist town.
Once upon a time, I read Beowulf
as a bedtime read-aloud to my son. I
read it in the Seamus Heaney translation, but in retrospect maybe it would have
been more fun (for me, at least) to do it in the Old English, starting with a
firm:
Hwæt!
Hwæt is an appropriate word to
begin a read-aloud because—at least according to many scholars—it means
something like, “Shut up, pay attention, this is important!” succinctly reduced
to a single exclamatory command: Hwæt!
It could be argued that English literature was launched with
that one word. Once it was uttered, Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Austen, Keats, Dickens, and Beowulf-scholar Tolkien would inevitably follow.
First page of Beowulf in the Cotton MS Vitellius A XV manuscript at the British Library.
On my second day in London, I’m standing in front of the
first leaf of the only existing manuscript of Beowulf, poised behind glass in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of
the British Library Gallery, the word Hwæt large in the
left corner. The penmanship was
the work of some anonymous scribe, toiling in the late Anglo-Saxon world circa
1000 A.D., give or take a half-century either direction. Beowulf
probably felt ancient even then, a mysterious relic of a marauding foreign mode of life.
Today no one knows exactly what “Hwæt”
means, the word apparently having dropped out of common usage as language
shifted toward Middle English under the Norman occupation. By the time of Chaucer, no one was saying, “Hwæt,”
not even the Wife of Bath.
In the introduction to his magisterial Beowulf translation, poet Seamus Heaney wrote:
Conventional renderings of Hwæt, the first word of the poem, tend towards the
archaic literary, with ‘lo,’ ‘hark,’ ‘behold,’ ‘attend,’ and—more
colloquially—‘listen’ being some of the solutions offered previously.
Heaney settled on the word “So,” with a period following it
to signify its separate function from the words that follow. First, you demand attention and then you
begin the story:
Hwæt
we Gar-Dena in gear-daum
becomes in Heaney’s translation:
So.
The Spear-Danes in days gone by…
But I prefer to think that something was lost as the poem
moved from a tale told in a mead-hall to an epic transcribed in a
scriptorium. “In gear-daum” (in days
gone by) doesn’t sound right to me, at least from the perspective of a bedtime
read-aloud. I prefer:
So. Once
upon a time, the Spear-Danes
And the
kings who ruled them had courage and greatness…
Of course, that would never have been the way the Beowulf poet would have declaimed it in in formal company, where certain poetic rules had to be observed. No, it’s the first draft that he improvised by
the bed of his son, sharing a tale of Grendel beasts and dragons as the sun set
and the shadows grew long.
Joseph Cavor (Lionel Jeffries) approaches the lunar staircase
in First Men in the Moon (1964).
“I
had always intended the meeting with the Grand Lunar to be a spectacular scene
and decided that a huge, almost never-ending staircase would give the scene a
grandeur that would only be rivaled by A
Matter of Life and Death (1946) in the history of film.”
Ray Harryhausen
An
Animated Life
The celestial staircase in A Matter of Life and Death (1946).
As the praise from
Harryhausen would indicate, the production design of A Matter of Life and Death—particularly the celestial staircase—is sublime. In A
Matter of Life and Death, the moving staircase is the connecting link between
the worlds of life and death. It is a
vast escalator in constant stately motion, lined by the statues of famous men. In the film’s design, where the afterlife is
black-and-white and the earthly scenes are in Technicolor, the stairs are black-and-white when ascending and color when descending. Thus, this Jacob’s Ladder exists on the cusp of life
and death.
Harryhausen’s challenge
to himself was to create a lunar staircase for First Men in the Moon to rival the grand design that
legendary producers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger brought to A Matter of Life and Death. The result is formidable—Harryhausen’s lunar staircase is not as ethereal as
the Life and Death staircase but entirely appropriate for an alien monarchy. Lined by impressive lunar crystals, the moon’s staircase proceeds upward in a series of four flights, cleverly combining
miniatures and tricks of perspective to make the scale look enormous.
Lionel Jeffries as the
brilliant Victorian scientist Joseph Cavor ascends the stairs alone, his
character so delightfully delineated by the actor that he completely anchors
the scene. From beginning to end,
Jeffries’ performance is witty and unpredictable. His phrasing is deliciously staccato,
swinging wildly between loveable insecurity and manic explosions. And it’s
not just a verbal performance but a physical one, too, that allows Jeffries to
use the awkwardness of his gangly frame to eccentric advantage.
Cavor (Lionel Jeffries) inside the sphere in First Men in the Moon.
As the movie proceeds,
it gradually becomes apparent that Cavor is our real hero. He’s the heart
and soul of the movie.
Above: Lionel Jeffries as
Joseph Cavor in First Men in the Moon. Below: Ray Harryhausen.
So let’s look at
him. His bald head disguises his real age, which is surprisingly young—Jeffries
was 38 in 1964, two years younger than Martha Hyer who was playing the
heroine. His smiles and guffaws are contagious, his delight expressed in
unsuppressable childlike glee. He radiates eccentric amiability, quirky
and British to the core.
Did it occur to anyone during
casting that this prematurely balding actor looks a bit like Ray
Harryhausen? They share the long forehead, the narrow face, and the intense gaze of the consummate professional practicing his craft. And there’s something
childlike about both of them, too, as if they’ve somehow managed to retain the enthusiasm of
their youths. Why, Jeffries is the
British doppelganger of the beloved animator!
When Cavor ascends the
staircase in First Men in the Moon, he is surrounded by one of the richest of Harryhausen’s
dream landscapes, a Neverland of the artist’s imagination fueled by memories of
the staircase to heaven in A Matter of Life and Death. Now squint at the screen, look sideways, out of
the corner of your eye, and discreetly replace Cavor with Harryhausen,
ascending to sublimity surrounded by an awe-inspiring world of his imagination.
The look on Cavor’s
face, dazzled and humbled and awestruck, reminds me of the recurring looks of wonderment
in the movies of Steven Spielberg that filmmaker and critic Kevin B. Lee celebrated in his video essay
The Spielberg Face.
In the video, the
Spielberg Face is described as:
“Eyes
open, staring in wordless wonder, in a moment where time stands still, but
above all a childlike surrender in the act of watching, both theirs and ours.”
Kevin Lee
The
Spielberg Face
When you’re climbing the
staircase of unfettered imagination, it is the only appropriate face. The Spielberg Face is
the Cavor Face is the Harryhausen Face.
The moment exceeds every
expectation. Freeze frame on the
Harryhausen Face.
Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and
Lionel Jeffries in First Men in the Moon.
OR…
Picture Ray on the grand staircase, ascending higher and higher, until he at last arrives at the
celestial courtroom where he will be judged by a jury of his peers, among them Georges
Melies, Wladyslaw Starewicz, John P. Fulton, Les Bowie, George Pal, Carlo
Rambaldi, Stan Winston, Peter Ellenshaw, and Marcel Delgado. As he enters, the deafening applause washes across heaven
like waves as his friends and fans stand to welcome him. Ray Bradbury smiles. And his old friend and mentor Willis O’Brien,
animator of King Kong, rushes forward
to greet him.
The courtroom travels to earth via the celestial
staircase in A Matter of Life and Death.
Selenite-blogging, essay 4 of 5 blog entries on First Men in the Moon (1964)
Part One: A
Salute to Laurie Johnson
The great movie composers inevitably seem to get associated
with one particular score—the one that would play behind them when they accept
a Lifetime Achievement Award or receive an MBE from the Queen.
For Max Steiner, it would be Gone With the Wind (1939).
For Victor Young, The Quiet Man
(1952). For Bernard Herrmann, Psycho (1960).
Composer of the wonderful score of First Men in the Moon (1964), Laurie Johnson is forever tagged as
the composer of The Avengers TV
theme, the music that must have played behind him when he was awarded the MBE
(Member of the Order of the British Empire) for his services to music in
2014. It’s one of the great TV themes.
But there’s much more to Laurie Johnson than just The Avengers, case in point being his
very fine score for First Men in the Moon. As the film moves from Victoriana to the
weirdness of life insider the moon’s caverns, the music grows increasingly
strange. In this first clip, the
Selenites are introduced with a blast of dissonance which drops into a
syncopation at the 26 second mark, effectively suggesting the movement of
the Selenites along the cave passageways.
Then a piercing high-pitched Selenite theme abruptly appears,
eerily meshing keyboard with strings. Staccato brass echo the melody. From this point, whenever the Selenites approach, the theme returns.
Surprisingly, First
Men in the Moon only contains one traditional Harryhausen monster
scene. The giant mooncalf provides this
one opportunity for a chase and attack.
Naturally, the mooncalf gets his own theme, both ponderous and
relentless, echoing the beast’s size and threat.
In one of the film’s most visually opulent scenes, designed
by Harryhausen to suggest the magnificent sets of She (1935) and A Matter of
Life and Death (1945), the scientist Joseph Cavor mounts a seemingly
endless staircase that leads upward toward the throne of the Selenite ruler,
the Grand Lunar. In this clip, Johnson’s
staircase theme begins at 1:26, striking an almost religious note that
appropriately reflects the look of awe on Cavor’s face.
Now 88 years old, Laurie Johnson is one of the few members
of the First Men in the Moon crew
still with us. Over the years, he has
scored more than 400 films and television episodes. Classically trained, he enjoyed adding experimental new
sounds (like the synthesized Selenite theme) to traditional orchestral arrangements.
You can hear his adventurousness in First
Men in the Moon as he moves from Gustav Holst-style themes for Victorian
England to a discreet background of electronica ever-murmuring behind the
Selenites. It’s a magnificent piece of
work.
Part Two: My Three Favorite Scores to Harryhausen
Movies
Captain Nemo (Herbert Lom) at the organ in Mysterious Island (1961).
Considering how the Charles Schneer/Ray Harryhausen movies
tend to coast on second-tier directors and actors, I’m always amazed that they so
often invested in the very finest music composers. In return, Schneer and Harryhausen received
scores that amplified the production values and technical effects, making the evocation of their fantasy worlds both more believable and dramatic. A great score helps a lot!
For my three favorites scores to Harryhausen movies, it may appear that I’m picking one
score apiece from three composers in order to avoid simply picking three
Bernard Herrmann scores. After all,
Herrmann’s musical reputation is stellar and ever-growing, and I have four excellent
Herrmann scores to choose from (The
Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, The Three
Worlds of Gulliver, Mysterious Island,
and Jason and the Argonauts). Also, I could be criticized for leaving out a
fourth major composer—Miklos Rosza—who worked on the Harryhausen movie The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. But my selections really are my personal three favorites—the
other Herrmann-scored movies would be in fourth through sixth place and, as for
the Rosza score, I think it’s far from his best.
My favorite of the Bernard Herrmann scores is his
wonderfully varied work on Mysterious
Island. It’s got swirling
hurricane-evoking action music to launch the adventure, a set of moody quiet
themes for the mysterious island, and quirky set pieces for each of the
monsters. This selection—Elena/The
Shadow/The Bird—begins with a delicate character piece for the young heroine, followed
by some very Vertigo-esque
forebodings, then (best of all) simultaneously comic and threatening music to
accompany the attack of a giant flightless bird.
The film composer Jerome Moross is justifiably most famous
for his classic western score to The Big
Country (1958). But—perhaps because
I heard it first—my heart belongs to his music for The Valley of Gwangi, Harryhausen’s grand dino-western. This clip begins with introductory themes and
then hits its stride at the 1:20 mark with one of the finest of all expansive
western melodies. It’s everything I want
a western score to be.
And third favorite?
Why that’s First Men in the Moon,
of course! Composer Laurie Johnson, a
friend and occasional assistant to Bernard Herrmann, seized the opportunity to
do his own variation on a Herrmann-type score and he did the master proud.
