The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
Directed by Eugène Lourié

Film Review

Amidst the wave of paranoia and pessimism that accompanied the early years of the Cold War cinema screens were showered with a seemingly endless torrent of monster movies which did their best to exploit public apprehension of a real threat whilst providing the starkest of visual metaphors for the Atomic Age - a terrible destructive monstrosity unleashed on mankind as a result of his foolish tampering with nature. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was the film that set this particular apocalyptic band wagon rolling, a classic of its genre that would prove hugely influential, thanks to its groundbreaking special effects provided by effects wizard Ray Harryhausen.

It was independent producer Jack Dietz who conceived the film, hoping to cash in on the box office stampede that ensued when RKO re-released its King Kong (1933) in 1951.  He and Hal E. Chester concocted a storyline which, as luck would have it, bore a striking similarity to one that Ray Bradbury had recently written - The Fog Horn, first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1951.  For a modest fee, Bradbury gave his consent for Dietz and Chester to use his story, which would provide the film with its most iconic scene - the one where the fierce rhedosaurus attacks a solitary lighthouse.  Harryhausen was drafted in to work on the effects, his first solo assignment after assisting Willis O'Brien (the genius behind the effects on King Kong) on Mighty Joe Young (1949).

Lacking the funds to create detailed miniature sets as O'Brien had done on his films, Harryhausen had to come up with a cost-effective alternative, a split-screen refinement of O'Brien's stop-motion animation technique that he termed Dynamation.  This involved separating the foreground and background of a previously filmed live-action shot and projecting the background part of the shot onto a small screen in front of which the flexible model of the monster could be manipulated, frame by frame.  Once the model sequence had been shot, this was then re-combined with the foreground part of the live-action shot, using conventional matting techniques.  The result is the apparently seamless insertion of the animated monster into the original filmed footage.  The technique was so successful that Harryhausen would employ it on subsequent films, resulting in a quantum leap in both the quality and degree of exploitation of stop-motion animation by the mid-1950s.  Had its central prehistoric monster not been so convincingly realised, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms would have been just another run-of-the-mill B-movie.  What makes the film so exciting and so compelling, even to this day, is the fact that the rhedosaurus has such a real and menacing presence - and also a strangely endearing quality which compels some degree of sympathy, even when it is happily chewing up most of Manhattan.

Ray Harryhausen deserves a fair share of the credit for the film's success, but so does its director Eugène Lourié, a Frenchman making his directing debut after recently working as art director on Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952) and production designer on Jean Renoir's The River (1951).  Before moving to Hollywood, Lourié was one of France's most highly regarded art directors, working not only with Renoir on such films as La Grand illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939), but also with such revered cineastes as Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier and Max Ophüls.  The success of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms proved to be Eugène Lourié's undoing - the only two other films he directed were also monster movies,  Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959) and Gorgo (1961).  In the twilight of his career, he received an Oscar nomination for his effects work on Krakatoa, East of Java (1969).  Lourié's experience as an art director no doubt accounts for Beast's striking visuals, which are some of the most impressive to be found in any monster movie and doubtless inspired future directors in the genre.  The sequence of the rhedosaurus running amok in New York is extraordinary, in both its ambition and realism, for a film of this era.

Once the film was in the can Jack Dietz was sure it was hot property and started looking for a buyer.  He sold it on to Warner Brothers for a sum of 400 thousand dollars, making a tidy profit of 150 thousand dollars.  Not the wisest of commercial movies as it turned out.  With some aggressive marketing behind it, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms ended up making five million dollars for Warners - it was the biggest box office hit of the year.  The film's success quickly spawned a succession of similar monster offerings featuring all manner of over-sized monstrosities, from gigantic reptiles to leviathan sea creatures.  Warner Brothers' Them! (1954) started a craze for movies featuring giant insects, and Gojira (1954), made by the Japanese studio Toho, saw Godzilla make his first appearance.  As it fed on our deeper neuroses, cinema suddenly became a scarier and gloomier place - just as the world outside had become as America and the Soviet Union went on stockpiling nuclear weapons like there was no tomorrow.

Film Synopsis

In the aftermath of an atomic bomb test in the Arctic Circle, physicist Tom Nesbitt catches a glimpse of a gigantic prehistoric reptile, which seems to have been released by the blast after being trapped in the ice for millions of years.  After being rescued, no one believes Nesbitt's fantastic story, not even paleontologist  Professor Elsen.  The latter's assistant Lee Hunter is, however, less sceptical and encourages Nesbitt to look into reported appearances of a similar monster off the east coast of America.  It seems that the creature, an extinct species of dinosaur called rhedosaurus, is heading for its nesting ground in the Hudson River.  Elsen's attempts to view the creature from a diving bell result in the scientist being killed and soon the rhedosaurus in running amok on the streets of Manhattan.  When the army moves in to try to kill the monster another, possibly more deadly threat becomes apparent.  Its blood harbours a disease that is lethal to humans...