The
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms is about the past
and the future, like Things to Come, and in a very conscious way
proceeding from Menzies’ film by shorthand. All that formal apparatus can be stated
as a nuclear physicist in love with a paleontologist. There’s your drama, and
it seems the physicist’s experiment (called Operation Experiment) in the Arctic
has unleashed a wrathful creature from the ancient past anxious to return to
its ancestral home in the Hudson Submarine Canyons off New York. It comes
ashore at Pine Street, makes not for Coney Island but Manhattan Beach (just as
there is elsewhere mentioned a Loch Lomond monster), and dies when its
virulently infectious wound is stanched with an atomic bullet.
This last scene,
with the Rhedosaurus amidst a burning and collapsing roller coaster, so
strongly resembles the oil fires in Tulsa and The Life and Times of
Judge Roy Bean as to suggest an influence. Before that, the
paleontologist’s mentor (the world’s leading expert in the field) descends in a
diving bell to see the creature he can scarcely believe exists. “I feel as
though I’m leaving a world of untold tomorrows,” he says over the phone link to
the surface, “for a world of countless yesterdays.” But he is so enraptured by
the sight he loses his life describing it, like Pliny the Elder at Pompeii. And
then the creature rampages up Wall Street.
Harryhausen
created the initial footage, a long take of the Rhedosaurus attacking a
lighthouse at night. Equally memorable is a live-action fight between an
octopus and a shark, echoing King Kong.
The
Giant Behemoth
It is cited from
Job at a funeral. Radioactive waste and fallout give rise to a sea creature
from the dinosaur age, radiation-sick.
The second point
is its rampage from Cornwall to the Thames, where it comes to die. A ship is
wrecked, Londoners flee in terror as the behemoth treads over the city.
It’s electrified
and deadly with radioactivity, its death is hastened by a radium-tipped torpedo
from midget submarine X2. Then there is a report from the East Coast of
America, dead fish as in Cornwall.
The film is
played drily to these two points as a purely technical exercise for maximum
effect, without commentary or drama except the lucid comparison to the Second
World War arising from the images.