Cardboard Science: Siri, How Many Fathoms Are In A League?

Year: 1953
Director: Eugène Lourié
Cast: Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway
Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

Happy Halloween, everybody! It's time for the final leg of the annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue, in which I task him with tackling three 1980s slasher reviews and in exchange he assigns me three 1950s/60s B-movies. Last time, we covered a film from Cardboard Science stalwart Bert I. Gordon. This time, we're tackling The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which brings us another legend of the genre, in the form of stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen. Also, it was directed by Eugène Lourié of The Colossus of New York, but I hope nobody will blame me for finding that fact a touch less exciting.

We've seen Harryhausen's work many times before as part of this project and others, in titles including Mysterious Island and It Came from Beneath the Sea. But you know what The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms has that they don't? The distinction of being a direct inspiration for a Cardboard Science Hall of Fame title, 1954's seminal Japanese masterwork Godzilla. 

Comparing The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms directly to Godzilla is a fool's errand, and we're gonna do it anyway. But first, the plot.

That is, if you really need a story hook other than "big monster go aargh."

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (which, for good measure, is based on the Ray Bradbury short story "The Fog Horn") follows Atomic Energy Commission physicist Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian of The Day the Sky Exploded). After he witnesses a bomb test in the Arctic freeing an ancient, still-living Rhedosaurus from the ice, he tries desperately to get anyone to believe his story as a series of mysterious and deadly incidents take place along the Atlantic coast, heading south.

He, and eventually the lovely paleontologist Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond) and her mentor Professor Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and, more importantly, 1959's The Shaggy Dog), are the only ones who know that a giant monster is the reason for these attacks. That is, until the monster surfaces and stomps around in Manhattan for a bit.

Honestly, he's doing the neighborhood a favor. What's knocking over a couple buildings if it lowers the rent?

Let's cut right to the good stuff: the monster. Ray Harryhausen's work is a perfect encapsulation of the best of 1950s science fiction filmmaking. You're never at any point unaware that you're watching a stop-motion creature interacting with composited shots of humans running away screaming. However, at a certain point the magic of cinema takes over and you stop caring about any of the flaws (which include the fact that Lourié keeps trying to shoot the monster through ugly distorted lenses).

That's because, no matter how jerky the frames got, Harryhausen simply got how to breathe life into a stop-motion model. The second the Rhedosaurus stops hanging around and attacks, its muscular physicality is absolutely captivating. Your disbelief has gone weightless. No suspension is required.

I also think that there is one advantage to this being a dry run for Godzilla, which is that the monster is rather smaller than you might expect for a kaiju movie. He is not city-stomping size, which requires him to pummel buildings and rip them apart instead of merely squishing them beneath his sheer bulk. 

Another part of what makes this particular monster so convincing are the little touches. Its eyelids are blinking, and its tongue is flicking out, smelling the air. In addition to stomping around town, it is doing all of those little unconscious, barely noticeable things that living creatures need to do in order to stay that way.

Thanks to Harryhausen's delicacy and attention to detail, when his Rhedosaurus looks toward the camera, you feel like it can see you. And that makes every second spent with the monster absolutely worthwhile and dazzling. Alas, there is a larger number of monsterless seconds than just about anyone would prefer.

Oh yeah. Them.

I'm a seasoned veteran of Cardboard Science, so I knew not to expect 80 jam-packed minutes of monster mayhem. They simply couldn't have afforded that. We had to have a human plot in there somewhere. 

While The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' human characters could certainly have been worse, they mostly just rattle around the frame, reenacting various sci-fi tropes until the screenplay can finally dispense with them in the third act. Yes, the movie itself clearly resents that it had to have people in it, too, to the point that it has the most perfunctory finale, both in terms of the conclusion of its romantic arc and its literal final frame.

That said, the bland human story does have its bright spots. Its requisite "stirring narration about the progress of science" opening sequence is a particularly good one, running through a roughly hourlong countdown in the space of just a few minutes to ratchet up the tension, and kicking around the movie's most dramatic lighting in the process.

None of the rest of the human plot can live up to those moments. Though Lee and Tom do parade around in some pretty nifty coats throughout the movie that prevented my attention from ebbing entirely.

But really, the most interesting way to watch The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is one that was not available to audiences at the time: comparing it to Godzilla. It was fascinating to see how differently a Japanese film handled the idea of a nuclear monster as opposed to an American movie (though with a Russian-French director and a Swiss lead, Beast is hardly the most flag-waving American motion picture there ever was).

It should be no surprise that Godzilla handles things better, tapping into its premise in a more potent and impactful way. Its nuclear monster is a stand-in for the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rather than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' approach involving a nation's fear of its own power growing too great (which, come to think of it, is also a thematic motif in Godzilla that is handled better). 

Beast is best represented by its final sequence, which takes place on a flaming roller coaster. It's meant to be a thrill ride that deposits you safely on the ground at the end. It's not its fault that Godzilla sought to be something more complex and interesting and devastating than that. And we should thank Beast for being one of the many reasons that Godzilla exists in the first place. But it's hard to completely admire The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms knowing what was soon to stomp its way through global cinemas just over a year after its release.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*The most fantastical moment of all in this monster movie was the fact that they expected us to believe Professor Elson could climb through a hatch in a diving bell that was clearly about half his size. You can't trick me with a judicious cut, editor Bernard W. Burton.
*Yes, the best place to store those barrels of flammable materials is at the base of the wooden roller coaster, why do you ask?
*I can't even come up with a joke that roasts the name of the top secret research project harder than just telling you what it is: "Operation Experiment."

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*About 25 minutes in, I noticed that Tom Nesbitt hadn't gotten a standard-issue sci-fi movie love interest, and I wondered out loud if he was going to just stay single the whole movie. The movie then answered my question by more or less immediately cutting to the door of the university's Paleontology department, which reads something like "Professor Thurgood Elson, Assistant: Ms. Lee Miller." They quite literally hung a sign on it.
*The duties of said Lee Miller would lead me to believe that she only minored in Paleontology while majoring in Making and Dispensing Coffee and Sandwiches.

Sensawunda:

*Seeing Times Square bedecked with posters for Clark Gable and Judy Garland movies is such a lovely time capsule.
*One less delightful time capsule is the absolutely arbitrary underwater sequence where a shark and an octopus fight to the death, presumably to entertain us without adding to the special effects budget. Boo.
*I must praise the Manhattan sequence for being unusually brutal for a sci-fi movie of its vintage. Sure, we see the monster munching on a person or two, but where the movie really kicks things up a notch is a harrowing sequence of a blind man being trampled as the people around him try to escape the destruction. This is a much more effective "the horror, the horror" moment than the knocked-over mailbox from The Spider.

TL;DR: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms rocks some excellent Ray Harryhausen effects, though the material that surrounds them is understandably a bit drab.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1479

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 

2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

2025: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) The Spider (1958) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2025: Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988)