(On Cable TV, August 2020) I first read Jules Verne’s L’Ile Mysterieuse as a kid and was thrilled at the result. It was, I think, the first real robinsonade that I encountered, and I kept marvelling at the way our desperate characters could manage to recreate civilization while stuck on an island in the middle of the Pacific. It was also the first novel that drove the point home of an imagined universe, as it eventually featured Captain Nemo of another Jules Verne novel. I’m much older and jaded now, but I was still disappointed at the 1961 adaptation of Mysterious Island. If I hadn’t read the novel, I probably would have been satisfied with the big-screen result. But having such vivid memories of the original worked against the movie – where were the details of their survival against all odds? What are giant stop-motion creatures doing in that story? Why is there a woman in the cast of characters? The answer to all of these questions, obviously, as found in Hollywood’s need to make movies thrilling, exciting and have at least one female role. In doing so, it transformed Mysterious Island from a novel of survival to a Ray Harryhausen special effects spectacle, simplifying as much of the plot in order to squeeze in more special effects sequences. I’m complaining on behalf of my younger self, but I can understand the impulse – and I note that nearly every single Classic Hollywoodian Verne novel adaptation has committed the same sins, sometimes ending with gold (20,000 Leagues Under the Seas) and sometimes with dreck (From the Earth to the Moon) and sometimes with something in-between (Journey to the Center of the Earth). Mysterious Island is somewhere in the middle – the addition of Harryhausen’s stop-motion special effects is almost always something wonderful to watch, and it does compensate for many of the shortcuts taken in order to fit a leisurely detail-packed novel into a film’s running time. I still think that the third act could have been improved, and the character of Nemo given a better send-off. But it’s been seventy years since the film’s release and it’s not healthy to obsess over the choices three generations removed. As mentioned, this ranks somewhere near the theoretical middle of Verne adaptations – generally faithful at first, then increasingly Hollywoodized. Audiences went to see it, and that’s what mattered then.
(On Cable TV, August 2022) My first glance at Mysterious Island focused on the deviations from the classic Jules Verne novel: the addition of gigantic monsters animated in stop-motion by the legendary Harry Harryhausen, or two female characters. All of this is fun, but really not in the spirit of the film’s Robinsonade. A second glance at the film, however, is tempered by having seen many other old-Hollywood Verne adaptations far less faithful to the source material. So, yes, it goes down more easily a second time around: It’s essentially faithful to the original text if it wasn’t for the monsters and the women, and those monsters do add a spectacle to the bones of the story, while the female character stop the film from feeling too much like a boys’ club. Much of the first half-hour, in fact, is a too-leisurely adaptation of the original material that eventually gets to the island action. But after that, it’s got a steady series of thrills all the way to the linkage with Captain Nemo and the other Verne stories. (Alas, this being from Columbia rather than Disney, the opportunity to have James Mason reprise his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea role as Nemo was sadly left unused.) Director Cy Endfield does just fine with what was that era’s big-budget special-effects blockbuster, and the charm of the production ends up being very similar to the impression left by reading Verne’s adventures, updated to the big screen. I have seen much, much worse even if I’m limiting myself just to other Verne adaptations.
