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Synopsis:
Count Andre Dakkar (Lionel Barrymore) and the Baron Falon meet on
Dakkar’s island fortress, which lies off the coast of the country of
Hetvia. Falon tells Dakkar that revolution is brewing in their homeland,
and confides in him that at the end of it there will be a new king upon
the throne – himself. Falon tries to recruit Dakkar to his cause, but
the Count disclaims any interest in politics, insisting that he is a
scientist only and wishes merely to be left in peace to do his work. At
that moment, the volcanic currents beneath Dakkar’s island carry to the
surface a strangely shaped bone. Dakkar seizes it excitedly, telling
Falon of his theory that in the depths of the ocean, another advanced
and civilised race exists. He shows Falon the partially reconstructed
skeleton of a being clearly not human. Falon is impressed, but points
out to Dakkar that he will never be able to prove his claims. Dakkar
then reveals his great secret: that he has designed and built a vessel
capable of travelling beneath the sea. His mind on things far other than
science, Falon inquires urgently whether the vessel is armed, and
marvels at what a weapon it would make. Dakkar insists that the arms are
defensive only, and swears that he will never allow his vessel to be
used for any but peaceful purposes. Some time later, as Dakkar oversees
the completion of the diving-vessel, workmen emerge from it in a state
of alarm. The head engineer, Nikolai Roget (Lloyd Hughes), carries the
vessel’s compressed air manifold, which was dropped by one of the men.
Knowing that any damage to the manifold would mean that the vessel could
never rise from beneath the sea, Nikolai puts it through a series of
tests. As he does so, he is joined by Count Dakkar’s sister, Sonia
(Jacqueline Gadsden), who is deeply interested in the work that Nikolai
is doing – and still more deeply interested in Nikolai himself. Nikolai
pronounces the manifold undamaged, and the diving-vessel ready for
launching. Dakkar orders the launch delayed until Falon, who has
expressed an interest in observing, can return to the island. As Falon
arrives, he catches a glimpse of Sonia through a window. Eagerly, he
hurries in to her – and is horrified to find her in Nikolai’s arms.
Abusing Nikolai as an upstart, and threatening him with a horsewhipping
for his audacity, the jealous Falon denounces the mortified young
engineer to Dakkar, who soothes his angry friend by promising to speak
severely to Nikolai….but who instead waits only until Falon and Sonia
are out of earshot to assure his right-hand man of his approval. The
imminent launch of the diving-vessel, however, overrides all other
considerations. Dakkar’s workmen assure him that everything is in
readiness, but Falon urges him to carry out one more test. Growing
suspicious of the Baron, Nikolai pleads with Dakkar to allow him to
pilot the vessel on its first short trip, arguing that if something does
go wrong, in this way he, Dakkar, will survive to make another attempt.
Dakkar finally agrees, telling Nikolai that his doing so is a measure of
his trust in him. As Dakkar, Sonia and the workmen look on in wonder and
pride, Nikolai pilots the vessel into the waters around the island. But
even as those gathered celebrate, a troop of armed Hussars is secretly
admitted to Dakkar’s city. A violent confrontation follows, and the
anguished Dakkar must confront the knowledge that the man he considered
his friend has utterly betrayed him….
Comments:
With 1929’s The Mysterious Island, science fiction cinema moved
into the sound era….after a fashion. Although over the preceding decade
numerous European directors had eagerly embraced both the visual and the
thematic possibilities of the fantastique, most American
film-makers remained reluctant to follow their lead, confining most of
their efforts to tentative productions full of spies, secret weapons and
a lot of running around; action films masquerading as science fiction
(an affliction, alas, from which we still suffer today). It took the
overwhelming success of First National’s 1925 release of The Lost
World to convince the other Hollywood studios that there was indeed
a market for straight-up, homegrown fantasy. MGM, never known for doing
things by halves, planned a spectacular that would outdo even The
Lost World: their fantasy film would be a three-hour epic shot in
two-tone technicolour, full of adventure and romance and the kinds of
special effects that had thrilled audiences just the year before. In the
early days of 1926, MGM assembled a solid cast, led by Lionel Barrymore
and including Lloyd Hughes from The Lost World, and divided the
responsibility for their mammoth undertaking between Maurice Tourneur,
who would direct the studio scenes, and pioneering underwater film-maker
J. Ernest Williamson, who had guided the photography and special effects
of Universal’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea eight years before
(and who had worked Tourneur previously, on The White Heather).
With high hopes and a million-dollar budget, The Mysterious Island
went into production. And then disaster, both artistic and temporal,
struck.
The first difficulty to
trouble the production of The Mysterious Island was one caused by
a situation all too common in Hollywood to this day: the simple failure
to think things through. In the mid-1920s, science fiction still
suffered from a fairly dubious reputation; and in launching their epic,
MGM had taken the precaution of following another of First National’s
leads, and choosing to adapt an author who was both well-known and –
perhaps more importantly – “respectable”. The selection of Jules Verne
as a source, however, presented the production team with a quandary:
whether to film Verne as written, or to update his story to a
contemporary setting. The wrangling over this point dragged on for month
after month, and through re-write after re-write. Meanwhile, J. Ernest
Williamson sat twiddling his thumbs and watching the ideal time of the
year for his photography, which was to be carried out in the Bahamas due
to the clarity of the light and the water, slip inexorably away. By the
time Williamson was finally given the to all-clear start shooting, it
was July: hurricane season.
Although his legacy is
sadly little known today, in the early decades of last century J. Ernest
Williamson was famous as one-half of the Submarine Film Corporation.
Along with his brother, George, Williamson adapted an invention of his
sea-faring father, a tube-like apparatus attached to a diving bell that
could be lowered from a ship for salvage work and the like, into a
facility allowing underwater photography. In the years that followed,
Williamson’s “photosphere”, as it was dubbed, played a vital role in
numerous motion pictures, both fictional and documentary – and should
have done in The Mysterious Island. Williamson’s portion of the
production, however, was hit by not one, but three hurricanes:
his equipment was ruined and had to be re-built, costing both time and
money. Williamson soldiered on despite this adversity – continued to do
so even when presented at length with a new version of the script,
vastly different from the one he had been shooting from – and at last
received the classic Hollywood reward for his heroic efforts: next to
none of his footage used in a film that bore no resemblance whatsoever
to the one he had agreed to shoot.
Meanwhile, the time
being lost in the Bahamas was nothing compared to that being lost in
Hollywood, where Maurice Tourneur’s slow and exacting methods – and his
disinclination to pay any attention to the head office – finally brought
the wrath of Irving Thalberg down upon him. Whether he jumped or whether
he was pushed remains unclear, but in either event Tourneur departed the
production in the latter part of 1926 – and, disillusioned, never made
another American film. Tourneur’s replacement was another European
ex-patriot, the recently arrived Danish actor/director Benjamin
Christensen (who is best known today, and rightly, for the extraordinary
Häxan). Unfortunately for Thalberg, however, Christensen and
Tourneur proved to be kindred spirits: time limped on, and production
costs soared, and still The Mysterious Island was no nearer
completion; and so Benjamin Christensen went the way of Maurice Tourneur.
The Mysterious Island’s third, last, and ultimately credited
director was Lucien Hubbard, writer, producer and – by this time, more
importantly – MGM company boy. It is also Hubbard who is credited with
the film’s screenplay, a mish-mash of Verne that owes a great deal to
“20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”, something to the twin tales of “Robur
The Conqueror” and “Master Of The World”, a little, with its vaguely
Russian-esque characters and its revolutionary background, to “Michel
Strogoff”, and – in an early example of yet another proud Hollywood
tradition followed to this day – nothing but its title to the text whose
name it actually bears. Under Hubbard, The Mysterious Island was
finally brought to completion – or so it initially seemed. Once again,
external events overtook the endlessly troubled production.
1926, the year that The Mysterious
Island went into production, also saw the release of The Jazz
Singer – and the rest, as they say, is history. By 1928, Hollywood
was nervous and uncertain. The cinema operators, faced with the costs of
total refurbishment, emphatically did not want sound pictures; the
paying public, still more emphatically, did. The Hollywood films
of the late twenties are a curious mixture. These years saw the release
of works that are at the absolute pinnacle of the silent film-maker’s
art – F.W. Murnau’s
Sunrise and King
Vidor’s The Crowd, for instance, to cite only two of the more
obvious examples. At the same time, there were a few – a very few,
granted – productions that demonstrated that their directors had already
grasped the full potential of sound, such as Ernst Lubitsch’s remarkably
accomplished version of The Love Parade. Between these two
extremes lie the many more films that simply hedged their bets and
included a sound sequence or two as a sop to the public, as the studios
waited to see which way the penny would finally drop. Hollywood’s first
all-talking features were released in 1928, and by 1929 the way of the
future was clear – and in the wholly silent The Mysterious Island,
MGM had a hugely expensive white elephant on its hands. The decision was
then made to go the way of the sound insert; to re-shoot the opening
fifteen minutes of the film (which ultimately clocks in at 95 minutes,
far short of the conceived three-hour running-time) with sound, as well
as including a couple of other short dialogue sequences and numerous
sound effects. This decision necessitated – or so the studio believed –
the replacement of the accented Warner Oland, the original Baron Falon;
all his scenes were re-filmed with Montagu Love, at the cost of still
more time and still more money. Finally, in October of 1929, three years
late and three million dollars over budget, The Mysterious Island
was released to a rapturous critical reception – and to the utter
indifference of the public. The film was a financial disaster.
Looking at The
Mysterious Island today, it is difficult to comprehend what the
audiences of 1929 didn’t see in it. Whatever its flaws, the film
is a rousing adventure story, full of incident and imaginative
sequences; and in its original colour format, must have been a real
eyeful. (Sadly, only black and white prints seem to exist today.)
Perhaps, however, the distance between ourselves and the film’s first
audiences is simply too great for us to see the film as they saw it;
perhaps what we regard today as charmingly anachronistic seemed rather,
to viewers in the late twenties, embarrassingly dated. Then, too, there
is evidence that once sound did begin to take over the American cinema,
there was a strong demand for films that were absolutely contemporary,
absolutely realistic, filled with people who lived and talked like the
audiences watching them – or at least, as they would have liked
to live and talk. Unfortunately for the producers of The Mysterious
Island, all that early wrangling had at length concluded in a
decision to go with a Verne fantasy world; to set the story in the
fictional country of “Hetvia”, and in an indeterminate period of
history; and to treat Count Dakkar’s invention of the “diving-vessel” as
something entirely new and wonderful. The film’s sound sequences are
another matter again. The opening section of the film is awkwardly
executed, certainly, but this probably grates upon the modern viewer far
more than it did people in 1929. All of the problems inherent in the
conversion to sound are evident in the exchanges between Lionel
Barrymore and Montagu Love: the two of them are forced to deliver their
lines while huddled together in the vicinity of the microphone.
(Occasionally, one or the other forgets himself, and wanders a little
too far away; the dialogue immediately drops out.) Meanwhile, although
they are speaking out loud to one another, the two keep the broadness of
gesture and expression that was common in the silent film. The extreme
twitchiness of Lionel Barrymore throughout this sequence – leave your
hair alone, Lionel! – is a clear indication of how uncomfortable
even an experienced actor could be with the task of coping during this
difficult transitional period. Watching, one can only sympathise – and
reflect on the many whose careers failed to survive the transition….
The remaining use of
sound in The Mysterious Island is more imaginative. Audiences
today may not be so impressed with Count Dakkar’s diving-vessel, but his
invention of a radio system that allows verbal communication between the
land and the crew of the submersible is still a pleasing touch. The
radio stars in two different scenes. The first is merely a demonstration
of its function (with the consequent jarring revelation of Lloyd
Hughes’s broad American accent; what is it about British accents,
that makes them so much more acceptable in a fantasy context?), but the
second is a far more dramatically imperative moment when the treacherous
Falon forces an unfortunate captive to imitate Sonia’s voice, in order
to lure Dakkar and Nikolai and their diving-vessel back to the surface.
Additionally, the film features the use of various sound effects –
metallic clanging noises in Dakkar’s shipyards, explosions during the
various battles, clamorous voices in the crowd scenes – that are neatly
integrated.
The most memorable
aspect of The Mysterious Island, however, is not these
“innovations”, but the extended underwater adventures of the central
characters. The screenplay contrives to get everyone, good guys and bad
guys alike, down into the depths of the ocean in Dakkar’s two
submarines. There, Dakkar’s most outlandish theories regarding the
co-evolution of an intelligent humanoid race beneath the sea are
vindicated – although as it turns out, perhaps “humanoid” isn’t quite
the right word to use. In the years before prints of The Mysterious
Island were available (and they are far from readily
available even now), all that most people knew of it, on the evidence of
a series of tantalising stills, was that the film featured some of the
oddest creatures ever to grace the screen. These “sea-people”, as they
are simply dubbed, are indeed bizarre: pint-sized, duck-billed,
web-footed, boggle-eyed and bulbous-headed, they are utterly, utterly
adorable….so it will probably come as a shock to the uninitiated viewer,
as indeed it did to this one, that they are frankly and instantly
hostile! – their first action being, in a clever touch, to attack
the diving-vessel that bears Andre Dakkar and Nikolai Roget with the
battering ram from a sunken Roman galley! (In the deceptive innocence of
their appearance, the sea-people are rather like the little rock
dwellers in Galaxy Quest – or, for that matter, like any native
Australian animal that you might care to name: they only look
cute.) This section of The Mysterious Island is notable for the
extravagance of its execution – and for the amazing multitude of
sea-people that swarms against the human characters. (Somewhere in that
crowd is Angelo Rossitto.) They pose a serious threat not because of any
actual violence they can commit as individuals, but simply through the
sheer weight of their numbers.
But the sea-people are not the only marvels that
Count Dakkar and Nikolai encounter on their way to the bottom of the sea
– a journey, I should point out, made entirely involuntarily: their
vessel has been irretrievably damaged by a barrage from Falon’s forces,
and is sinking to its seemingly inevitable doom. (This situation allows
Dakkar to produce an absolutely hysterical piece of what I like to call
“scientific consolation”: granted, he says to Nikolai, in a few hours
the two of them are going to stifle to death in agony; but until then
they will be in “a world that no human being has ever seen before. We
may even see the people of the abyss!” Nikolai, to his credit, seems
rather more consoled than I suspect I would be in similar
circumstances, good scientist though I like to think myself….) On the
way down, the vessel encounters a huge, hairy, spidery creature that
simply hangs in the water; while our heroes later win a reprieve from
the attacks of the sea-people when they themselves are attacked by “an
ancient gluttonous enemy” – and lordy, lordy! – if it isn’t one of the
screen’s earliest examples of a crocodilian masquerading as a dinosaur!
(Early on, Falon challenges Dakkar’s theory about the sea-people by
demanding to known how anything humanoid could breathe down there? “How
do fish breathe?” Dakkar shoots back at him – which is all very well,
but it hardly explains what something that very obviously has lungs
is doing down there!) This faux-finned beastie skitters all over
the sea-people’s underwater city, as the residents flee in terror; and
Dakkar and Nikolai buy themselves into the temporary favour of their
reluctant hosts by disposing of the creature with their vessel’s
torpedos. (The death of the “dinosaur” is rendered by a still-frame, so
I am left with the hope, as I am certainly not in some
productions, that the poor animal wasn’t actually injured.) But as is so
often the case, it isn’t long before the human beings – who by this
stage of the film include the occupants of the second diving-vessel,
Sonia, Falon, and a few of Falon’s men – wear out their welcome; and the
sea-people retaliate by siccing on them an animal that they keep as a
kind of pet: a giant octopus. Naturally. I mean, what underwater
adventure would be complete without a cephalopod on the rampage?
Although conceived and executed primarily as an
adventure film, The Mysterious Island is not merely eye-candy. It
is, on the contrary, consistently interesting on the level of character.
Admittedly, the Baron Falon is a purely cardboard cut-out villain, and
Nikolai never comes across as anything other than your standard issue
romantic hero; but in the Dakkars, Andre and Sonia, The Mysterious
Island shows real imagination – and a touch of courage.
The fact is – I owe Sonia Dakkar an apology. The
first time I watched The Mysterious Island, at the moment of
Sonia’s introduction, I flinched, gritted my teeth, and prepared to
spend the next ninety minutes in a state of annoyance. Well, perhaps I
was not so very much to blame: Sonia gets the worst kind of “heroine”
introduction, all soft focus and fluttery eyelashes and twee romantic
music; so you can imagine my delight when she turned out to be, not the
useless, constantly swooning object that I was expecting, but a
resourceful and courageous young woman; and far more enterprising a
heroine than most of her immediate sound era descendants, who almost
without exception play the role of passive victim. The early scenes
involving Sonia are rather misleading. Her constant visits to the
engineering workshop have an ulterior motive that everyone –
except, perhaps, that motive himself – is aware of; but it soon becomes
clear that Sonia is an intelligent girl with a real and passionate
interest in the work to which her brother and Nikolai are devoted. She
is, moreover, brave enough to be unashamedly in love with a man who, no
matter how deserving, is technically her social inferior – more on
that subject later on – and, when he is hesitant to take the first
step, to act upon her feelings. It is, indeed, Sonia’s love for Nikolai
that propels her into danger; into worse than danger. When Falon, in
love with Sonia himself, discovers her feelings for Nikolai, he is both
insanely jealous and socially outraged. When his forces have overrun
Mysterious Island, Falon’s first action is to take Sonia prisoner. Andre
has placed all the plans and documents describing the design of the
diving-vessels in Sonia’s keeping; when the invasion occurs, she hides
all the papers – and is consequently the only one who knows their
whereabouts. Unaware, Falon tortures the captive Andre, who of course
cannot speak if he would. Not yet realising the truth, Falon then orders
the torture of Sonia, hoping by these means to torment Andre into
speaking; then continues to do so when, to save her brother, Sonia
reveals that she, and only she, has the information that Falon wants.
The torture fails, however: Sonia stands up to the brutal treatment;
although in the end, only a deep faint saves her from death. (The slimy
Falon is very assiduous about checking Sonia’s heartbeat, if you
get what I mean.)
But Sonia’s sufferings have only just begun. Andre is
rescued by Nikolai, but the two men are drawn back into danger by
Falon’s ruse of a false radio call from Sonia. As the diving-vessel
surfaces near the supposed rendezvous point, the men see Sonia waiting
as planned – but are unable, in the darkness, to see that the poor girl
has been gagged and staked out like a Judas goat. (It is clear that
Falon’s treatment of Sonia is largely motivated by his desire to punish
her for loving Nikolai.) Helpless, Sonia can only look on in horror as
the diving-vessel is shelled and seriously damaged. Subsequently rescued
by one of her brother’s loyal workmen, Sonia eventually finds herself on
the second diving-vessel, trapped with Falon and his men after a failed
attempt by Dakkar’s men to reclaim the submersible. Believing that her
brother and her lover are either dead or dying, Sonia resolves to
prevent the vessel from falling into Falon’s hands and being used as a
weapon – even at the cost of her own life. Unwisely left unrestrained by
Falon (who underestimates her, as so many of us have!), Sonia determines
to sabotage the vessel – and, clever girl, she knows just how to do it,
too. Remember that compressed air manifold we all thought she was just
pretending to take an interest in…?
(While on the subject of Sonia, I am tempted – how
unusual! – to make far too much of an essentially minor point. I
watched The Relic again the other night – disliked it as much the
second time around – and was just as much annoyed by everything
about Dr Margot Green, including her little-black-dress-and-high-heels
monster-evading ensemble. Compare her with Sonia who, recognising that
she will need to be active if she’s to save herself, takes the first
opportunity to rid herself of the elaborate and confining gown she was
wearing when captured, and to change into something sensible.
Thank you, Sonia!)
Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of The
Mysterious Island is how interesting it is politically. When the
film opens, the mythical kingdom of Hetvia is in a state of revolt. (The
implication is of a peasant’s uprising, so we immediately recognise
Falon as a dangerous opportunist.) Count Andre Dakkar, however, although
being “one of the most powerful noblemen in the realm”, has chosen to
withdraw himself from the turmoil of his homeland, and to devote himself
to scientific research on his island stronghold – an enclosed community
run on surprisingly egalitarian principles. Dakkar makes this known to
the equally disgusted and disbelieving Falon in no uncertain terms,
declaring everyone on his island to be his equal: “Here on my island, we
don’t have kings or rank or power. We work with but one end: to study,
to learn, to be free; to seek happiness, each in his own way….”
Fine words; and more than just words, we learn. All
the same – we do rather get the impression that this tiny world of true
democracy is of quite recent founding. None of Dakkar’s “equals” seems
too eager to be the first to put his principles to the test. No-one, for
instance, ever calls him “Andre”; he remains “Sir” and “Excellency” to
the last; while even as he declares his beliefs, Dakkar himself is
capable of referring to “the workmen in my shop” and “the peasant
who tills my fields”. (At the conclusion of the film, he also
orders everyone out of his shipyards “under penalty of death”.) However,
the pleasant surprise here is that Dakkar does actually practice what he
preaches, even if the language in which he preaches it could do with a
little revision: there is not the slightest hint, as so often is
the case, that his is merely a lip service philosophy, a case of
we’re-all-created-equal-but-look-at-my-sister-and-I’ll-murderise-ya. And
this is all the more satisfying because the bone of contention is,
literally, Dakkar’s sister. One of the nicest moments in the film is
Dakkar’s ill-concealed amusement in the face of Falon’s class-conscious
horror over Sonia being “insulted” by – as he puts it – a common
workman! – and never mind that it was Sonia who made the first move.
Like his fellows, Nikolai has refrained entirely from presuming upon the
Dakkars’ declared ideals. Although obviously as much in love with Sonia
as she is with him, he has never done anything about it. This forces
her to take action, in the form of some rather desperate flirting –
although it is a stumble upon some convenient rubble in the workroom
that finally precipitates her into Nikolai’s arms. And there is another
telling moment that underlines the sincerity of both Dakkars, as the
diving-vessel, Nikolai in command, takes its maiden voyage. The
emotional Sonia watches the launch not in company with her brother and
Falon, but from amongst the workmen who have toiled so hard to bring
Andre Dakkar’s dream to fruition. This short scene gains real poignancy
in retrospect: many of the men with whom Sonia stands so companionably
will shortly give their lives for her, in an abortive attempt to rescue
her from Falon.
Of course, it is noticeable that in order to create
his democratic society, Andre Dakkar has had to withdraw himself
altogether from the reality of life in Hetvia. Reality, however, as it
has a nasty habit of doing, pursues Dakkar to his island, in the shape
of Baron Falon and his revolutionary schemes. Falon tries to make an
ally of Dakkar, prompting him to make history as the first of many,
many, many screen scientists to utter a variation of the
following impossible dream:
“I’m a scientist
– who asks nothing but to be left alone!”
Whatever hope Dakkar has of being left alone
evaporates in the instant that he reveals to Falon not merely the
existence of his diving-vessel, but that it is armed; even Falon’s
glittery-eyed declaration, “With that – we could conquer the
world!”, does nothing to wake him up to what is actually going on. This
is more than idealism; this is tunnel-vision: a rose-tinted vision of
the world that borders on the suicidally naïve.
Well, what can I say?
The plain fact is, scientists often are naïve; certainly
politically naïve. The problem here is not so much Dakkar’s blithe
assumption that having inadvertently created a first-class weapon of
war, he will be left alone to pursue entirely peaceful purposes with it,
as it is his failure to grasp the threat posed by his supposed friend,
Baron Falon. As Falon, Montagu Love’s performance is so unsubtle,
Falon’s villainy so broad and unconcealed – you really do expect him to
start twirling his moustache at any moment – that Dakkar comes across
not merely as naïve, but instead as---well, a bit thick. Consequently,
when the truth finally dawns upon him, when in horror he denounces Falon
for his treachery – “You!” – the audience is likely to respond
not with commiseration, but with an unsympathetic, “Well, duh.”
But real calamity follows the revelation of Falon’s treachery; this
betrayal, and the viciousness of Falon’s conduct, destroys forever
Dakkar’s belief in the possibilities of the world, of humanity; the
man’s real generosity and nobility are subsequently lost in his
single-minded pursuit of bloody revenge.
We are so used these
days to watching films in which the violent pursuit of personal
vengeance is excused, if not positively celebrated, that it is somewhat
of a shock when The Mysterious Island chooses to punish Andre
Dakkar for turning his back on his principles and devoting himself to
the destruction of his enemy – even though his doing so is entirely
understandable, given Falon’s unconscionable treatment not just of
Dakkar himself, but of Sonia and the workmen. But, the film seems to
argue, there is much more at stake here than one man’s sufferings,
however extreme: a whole way of life is under threat.
And it is here – more
or less accidentally, we feel – that The Mysterious Island finds
itself back in what is recognisably the world of Jules Verne. As those
well-versed in Verne-iana would know, “Dakkar” is the real name of
Captain Nemo. Verne’s original vision of his anti-hero cast him as an
embittered Polish nobleman, driven to madness as a result of Russian
brutality. Verne’s editor, with his eye on the European market,
convinced his client to remove from “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” all
explicit references to Nemo’s past; and when Nemo was at length
resurrected in “The Mysterious Island”, he had somehow become an
Indian nobleman – a prince, to be exact – who had been driven to
madness by British brutality! Now, while this may in story terms
have nothing to do with what happens in The Mysterious Island,
the ruination of Count Dakkar’s ideals, his spiritual corruption, and
his conversion from idealist to misanthrope as depicted in the film
form, thematically, a perfectly valid backstory for the Captain Nemo
with whom the world at large is familiar. In fact – what Lucien Hubbard
& Co. have done in The Mysterious Island, quite unwittingly, is
to invent the prequel. (Were this film to be made today, it would
almost certainly be called either The Young Captain Nemo or
Captain Nemo: The Early Years.) The badly injured Count Dakkar who,
having both satisfied his vengeance and killed his soul, sails away
alone at the conclusion of this film – supposedly to die, but who knows?
– is quite recognisable as the reluctant rescuer of castaways who would
star in any of the, count ‘em, five subsequent versions (so far)
of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea….
It is in many ways a
shame that The Mysterious Island performed so dismally at the box
office, not least for the negative impact that this had upon the
development of the science fiction film – and upon the cinematic
depiction of the scientist. As a scientist, Andre Dakkar is almost a
novelty: honestly devoted to his fellow man, and sincere in his beliefs;
his subsequent fall from grace is depicted as a real tragedy. But alas!
– so few people saw this particular scientist in action; and of
course, the next time a scientist so entirely dominated a film, he would
not be embracing principles of equality and intellectual liberty, and
devoting himself to the pursuit of knowledge and the betterment of
mankind, but robbing graves, meddling in things best left alone, and
finding out what it felt like to be God. Looking back, I can’t
help but wonder how entirely different the whole evolution of the
scientist in film might have been, had The Mysterious Island been
a popular success, and if the initial role model for all scientists to
follow had been Count Andre Dakkar – and not
Henry Frankenstein….
Footnote:
Endless thanks and gratitude to Gerry Carpenter of
Scifilm and
HermanCohen.com for
providing me with a copy of The Mysterious Island.
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