20,000 Leagues Under the Sea-1916-Stuart Paton-The first submarine feature silent film-Full movie
"
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" ,
1916, is a science-fiction silent film directed by
Stuart Paton, released by
Universal Film Mfg. Produced by
Carl Laemmle over a two-year period in the
Bahamas, at Universal's
Leonia, New Jersey and
Universal City, California facilities, for a reported cost of $
500,
000 (roughly $
100,000,000 today), the screenplay also incorporated elements of
Verne's
Mysterious Island.Co.
A strange giant "sea creature" has been rampaging the seas.
The American naval ship
Abraham Lincoln is sent to investigate, but is rammed by "the creature" which turns out to be
The Nautilus, the fantastic submarine of the enigmatic
Captain Nemo, and "
Rudderless, the 'Abraham Lincoln' drifts on". Then, in "A strange rescue" he guides the sub to surface under those pitched overboard and his crew take them, including
Professor Aronnax, and his daughter (who are
French) below through a hatch in the surface of the deck. After they pledge not to escape,
Nemo shows them the wonders of the underwater world, and even takes them hunting on the sea floor.
Meanwhile, soldiers in a runaway
Union Army Balloon are marooned on a mysterious island not far from the submarine. They find a wild girl living alone on the island ("a child of nature"). The yacht of
Charles Denver arrives at the island. A former
Indian colonial officer, he has been haunted by the ghost of a woman (
Princess Daaker) that he attacked years ago; she stabbed herself rather than submit to him. He fled with her young daughter and then abandoned the child on the island. The long-tormented Denver has returned to see what became of her. One of the
Union soldiers schemes and kidnaps the wild girl onto Denver's yacht. Another soldier swims aboard to rescue her. At the same time, Nemo discovers that the yacht belongs to Denver, the enemy he has been seeking all these years. The Nautilus destroys the yacht with a torpedo, but the girl and her rescuer are saved from the water by Captain Nemo.
In elaborate flashback scenes to
India, Nemo reveals that he is
Prince Daaker, and that he created the
Nautilus to seek revenge on Charles Denver. He is overjoyed to discover that the abandoned wild girl is his long-lost daughter, but his emotion is such that he expires. His loyal crew bury him at the ocean bottom. They disband and the Nautilus is left to drift to its own watery grave.
The third motion picture (1-American Mutoscope &
Biograph 1905, 2-Georges
Méliès 1907) based on
Jules Verne's "Vingt
Mille Lieues sous Les
Mers" from his legendary Voyages Extraordiniares, Universal Film Mfg. Co's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)" is noteworthy for the technically astonishing underwater photography of
John Ernest Williamson's
Submarine Film
Corporation. The technology of
Williamson's "Photosphere" observation chamber, used to film encounters with undersea creatures, rivals the fictional science of Verne's novel and helped establish the fantasy-horror legacy of
Universal Studios.
It was too difficult for that time to stay close to the characters and to the relationship between Arronax and Nemo, which is based on the talking, showing different philosophical points of vue. So there we stick to a melodrama full of suspense and action. The pacing is quite fast, for a
1916 movie. A lot of characters and settings are involved, the cinematography is most of the time quite good and the actors are
... so so. But it's the editing that attracts attention here, in a griffithian narration full of "parrallel editing" as we say in french. Some sequences are composed of four or five parallel actions, and sometimes flashbacks are used to add another dimension to the melodrama. The same fact is related three times by three different characters, each flashback being longer than its predecessor until the final revelation (that we can guess early in the film, but, as for most of gender movies, the pleasure for the viewer comes from the combination between waited events and surprising elements) narrated by Nemo himself.
This film became famous for its groundbreaking work in actual underwater photography by
George M. Williamson and
J. Ernest Williamson. The actual undersea footage was shot in the Bahamas due to the unusually clear water. When this film was remade by
Walt Disney 38 years later, they came to this same spot for their undersea footage.
Resources: wikipedia.org, imdb.org
New soundtrack and dubbing: Cinemateca
Music:
Kevin Mac Leod (www.incompetch.com) licensed under
Creative Commons licence http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ .
Attribution 3.0 Unported (
CC BY 3.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
3.0;