A silly but fun movie with everything you'd want from a sci-fi blockbuster -- heroic characters, menacing villains, monsters, big sets and special effects.
A silly but fun movie with everything you'd want from a sci-fi blockbuster -- heroic characters, menacing villains, monsters, big sets and special effects.
There was neither a heroine nor a villain in Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, but scenarist Charles Brackett evidently knew what he was doing by adding both to the 1959 film version. The picture proved to be a significant success in an otherwise disappointing year for 20th Century Fox. James Mason stars as amusingly absent-minded professor Oliver Lindenbrook, whose first step on a fabulous journey is prompted by a lump of lava brought to him by his student Alec McEwen
(Pat Boone -- and, yes, he gets to sing). Melting down the curiously composed lump, Lindenbrook discovers a hastily scrawled message from long-lost explorer Arne Saknussem, with directions for reaching the earth's core. Accompanied by Carla (Arlene Dahl), widow of a famed geologist, and Icelandic guide Hans (Peter Ronson), Lindenbrook and Alec head down, down below. They are closely followed by the villainous Count Saknussem (Thayer David), descendant of the lost explorer who wrote the directions; the count hopes to use Lindenbrook's discoveries for his own personal and political gain (we know he's really bad when he eats Han's lovable pet goose). What follows is a festival of superb special effects, fabulous subterranean sets, and gigantized reptiles posing as dinosaurs, all brilliantly accompanied by Bernard Herrmann's ominous musical score. Journey to the Center of the Earth would later be adapted into a Saturday-morning cartoon series, again produced by 20th Century Fox. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
A number of critics have likened Journey to the Center of the Earth to a Disney theme park ride, and they're right. But when you take this ride with your children, it can be a lot of fun.
By standards of the time, the special effects of Hollywood's first (but not the only) version of Jules Verne's sci-fi classic were good and nominated for Oscars; they lost out to Ben-Hur, which swept all the awards.
It's one of the very best Hollywood adventure movies, with lots of monsters, underground oceans, sinister villains, and touches which would have delighted Jules Verne himself.
...distinguished by its curious casting mix of Mason and pop croonster Pat Boone, some striking CinemaScope vistas, and Bernard Herrmann's orchestral score with cathedral-sized pipe organs.
Fox's impressive DVD edition gives us ... a fully restored anamorphic 2.35:1 image created from a new negative.... Herrmann's lauded score receives gold-standard treatment all the way down to its quake-inducing subterranean registers.
This classic adventure movie based on the Jules Verne novel still looks so great and still has such a great and unique atmosphere over 50 years later. The settings of the caves our heroes have to wander through are a great mix of fantastic looking studio sets and real caves. It also helps that the story is enthralling
and has the lovable duck Gertrud in the adventurer team. Not only the sequence with the rolling rock implies that Spielberg knew this film very well when he planned his Indiana Jones debut. Very few films of this era have aged so well and are still as much fun to watch as they have been on a rainy childhood memory.
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