Tuesday 2/18/25
It Came from Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon; 1955) is a strange movie with a solid ten or so unintentionally funny spots. Kenneth Tobey plays the naval commander whose submarine encounters something it shouldn't on a test run, which makes for the film's best sequence; it's both fun and taut.
The men are cruising around, playing some Hawaiian music, and then their ship and their lives are put in immediate danger by something they can't see and have no clue what it is. This turns out to be a giant octopus that eventually paws at an rubs up against the Golden Gate Bridge and the city of San Francisco from the interior of the bay (which we're told is very deep). Why? Nuclear stuff--that's how it often went in 1950s science fiction/horror.
But that's not the weird part, which involves a scientist couple played by Faith Domergue and Donald Curtis who are brought in to first figure out the mystery behind what's going on and then kept on the job until the thing is destroyed. Tobey's character makes out a lot with Domergue's character in front of Curtis' character a bunch. At dinner. While having celebratory drinks. Then, despite being her boyfriend, he asks her questions such as, "Did you like kissing that other man?" all eager and totally unbothered.
Is this supposed to be some cuckolding picture? If anything, he sounds like a creepy dad who wants to watch his stepdaughter--who he is also dating--get it on. You think of Curtis as being older when you watch the movie, but he was actually around forty, and in another bit of weirdness, he does some action-y type of stuff--with a wet suit and a speargun in one instance, no less--despite seeming like he's sixty-one and is more suited to sitting in an armchair smoking a pipe. When you watch these films now, you can be really struck by the ages of the actors and how they don't align with your expectations. It happens all the time.
Tobey's character, meanwhile, is this handsy, caveman-ish jerk which sometimes (but by no means always) got played up as "the way a man ought to be," amazingly, in the movies at the time. The man tells the woman what she wants, because he knows best, and then he plants one on her and when she backs away from his touch he just grips her harder until she's convinced and then--because this is how these things go--she's all into it and moaning his name while rubbing the hair on the back of his head.
There's also a scene where Domergue's character takes over the naval control room, which is really bizarre. All of these naval officials are standing right there but the film has her receiving communications and debriefing the naval people. Seems like the chain of command concept got launched out the window there so one of the stars could be...empowered?
She does make a couple speeches about the "modern woman," but that doesn't stop her from happily going along with the handsy guy who basically says, "Shut your mouth and give me those lips (and then those other lips!)" as the cuckold guy watches and his girlfriend makes it plain that though she may be a modern woman that doesn't stop men from knowing best.
The special effects were by Ray Harryhausen. I'm not someone who needs great special effects. If a film works, I'm immersed, and my imagination is working in conjunction with the movie and the story and the characters. Story is character. Character is story. When I watch Ben-Hur, I want the chariot race to be over because it drags and you know how it will end, but more so in order to get back to the people. They're more interesting.
The Harryhausen special effects might look old-fashioned to someone today, but in my view they work better than all of the computer-generated stuff. Why? Because it's obvious that's what you're looking at when you're looking at computer-generated stuff. Human invention went into Harryhausen's effects; they have a spiritedness to them, too. Someone is earnestly trying to give you something neat here.
Typically, directors who made a 1950s sci-fi/horror film didn't make just one of them, but this was it for Robert Gordon, but he did return to horror with 1963's Black Zoo about a cult who worships animals. The cast for that picture featured Elisha Cook, Jr. and Michael Gough, and when you see they're names pop up, you know that's a film worth watching.
Gordon began as a child actor, playing in 1928's The Jazz Singer (the first talkie), oversaw The Joe Louis Story from 1953, and directed a bunch of TV episodes for programs such as Bonanza and My Friend Flicka. He was offered jobs and took them. Stayed employed. Tended to his craft. And directing was a craft for Robert Gordon, not an art, but that's totally fine. A movie like It Came from Beneath the Sea is enjoyable enough despite its shortcomings and humble ambitions that you can watch it again from time to time, as I do.
Howard Hawks was another director who was one and done when it came to sci-fi/horror and he didn't even give himself a director's credit for that film, The Thing from Another World. Kenneth Tobey was in that picture as well, which completely outclasses It Came from Beneath the Sea. The Thing from Another World is just such a classy genre film. That's always stood out to me about it. A big reason why is the ensemble cast. Hawks pulls off a communal dynamic; everyone is more or less equal, or has equal voice, I should say. It Came from Beneath the Sea tries to do a version of that with the central trio, but as I said, it's produces a lot of befuddled "Did he really just do that?" and "Is he okay with that?" and "Why is she into this letch?" responses in the viewer.
It Came from Beneath the Sea was released as the "top" of a double bill with Creature with the Atom Brain on the bottom. That second movie starred Richard Denning, who was memorable as the dick in Creature from the Black Lagoon, easily the best picture he was ever in. Creature with the Atom Brain also uses the nuclear trope/excuse, but throws zombies into the mix. Cool. The screenplay was by Curt Siodmak, who wrote the screenplay for 1941's The Wolf Man--think of all of the pop culture lore that script established--and the novel Donovan's Brain, which Orson Welles--who excelled at horror--did a nice two-part adaptation of on Suspense.
You know how the Beaver was always going to--or wanting to go to--the movies on Leave It to Beaver to see sci-fi and horror? And Ward was like, "Stop rotting your brain at the pictures, have fun with trigonometry" or whatever? A double bill of this nature was what Beaver and Whitey and Larry and the rest of his friends were going to. Stuff that someone like Beaver would've looked back on fondly later in life. That's a nice thing for a movie to have going for it.
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