Mysterious Island (1961)

Official trailer

Mysterious Island is the Harryhausen adaptation of Jules Verne. Cy Endfield directed it. The film adapts Verne’s 1874-1875 novel L’Île mystérieuse, with serious creative liberty. Michael Craig plays Captain Cyrus Harding, a Union officer who escapes from a Confederate prison camp during the Civil War by stealing a hot-air balloon. The balloon carries Harding and his fellow escapees across the country and out over the Pacific until they crash on an uncharted Pacific island. The island is full of giant creatures.

The eventual revelation is that the giants are the work of Captain Nemo, who has retired to the island after the events of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and is conducting experiments to feed humanity through gigantism.

Herbert Lom plays Nemo. Joan Greenwood plays Lady Mary Fairchild, one of two women who reach the island as the only survivors of a shipwreck. Bernard Herrmann scored the film.

Few adventure films make me grin like this one. A Union balloon escape, an island full of giants, Harryhausen’s creatures, a Herrmann score and Herbert Lom as Nemo add up to my idea of a perfect adventure picture. My one complaint is that the castaways are less interesting than the things trying to eat them.

The film was Harryhausen’s third collaboration with Bernard Herrmann and one of his strongest visual achievements. The Pacific setting, shot largely on the coast of Spain, gives the film a fresh look. The creatures include a giant crab, a giant bird, giant bees, and a giant cephalopod that pursues the survivors through an underwater cave system.

The Verne Adaptation

Verne’s novel is approximately seven hundred pages and contains many incidents the film can’t accommodate. The script keeps the basic premise (Civil War escapees on an uncharted island ruled by a hidden Captain Nemo) and rebuilds the middle to support Harryhausen’s creature sequences. Verne didn’t write giant crabs or giant birds. The gigantism subplot is the film’s invention and is the reason Captain Nemo is on the island. The change is defensible.

The film needs the creatures to function as a Harryhausen production, and the gigantism rationale lets Verne’s strict scientific structure accommodate fantasy creatures.

Herbert Lom’s Nemo is the one I like best. He plays a man whose anger against governments has cooled into a focused commitment to scientific progress, and I find that quieter, older Nemo more interesting than the raging pirate. Retiring him from piracy to a philosophical project on a hidden island gives the character somewhere to be that fits both the Verne canon and this story.

The Creatures

The giant crab sequence is the film’s first major creature encounter. The survivors are exploring a beach. A real coconut crab, scaled up through Harryhausen’s compositing, emerges from the surf and attacks. Harryhausen used a real dead crab purchased from a fishmonger for the puppet. That gives the creature an organic quality that a built model wouldn’t have had. The crab’s death involves the survivors throwing it into a boiling geyser. The creature dies in extended close-up.

That real crab from the fishmonger is the detail that delights me most in the whole film. It looks wet and heavy and alive in a way a clean built model never could, and watching the survivors boil the thing in a geyser is gruesome fun.

The giant bees are the film’s strangest creatures. The survivors are exploring a cave when they encounter the bees, who have built a honeycomb large enough that a human could be sealed inside an individual cell. The sequence in which Herbert is briefly trapped in a wax cell while a bee attempts to feed him to its larvae is the kind of imaginative horror that the Verne novel didn’t contain but that the film earned through tone alone.

The Score

Herrmann’s score thrills me. The opening titles, the giant crab, the bee cave and the Nautilus reveal all lean on his gift for building tension and wonder at once.

He uses brass and percussion more heavily than in his Hitchcock work, and the result carries the adventure without sliding into orchestral cliché. I’d rank it among the best things he wrote for Harryhausen.

The Herrmann-Harryhausen collaboration would end with Jason and the Argonauts two years later. I’d rank Mysterious Island near the top of the four-film cycle. Listen to the score on its own and the structure of every sequence becomes clear.

Does Mysterious Island still hold up?

9/10, and it would be a 10 if the castaways were half as vivid as the crab. It’s the most thoughtful Harryhausen adaptation of a classic novel, Herrmann’s score is among his best, the creatures are beautifully designed and animated, and Lom makes a fine Nemo. I think it works as Verne, as a Harryhausen showcase and as a rousing adventure on its own terms.

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