Even at this early date, just two or three years after its founding, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer saw itself as the “class act” amongst Hollywood studios. Low-budget forays into SF had been tried throughout the silent era by other studios, but MGM never did anything small. If Louis B. Mayer was going to approve an SF movie he was going to wait until a property with sufficient scale and dignity could be found. (Movie buffs will notice that this scenario played itself out again during the more successful sci-fi craze of the 1950s; MGM didn’t enter the fray with its own space movie until 1956, when it was at last ready to invest real time and money in the classy and cerebral Forbidden Planet). Despite its current popularity, the genre still had a certain disreputable air about it in the mid-twenties. Though this was well before the lurid pulp covers of later years had linked SF with a morbid eroticism in the public mind, there was already a common feeling abroad that “scientifiction” (as Gernsback called it) was mainly for oddballs. First National’s The Lost World had managed to skirt this difficulty because the original story owned a dignified pedigree; writer Conan Doyle had penned the immortal Sherlock Holmes stories and his name lent the film some respectability. Taking note of this, it must have occurred to someone at MGM that there was at least one other writer of extravagant fiction out there whose name was not frowned upon by librarians and schoolteachers—the famous French novelist Jules Verne. Several of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires—a series of fifty-four SF and adventure novels that appeared between 1863 and 1905—had achieved “classic” status in America by this time, even though the English translations were generally poor. Most boys, in fact, growing up in the 1920s would have had at least one of the fondly remembered Scribner & Sons editions on their bookshelves, featuring, as several of them did, the iconographic illustrations of the great N.C. Wyeth. A Jules Verne motion picture then, as MGM reasoned, might be just the thing to follow-up the success of The Lost World and might constitute the next great advance towards mainstream acceptance of science-fiction entertainment.

The film was begun early in 1926. A script was fashioned, given the title The Mysterious Island and ostensibly based on Verne’s 1875 novel L’Île mystérieuse. Actually, the scenario was an amalgam of several Verne novels, with plot elements borrowed from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Master of the World, and Michael Strogoff outnumbering those taken from Mysterious Island itself. As if to signal their hopes for the film to the world, the producers hired Lloyd Hughes, bright-eyed leading man from The Lost World, to play their hero and also retained the services of cameraman J. Ernest Williamson, who had photographed the groundbreaking underwater scenes featured in the 1916 version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. [Curiously enough, this original 20,000 Leagues movie doesn’t fit our definition of “Fireside SF” either; once again, it’s not clear that the film was intended as a period piece, since the technology being depicted was still futuristic by the standards of 1916]. Strangely missing from most discussion of this film through the years has been any appreciation of the insight that made it unique—an insight, in fact, that gave birth to a whole new sub-genre of science-fiction. This is the sub-genre we’re celebrating in this edition of the Imaginarium, a thing we’ve called, for want of a more scientific name, Fireside Science-Fiction.

The great innovation may seem obvious to us, yet it was anything but in 1926. Verne’s novels had been speculative when they first appeared, and many of them remained so for nearly a century. They were adventure stories, yes—but built almost entirely around elaborate prophecies of future technology. When those prophecies were fulfilled (as they were in the case of books like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days) Verne’s novels didn’t seem futuristic anymore, or even quaint as they do to us today, but simply dated… hopelessly dated, and about as dated as any book could ever hope to be. Some of them languished in this condition for over 40 years—just old-fashioned Victorian curios, brick-a-brack on the shelves of literature’s antique store. But by the mid-1920s these books were passing into a new phase, a state of being wherein the very datedness itself had acquired a fascination. And this was the genius of the stroke: I think we can say with confidence that the producers of The Mysterious Island were the first filmmakers in history who’d ever dared, with a breathtaking flash of invention, NOT to update a hopelessly out-of-date book. They took Jules Verne’s daring predictions about the day-after-tomorrow and turned them into something else entirely—into a huge, elaborate alternate universe story. They created a 19th century of the imagination, where British Imperialists reached the Moon 75 years before Neil Armstrong, and electric submarines prowled the deep while Buffalo Bill was still prowling the West.

The production itself was an exceptionally troubled one. The Mysterious Island was three years in the making, delayed and delayed, once by a hurricane that completely destroyed Williamson’s underwater film laboratory. The decision to make the film in Technicolor (the original two-strip process introduced earlier in 1926 with Fairbanks’ Black Pirate) was impeding progress as well. Then, just as the silent version of the film was approaching completion, the Talkie revolution swept the industry. This sent the filmmakers back to the drawing board yet again, where they reconceived the movie as a predominantly silent picture with several lengthy sound sequences. This decision not only necessitated a great deal of re-shooting, but also the replacement of Warner Oland (originally cast as the heavy of the piece, Baron Falon) with character actor Montagu Love. By the time The Mysterious Island was ready to show publicly it had cost the studio over 4 million dollars, an astronomical sum by the standards of the day. It was far and away MGM’s most expensive project to date—and the future of science fiction in film was riding on its success.

Those who did see The Mysterious Island during its original release certainly got an eyeful. Reclusive Count Dakkar (Captain Nemo’s real name, by the way, as revealed by Verne in the 20,000 Leagues sequel) uses a spectacular volcanic island near the Baltic kingdom of Hetvia as home base for his scientific experiments. There he constructs two futuristic submarines with which he intends to investigate his theory of a mysterious race of half-human fish men living at the bottom of the sea. Just as the first of these submarines sets out on its sea-trials, however, Dakkar’s old friend Falon betrays him, overruns his island with soldiers, and takes the Count and his sister Sonia hostage. Using them as bait, Falon lures the first submarine, captained by Dakkar’s chief engineer Nicolai Roget, back into port and sinks it with cannonballs. As it descends uncontrollably into the depths, the triumphant Falon boards the second boat, which will now become an undreamed-of weapon of destruction in his ruthless and ambitious hands. The Baron hasn’t reckoned on the determination of Sonia, however, who is willing to sink the second sub as well, with herself and Falon on board, rather than see her brother’s work used for world domination. As Submarine #2 follows the other into the hopeless abyssal depths, The Mysterious Island begins to unleash its impressive array of special effects. Though undoubtedly crude by today’s standards, these effects (similar to those seen in 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad) are nonetheless wonderfully imaginative, having something of the appeal of an elaborate puppet show. And if the creepy little gill men who welcome the explorers to their undersea domain seem reminiscent the Flying Monkeys from Wizard of Oz that should come as no surprise; art director Cedric Gibbons went on to design that film as well, and many of the little people wearing the fish costumes later appeared as Monkeys and Munchkins in Oz. There’s a giant spider down there as well, along with a sea-dragon and an oversize octopus. And the rigid diving suits the aquanauts use during the finale are worthy of mention also; somehow fanciful and yet believable at the same time, they’re still impressive today.

I think the drama in The Mysterious Island works well, too. Lionel Barrymore’s transformation from idealistic, would-be benefactor of humanity into embittered vigilante is quite effective, and the torture scene that brings about this transformation is wrenching. Much has been made of the film’s lack of fidelity to the original book—too much, in fact. What the filmmakers seem to have envisioned was an epitome of Verne, an attempt to capture the essence of the Vernian world rather than a literal adaptation of any one book. This being the case, I think it’s interesting just how many of the author’s themes did make it into The Mysterious Island. In fact, if you stopped the film just before the end it would work as an interesting prequel to Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The traumatic events that ignited Captain Nemo’s anti-war crusade—merely alluded to in the Disney version—are vividly depicted here.

At any rate, The Mysterious Island was, as you may have guessed by now, an abject failure at the box-office. For reasons that aren’t quite clear, audiences of 1929 stayed away in droves and the film recouped less than ten per cent of its negative cost. The impact of this calamity, both on MGM and on the rest of Hollywood, would be difficult to overstate. The Mysterious Island disaster not only frightened producers away from Jules Verne, it cast a stink of failure over the entire concept of science-fiction cinema, a stink that clung to it for nearly 25 years. On the rare occasions when a sci-fi theme or concept did make it to the screen during the Thirties or Forties it was as part of a horror movie or in a cheap serial made for children. The Mysterious Island, in other words, managed to nip the whole burgeoning genre in the bud. The film itself was forgotten by MGM and nearly lost, perhaps on purpose. Even today, it can only be seen in black and white; no Technicolor print is known to exist.

Ignominious as this defeat was, many of the makers of The Mysterious Island lived to see some measure of vindication. In the early 1950s, when the sci-fi drought did finally pass, one of the first big-budget hits in the cycle was, in many ways, a virtual remake of their grand busted epic of 1929. And on this second go ‘round, Jules Verne and Captain Nemo took the movie business by storm…