For the furtherance of science some men must be willing to suffer.

— Jules Verne's original novel

     Journey to the Center of the Earth is certainly one of the best films in the genre and, in some ways, the best. One thing only keeps it from being called a complete and unqualified success: the fact that it was not written by science-fiction people. In this regard, Journey reminds me of the big-budget Superman films of the late Seventies. The character interaction, the dialogue and so forth, in both Superman: The Movie and Superman 2, is just first-rate—almost never done better anywhere. And yet just when our hearts are most fully engaged Superman puts time in reverse by flying around in circles really fast, pulls someone through space by the fingertips, rips a plastic “S” off his chest and throws it at the villain. The human element (which is, admittedly, the most important part of any movie) is there in spades and done to perfection. But the finished product is still marred by the fact that the writers (in this case Mario Puzo [The Godfather], David & Leslie Newman [Bonnie and Clyde], and Tom Mankiewicz [The Cassandra Crossing]) clearly didn’t know beans about comic books or space stories or any of the other things they were supposed to be writing about. Except the characters. And Journey to the Center of the Earth has just this same difficulty.

The screenwriters attached to Journey were among Hollywood’s greatest; rarely, in fact, has any genre film enjoyed the attentions of such a dazzling set of scribes. Walter Reisch wrote the classic Gaslight (1944) for George Cukor, the delightful Ninotchka (1939) for Ernst Lubitsch, and That Hamilton Woman (1941) for Sir Lawrence Olivier. Charles Brackett, on the other hand, merely won Oscars for Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Lost Weekend (1945). With a team like this at work we might have expected this adaptation of Verne’s 1864 book Voyage au Centre de la Terre to have been something special…and it is. It’s especially adroit with language and the characterizations work especially well. But the science-fictional elements are just as wacky as those in Superman and I’m afraid it isn’t all the 19th century Frenchman’s fault.

The antiquated geology is still there, to be sure, but this script’s problems run a good deal deeper than that. Some of the trouble might be due to pre-release tampering. One of the difficulties with Verne’s book is that the titular journey never actually reaches its goal; the trip is cut some 5000 miles short by a sudden precipitous return to the surface via volcanic eruption. This worked fine on paper, but here the producers seem to have worried that theater patrons might feel gypped by such a journey—a journey to the center of the earth, that is, that never gets to the center of the earth. So it looks as if they ordered up a sort of ersatz climax to the voyage and stuffed it into a preexisting scene at an arbitrary (and somewhat less than climactic) point. As a matter of fact, we know for certain that the raft trip across the Saknuessem Ocean originally included a musical number by Pat Boone that was cut from the film. In its place, we now have this cribbed together “center of the earth” moment that really amounts to nothing more than a couple of lines of dialogue and a heavy thunderstorm. The sequence is made even less satisfying by the fact that it’s shoehorned into place with a confusing “dream sequence” device that leaves you wondering whether any of it really happened at all. Very suspicious, to my way of thinking.

Still, many of the script’s logical lapses are undoubtedly the fault of Brackett and Reisch. The lost continent of Atlantis, for example, vanished beneath the waves last time I looked; yet here it is at the center of the earth, high and dry somehow with even the stock on its grocery store shelves intact. And old Arne Saknuessem’s ability to get his plumb-bob to Scotland by throwing it up a volcano shaft that leads to Sicily is a miracle which must have required every ounce of Pat Boone’s considerable influence with the Almighty. Some folks seem to enjoy finding problems like these. I don’t. Some people uncover plot holes like this and cry out “Eureka! I’ve found it!” I’m not one of those people. I fully sympathize with all of your wives and girlfriends out there when they complain, “Why can’t you just relax and enjoy it? Why do you have to analyze everything to death?” But I still wish Journey to the Center of Earth made more sense.

Especially when everything else in it is so marvelous. James Mason, for instance, is even better here than he was in 20,000 Leagues. His knowing turn as Sir Oliver Lindenbrook, Man of Science par excellence, is truly a thing of beauty and a joy forever. By turns cranky and sentimental, totally devoted to the cause of science in the abstract yet not without an eye toward his own place in “the great book of history”, Sir Oliver is the prototype Victorian explorer of which every other Fireside example is a broad, phony imitation. And best of all, we really can still see in him “that little boy who wouldn’t eat his porridge.” Most of the other performances are excellent as well, including that of teen heartthrob Pat Boone. All kidding aside, Boone quits himself admirably in my estimation. Ever since Around the World in Eighty Days these films had kept an element of the ‘big-screen variety show’ about them—people came to see them for Entertainment, in the full, Fifties, “Ed Sullivan Show” sense of the word. Boone’s musical numbers fit comfortably within that 1950s convention. Certainly his performance as young Alec McEwen (complete with a nicely suggested Scottish accent) compares quite favorably to similar appearances by, say, Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo that same year. And surely Boone is as good an actor as Elvis Presley, who was carrying a whole film series on his shoulders by this point!

The visuals are, once again, top-rate—some of the best of the 1950s. One might understandably question the whole concept of using trick photography to blow lizards up into dinosaurs, but there’s no question at all that this particular movie does it as well as it ever was done. The matting is superb, and the final shot in the Dimetrodon sequence at least (wherein the explorers sneak safely past a group of them cannibalistically feasting on each other) is as good as anything in One Million Years BC or Valley of Gwangi. The matte paintings seen throughout the film are spectacular as well. One of the uncredited designers was Harold Michelson, who later did such masterful work on The Birds (1964) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). No wonder that Journey to the Center of the Earth received Oscar nominations for Color Art Direction, Special Effects, and Sound. Bernard Herrmann’s score ought to be mentioned as well; its heavy heavings and breathings, as if the earth itself were a sleeping prehistoric monster, go a long way indeed toward glossing over the logical and dramatic gaps about which I have gently complained.

Science Fiction people make their own kinds of mistakes. All that emphasis on looking for plot holes produces…well, a kind of myopia in the end; a distorted sense of proportion. And someone who has spent a great deal of time reading comic books (not that there’s anything wrong with that) may not have had much time left over for reading Shakespeare or Shaw or Robert Louis Stevenson. That’s why, given the choice between a script with watertight logic and a heart of ice, or a script like this one, made of Swiss cheese but throbbing with heart and soul, I’ll take Journey to the Center of the Earth every time. This film produces, more than any other, all the emotions one wants to experience on such a sentimental journey. Fireside is about getting a new perspective on our own time by seeing it through the eyes of the past. It’s about traveling to fantastic places with congenial company. It’s about wondering whether or not, for all our astounding technological progress, something indispensable might have been lost when we left the 19th century behind.

Other Fireside films sometimes try to create dramatic tension by filling their incredible journeys with bickering characters and expeditions threatening to fall apart through treachery and deceit. Journey to the Center of the Earth allows us to relax and experience the wonders of our newfound lost world with people who love each other and whom we ourselves grow to know and love. And that’s what makes it, truly, one of the high points.