Wtf-film: cult cinema and video reviews

rating:
company: Columbia and
Morningside Productions
year: 1957
runtime: 82′
country: United States
director: Nathan Juran
cast: William Hopper, Joan Taylor,
Frank Puglia, John Zaremba,
Thomas Browne Henry, Tito Vudo,
Jan Arvan, Arthur Space
writers: Robert Creighton Williams,
Christopher Knopf and Charlotte Knight
cinematography: Irving Lippman
and Carlo Ventimiglia
music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff
special effects: Ray Harryhausen
disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
release date: December 4, 2007
retail price: $28.95 / $107.95
disc details: Region Free / dual layer BD50
video: 1080p / 1.85:1 / b/w + colorized
audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround (English)
and Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (Spanish)
subtitles: English, English SDH, Chinese,
Korean, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai
(Spanish, Portuguese for supplements)
special features: feature commentary with
Ray Harryhausen, Remembering 20 Million Miles
to Earth featurette, Tim Burton Sits Down with
Ray Harryhausen featurette, David Schecter on
Music’s Unsung Hero featurette, Interview with Joan
Taylor, image galleries, trailers (Close Encounters
of the Third Kind), The Colorization Process, BD-Live
order this disc from Amazon.com
single disc | 4-disc Ray Harryhausen Collection

Plot: A spaceship crashes in the sea off Sicily, unleashing an ever-growing specimen of Venusian life.  The creature is captured and taken to Rome, where it goes on a rampage culminating in a military battle at the famed Colosseum.

Ray Harryhausen’s third film project under the Columbia banner is another landmark in his feature film career, being his faithful producer Charles H. Schneer’s first solo effects effort (produced through his newly formed Morningside Productions) and the first for which Harryhausen himself was to be the source inspiration.  It was also the first teaming of the Harryhausen / Schneer duo with art director turned director Nathan Juran, who would direct a number of Schneer’s non-fantasy projects (Hellcats of the Navy, Good Day for a Hanging) as well as two future Harryhausen efforts (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, First Men in the Moon) and even the Harryhausen / Schneer knock-off Jack the Giant Killer.

20 Million Miles to Earth, Harryhausen’s final feature in black and white, is a minor classic of the genre, only bogged down by the unevenness of the scripting.  The tale begins with a Quatermass-style event – the crash-landing of an exploratory spaceship, most of whose crew has already succumbed to a strange disease contracted during their investigation of Venus.  The only survivor is Colonel Robert Calder (William Hopper), who makes it his mission to track down a very special part of their cargo: a specimen of Venusian life that may hold the key to surviving exposure to the planet’s lethal atmosphere (the cause of the mysterious disease, which never spreads beyond the dead crewmen).

Unfortunately for Calder, the creature has already been found by a young Sicilian boy, who wastes no time in selling it to a traveling zoologist from Rome (the show-stealing Frank Puglia) for a cowboy hat.  By the time Calder catches up to the zoologist and his soon-to-be-doctor granddaughter Marisa (Joan Taylor, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers) the beast, exponentially growing due to the composition of our atmosphere, has already escaped into the countryside.  After an unfortunate encounter between the monster and a farmer, it is captured and taken to Rome, where it continues to grow . . . and grow . . . and grow . . .  until an inevitable laboratory accident allows it to escape once more, this time into the heart of a modern city.

There’s a lot of King Kong and Mighty Joe Young in 20 Million Miles to Earth, with the ostensibly peaceful Venusian Ymir finding itself out of place and increasingly terrorized in an unfamiliar landscape.  Special note is made of the creature’s atypically non-combative disposition, and that it only becomes dangerous when provoked.  This, of course, leads the human cast to provoke it, and endlessly, prodding it with sticks, beating it with shovels, stabbing it with pitchforks, shooting it, and eventually sedating it with electrocution (!).  Any statement about the belligerence of the fearful and greedy mankind, who only want the Ymir so that they can find a way to plunder Venus of its resources, is lost in the shuffle, and by the time the maddened creature awakens in Rome the story has devolved into typical monster-on-the-loose mode.  The rampage of the Ymir in Rome, including a battle with an elephant and a military confrontation around, in, and atop the Colosseum, makes for wonderful action but is emotionally hollow, and a final contemplative line (“Why is it always, always so costly for Man to move from the present to the future?”) feels every bit as tacked on as it is.

The rest of the dramatics are relatively inert, with much of the human story eaten-up in pursuit of the Ymir – a needless romantic subplot between Hopper and Taylor leads nowhere at all.  The dialogue of the Sicilian fishermen who open the story is stunningly bad and downright demeaning at times, the characters themselves never amounting to anything more than hairy-backed simple-minded caricatures.  The professional cast does well with the material provided, with Hopper delivering his second solid monster-film performance of the year (the other from the awful The Deadly Mantis, also directed by Juran).  Taylor does her best with an underwritten role, which comes complete with a archetypal hate-him then love-him romantic arc and a fleeting moment of sympathy for the monster.  The monster itself is, effectively, the lead of the story, let down in the end by the unimaginative writing.

Direction from Nathan Juran is taught and effective, and his compositions (particularly in the mid-film barn confrontation) harken to his past-career as an art director.  This is certainly the best photographed of Harryhausen’s early effects pictures, and it’s good to see Juran working with above-par material (his other genre work at the time involved outright groaners like The Deadly Mantis and laughably ludicrous programmers like Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman and The Brain From Planet Arous).  Mischa Bakaleinikoff delivers some interesting original monster themes, though Columbia’s array of stock music cues are wearing more than a little thin by this point.  Harryhausen and Schneer would team with legendary composer Bernard Herrmann for their next two outings, leaving Columbia’s stock library in the dust for good.

While the storytelling may be problematic, Harryhausen’s effects methods had did nothing but improve with 20 Million Miles to Earth.  The film features some of his finest moments as an animator, the birth of the Ymir and the later shadowy confrontation in the barn.  One memorable moment has the Ymir cornered before the door of a cage, pushing against its door as John Zaremba (Earth vs. The Flying Saucers) tries to close him in – the illusion is seamless.  After wrangling with distinctly inhuman antagonists for two films (a giant octopus and a fleet of flying saucers respectively), the humanoid Ymir offered Harryhausen an opportunity to impart his creation with genuine emotion.  The creature is entirely sympathetic, afraid and lost in an unknown world with man’s military might steadily closing in around him.  The final moments atop the Colosseum, with the Ymir struggling for a last few moments of life, are evocative of King Kong. Even with lackluster drama dragging it down, 20 Million Miles to Earth still stands tall as one of Harryhausen’s shining accomplishments.

20 Million Miles to Earth is the most fondly remembered of Harryhausen’s black and white work at Columbia, and was the first of his films to see Blu-ray release through Sony.  The 50th Anniversary Edition premiered in December of 2007, and was later collected with It Came From Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad into the Blu-ray-exclusive Ray Harryhausen Collection (a collector’s set of the 2-disc SD DVDs is available, but excludes The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, released individually in 2008).

As with It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, Sony has included a colorized variant of 20 Million Miles to Earth as part of its special edition release.  While it has its effective moments (see the shot of the dying man in the hospital bed), the job is problematic overall.  The Ymir fares pretty poorly throughout, the colorization making the differences in contrast between foreground and background elements of the effects scenes all the more apparent.  Blips in the computerized colorization procedure are frequent (as they are on all of the colorized editions of Harryhausen’s films).  Colors often bleed outwards from where they’re intended to be (see the boy’s lower right cheek in the capture below, or Kenneth Tobey’s forehead and hairline in the night-time romantic shot from It Came From Beneath the Sea), and fade-ins are often outright ugly.  A prime example occurs at the very beginning of the picture, where the colors of the COLUMBIA logo pop in before the letters are there to support them.

Both variants of the film receive a fine 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer.  While a few moments are a tad iffy (a handful of the opening spaceship shots in particular), the transfers are fine overall.  Detail is strong throughout, and while grain is less prominent than in It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (a result of using different film stock) it’s still present and welcomed.  Damage is light and the source elements for the picture look to be in great condition for their age.  Primary audio is presented in another splendid Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track that sounds very good to these ears, though the original monophonic mix is sadly absent.  A Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic Spanish dub is included.  The feature is supported with a wide array of subtitles (see the details at the top of this article), with supplements receiving translations in Spanish and Portuguese.

The BD-Live enabled disc features a nice assortment of supplements, the main attractions of which will be the fine commentary track from Harryhausen and effects men Dennis Muren and Phil Tippet and the nice Remembering . . . featurette.  Other featurettes are repeated on the Blu-ray releases of It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers – the interview with Joan Taylor as well as the Tim Burton Sits Down With Ray Harryhausen and David Schecter On Film Music’s Unsung Hero featurettes.  The image galleries are fantastic, allowing one to see the Ymir’s many pre-film forms, though the included trailers – a Blu-ray ad and a spot for the Close Encounters of the Third Kind Ultimate Edition – are a disappointment.  There’s lots of talk about the colorized version of the film in the supplements, and that bothersome The Colorization Process advertisement, repeated on Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, makes its debut here.  All supplements appear to be 480p SD with the exception of the paltry previews.

Bland scripting can only bog a picture down so much with a Ymir about, and 20 Million Miles to Earth is still loads of fun.  This high definition package bests previous editions in the feature presentation department by a long shot, and Harryhausen’s effects still look stunning some 52 years after the fact.  I find myself highly recommending the Ray Harryhausen Collection again, though I’ve linked in to the individual Blu-ray list at the top of this article – I can’t imagine fans being truly disappointed with either.  20 Million Miles to Earth comes recommended.

order this disc from Amazon.com
single disc | 4-disc Ray Harryhausen Collection