Siren of Atlantis, a.k.a. Atlantis, the Lost Continent (Seymour Nebenzal Pictures, United Artists, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 11), after we returned home from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for a stunning organ concert by San Diego-born Chelsea Chen, my husband Charles and I ran a rather strange movie from YouTube from 1948, originally called Siren of Atlantis but reissued as Atlantis, the Lost Continent, probably to grab some of the audience away from George Pal’s big-budgeted spectacle Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961). Siren of Atlantis began life in 1919 as the second novel by French pop writer Pierre Benoit, whose father had been an officer in the French colonial army in Africa and which gave him the background for some of his tales. His first novel was called Königsmark (1918), a Ruritanian tale published in English as The Secret Spring (it was a major hit in France but flopped in the U.S. and Britain). His second novel was called L’Atlantide (“Atlantis”). Benoit drew on his childhood living in Tunisia with his military-officer father to construct a plot in which a remnant of the lost continent of Atlantis survived underground beneath a mountain range in the Sahara Desert, and was ruled by Queen Antinea (Maria Montez), who was supposedly immortal. (In the book she had already had 53 male lovers and, after she tired of each one, he was turned into a golden statue. She had niches for 120 of them, and as soon as she reached that number she would will herself to die.) One of Benoit’s trademarks as an author was that each of his books would have exactly 227 pages, and the central female character would always have a name that began with “A.” L’Atlantide was first filmed in the silent era in 1920 (though the movie wasn’t released until 1921), and in 1932 German producer Seymour Nebenzal grabbed the rights and hired director G. W. Pabst to film the first sound version. Pabst, as was common in the early talkie era, made three separate films with three different casts in German, French, and English.

Then the Nazis took power and Nebenzal fled, but he carried with him the rights to his old movies – including Fritz Lang’s M (1931), which he remade in 1952 with Joseph Losey directing and David Wayne playing the role of a psychopathic rapist and murderer of children that had been Peter Lorre’s star-making part in Lang’s version. By 1947 he was settled in Hollywood doing low-budget remakes of his German films, and when he decided to remake Siren of Atlantis he first sought out Douglas Sirk (another refugee from the Nazis, originally Detlef Sierck) to work on the script and direct it. Sirk did some writing with Rowland Leigh (who got co-credit for the screenplay with Robert Lax), but tried to talk Nebenzal out of the remake, saying he should just reissue Pabst’s version instead. In a book-length interview with British film historian Jon Halliday, Sirk recalled telling Nebenzal that he “didn't have the money to do the necessary fantastic sets. You know, Atlantis depends on inspiring people's fantasies. The old Pabst picture had great sets, but you do need money to construct a hidden city and that kind of thing. It's no good trying to shoot this sort of film on a small budget, as Nebenzal wanted – and then he wanted me to use some of the long-shot material from the old Pabst, and so on.” Nebenzal cycled through various other directors, including Arthur Ripley and yet another German refugee, John Brahm, though the final directorial credit went to the film’s editor, Gregg W. Tallas. (Tallas went on to a minor career as a director, making 11 more movies, most of them science-fiction cheapies.) At least he got competent help on both sides of the camera; the cinematographer was Karl Struss (a major name who had shot Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler satire The Great Dictator in 1940), the art director was Lionel Banks (10 years after he’d created Shangri-La for Frank Capra on Lost Horizon), the film’s attractive score was by French composer Michel Michelet, and the cast included Montez; her then-husband, French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont (who’d just got through playing Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in The Song of Scheherazade at Universal); and an outrageously miscast Dennis O’Keefe.

The film begins with Lt. André St. Avit (Aumont) being rescued in the middle of the Sahara and telling his rescuers a fantastic tale about how he, the sole surviving member of an expedition led by Captain Jean Morhange (O’Keefe, who like all the American actors cast as French people in this movie doesn’t even try for a French accent) to find a lost previous expedition led by French anthropologist Marchand. Marchand had become convinced that Atlantis had not only existed but its remnants were in the Sahara, which had been an ocean before it dried up and became a desert. Morhange, St. Avit and their company were attacked by Tuaregs, a desert tribe, and ultimately they were kidnapped and brought to Queen Antinea’s court, where St. Avit was promptly seduced by Antinea. He replaced Lindstrom (Allan Nixon) as her boy toy, and Lindstrom promptly became an alcoholic on his way to golden statuehood. Morhange tries to get St. Avit to snap out of his infatuation with Antinea and escape, despite the warnings from Antinea and her prime minister, Blades (Henry Daniell, acting his impossible role with his usual authority) that no one escapes from Atlantis and anyone who tries will be tracked down and killed. Antinea tricks St. Avit into thinking that she’s seduced Morhange – which she hasn’t – and in a fit of the usual stupid jealous rage that drives all too many movie plots, St. Avil stabs Morhange several times and ultimately kills him. Then he manages to escape Atlantis after all, and in the film’s best scenes he’s shown making his way through the desert and repeatedly being engulfed by waves of ocean – which, of course, are just mirages. Finally he’s put through a military court-martial for allegedly killing Morhange, though without any evidence to back up his claims the court-martial acquits him and sets him free. Then a Tuareg comes to the French camp bearing a love token – a piece of Atlantean jewelry Queen Antinea had given to St. Avit – and dropping it in the sand in front of St. Avit. St. Avit orders the Tuareg released and follows him into the desert in search of the lost entrance to Atlantis, collapses in the desert, and a sandstorm comes up and presumably buries him alive in the sand. The End.

Siren of Atlantis closely resembles the plot of H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), also about an immortal queen of a mysterious realm hidden from the outside world who takes a series of boy-toy lovers and is said to be immortal. In fact Benoit was accused of plagiarism at the time, though he successfully defended himself by saying he couldn’t have read Haggard’s novel because it was in English, which Benoit didn’t understand, and hadn’t yet been published in French. This 1948 film is a preposterous mixture of the moving and the silly. Given the limitations of Nebenzal’s budget, it’s surprisingly well done, with Nebenzal skilfully recycling old sets and deploying stock footage to make it look like a bigger-budgeted film than it was. As Aumont recalled, when they needed three camels they borrowed them from a local zoo – but the zoo only had one-humped dromedaries and they glued fake humps onto them with rubber cement. Though both Charles and I were looking forward to Montez’s unequal struggles with English from her Universal films like Cobra Woman (1944) – in which, playing an imperious Polynesian queen, she revealed her genuine Latina origins by punctuating her executive orders with, “I have espoken!” – her English had improved a great deal since her Universal vehicles. She actually delivered a pretty good performance in a nearly impossible role, and she’s better than both male leads. Aumont recalled having to wear shoes with three-inch lifts so he’d look taller than O’Keefe, and it’s clear neither he nor O’Keefe were able to do much to make their characters believable as Frenchmen (despite Aumont’s real-life French accent), military officers, or human beings. Siren of Atlantis is one of those middle-range movies that’s not great but not so bad it works as camp (though one wonders what the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew could have done with it), and one has to have at least a grudging respect for Nebenzal and his various directors for what they were able to accomplish on a shoestring budget.