Valley of the Dragons (Zimbalist-Roberts-Bernds Productions, Columbia, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. I cracked open the Mill Creek Entertainment boxed set of DVD’s of six science-fiction cheapies from the 1950’s released by Columbia -- though two of them were products of Japan’s Toho Studios and Columbia was only the U.S. distributor. I bought this box because I’d caught a couple of the films in it, The 27th Day and The Night the World Exploded, at one of the Golden Hill science-fiction film screenings that ran for years until the SARS-CoV-2 dictatorship intervened and suppressed them, and I’d been so taken with The 27th Day that I not only bought a used copy of the book it was based on from amazon.com, I also bought the DVD so I could share it with Charles since he’d had to work the night it was screened. So last night I ran him two other items from the box, The Night the World Exploded (about a fictional “Element 112” that expands, releases great quantities of toxic gas, and ultimately explodes and causes massive earthquakes once it’s exposed to air -- it’s usually not dangerous because in nature it’s found in water, which neutralizes it, but massive oil drilling and other energy extractions have removed the underground water protecting us from it and allowed it to do its thing, including moving the earth’s rotational axis three degrees: an odd bit of environmentalist social commentary to turn up in a 1950’s sci-fi “B” even though the best science-fiction writers of the period were working social and political themes into their stories) and Valley of the Dragons, the only movie in the box I hadn’t watched before.

Valley of the Dragons was ostensibly based on a Jules Verne novel called Career of a Comet -- it was made in 1961, after a succession of Verne movies in color and with bigger budgets and major stars: Walt Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from 1954, with James Mason and Kirk Douglas; From the Earth to the Moon, with Joseph Cotten from 1958 (made for RKO but bought by Warner Bros. after RKO went out of business following three years of corporate post-traumatic stress disorder from Howard Hughes’ seven-year ownership from 1948 to 1955); Michael Todd’s all-star Around the World in 80 Days; and Journey to the Center of the Earth, again with James Mason. Alas, Career of a Comet got filmed by an ultra-low budget unit at Columbia in black-and-white as Valley of the Dragons, directed and co-written (with Donald Zimbalist) by Edward Bernds. Bernds had started his career doing sound for the Three Stooges shorts at Columbia and ultimately got to direct them -- Leonard Maltin rates Bernds’ first Stooges short, Micro-Phonies (a radio spoof) from 1945, as their best film. But when he graduated to features he became a science-fiction specialist.

Valley of the Dragons -- a deceptive title because though the film depicts a wide variety of prehistoric fauna, there are only two brief shots of dragons (and after watching the digitally animated dragons of Game of Thrones these look pretty phony by comparison!) -- starts in the 1880’s, with stock “Middle Eastern” shots to tell us we’re in Algeria and two men, Hector Servadac (Cesare Danova, whom we’d otherwise seen only as the villain in Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas) and Michael Denning (Sean McClory, who’s supposed to be playing an Irishman but whose brogue comes and goes), are about to fight a duel over a woman they both loved. Only, just as they’ve finished taking the requisite 10 paces and are about to turn around and fire on each other, a flaming white something-or-other descends from the sky and transports them to a world where evolution never got past the cavemen and prehistoric beasts, including mastodons (which at least did co-exist with humans) and dinosaurs (which didn’t). They also find a race of prehistoric humans which the script identifies as Neanderthals -- they look like the sort of ugly mutants generated in future-set 1950’s movies by atomic radiation and I briefly expected there might be a World Without End-style explanation that they had been projected forward in time to a dystopian future in which humans had regressed to a prehistoric lifestyle -- as well as another tribe that looked more like us and to whom Our Anti-Heroes could teach English so they could communicate.

Of course the two reluctant space travelers -- since it’s eventually established that in one of its previous fly-bys of Earth that comet picked up a large chunk of earth and dumped it on the moon, including enough of earth’s atmosphere that the life forms contained in it could still survive -- each find women they can pair off with. Hector falls for Deena (Joan Staley), a blonde with impeccably perfect hair and a metal container that’s supposed to represent prehistoric ware but is obviously of modern manufacture (the anachronism of her pot bothered me more than the anachronism of her permanent, but for Charles it was the other way around), and the two get a lot of me-Tarzan you-Jane-style dialogue as he teaches her English and she teaches him Cavespeak. Denning’s cave-girl squeeze is Nateeta (Danielle de Metz, who got an “Introducing” credit -- anyone ever hear of her again?), and while the two are canoodling with their cave babes they also mediate a peace settlement between the two warring tribes after nearly getting themselves killed in the cross-fire between them. The film borrowed quite a lot of dinosaur footage from Hal Roach’s 1940 production One Million B.C. (according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, it was the last theatrically released feature to do so -- as the Roach studio fell on hard times in the 1950’s, Roach made a lot of money licensing this footage and cheap producers frequently bought it for projects that needed dinosaur footage but didn’t have big enough budgets to create any themselves) but seems to have copied its plot as well.

No special effects person is credited (though imdb.com lists Roy Seawright, the effects person on One Million, B.C., for “uncredited archive footage”) but the effects are actually reasonably convincing for the time: a far cry from what Ray Harryhausen was doing for adventure fantasies at the same studio at the same time (but then none of the footage in Valley of the Dragons seems to have used the stop-motion technique Harryhausen and his mentor, King Kong effects master Willis O’Brien, were known for and a lot of the “dinosaurs” were actually living lizards and other reptiles filmed in slow motion with spines, scales and other protuberances glued on them to make them look more “dinosaurian”). There are a few effects that look risible -- notably the giant spider that attacks the principals in one scene (with a human skeleton stuck to its web to indicate that it eats people), which is semi-convincing (albeit obviously suspended by wires) in the side shots but has a ridiculous cartoon-like head any halfway decent puppet-maker would have been too embarrassed to use. But for the most part the effects are convincing, and one shot in which a mastodon chases after the humans at fast speed stumped both Charles and I. (I suspect they took a living elephant, stuck mastodon horns on its tusks, and filmed in fast motion, but Charles wasn’t convinced and I’m not that sure that’s how they did it, either.) There’s nothing particularly wrong with Valley of the Dragons except that it’s dull -- a handful of reasonably exciting action sequences in the middle of a lot of boring exposition and a sense that we’ve seen this movie before. In one aspect I’m sure we have seen this movie before -- or at least the locations where the outdoor scenes were filmed, which I suspect were the same ones Gene Roddenberry and his scouts picked out for the original 1960’s Star Trek episodes (which often also featured primitive environments that inexplicably contained hot blonde babes with impeccable hair!).