It Came from Beneath the Sea (Charles H. Schneer Productions, Sam Katzman Productions, Columbia, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, November 16) I watched an unexpectedly good movie on Turner Classic Movies: It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), made at Columbia Pictures by Sam Katzman’s “B” unit, produced by Charles H. Schneer, directed by Robert Gordon and written by George Worthing Yates and Harold Jacob Smith. What made this more interesting than your standard giant-monster fest from the mid-1950’s is the special-effects person, Ray Harryhausen. In his intro Ben Mankiewicz mentioned that Harryhausen as a child had seen the 1933 King Kong in its initial release and had decided then and there that that’s what he wanted to do: to use the same technique of stop-motion animation to bring monstrous creatures to cinematic life. In 1949 Harryhausen got to work as assistant to the creator of King Kong, Willis O’Brien, on the film Mighty Joe Young – O’Brien even gave him one of the original metal armatures he had used for King Kong, and Harryhausen ultimately reused it for the Cyclops in Jason and the Argonauts after he and producer Schneer (who worked together from this film in 1955 to the original Clash of the Titans in 1981) turned their attention from black-and-white monster movies with contemporary settings to color fantasies set in ancient times. Alas, the beginning of Harryhausen’s career with Schneer was marred by the same sorts of budget-driven compromises as the end; just as Schneer didn’t allow Harryhausen to depict the legendary three-headed dog Cerberus that guarded the entrance to Hades (he had to content himself with just two heads) in Clash of the Titans, in this film Schneer vetoed the giant octopus Harryhausen wanted to create as the film’s menace and said it could have only six limbs, not the regulation eight (which led Ben Mankiewicz to joke, rather lamely, that it was really a “sexapus”).

It Came from Beneath the Sea opens on board America’s first nuclear-powered submarine (it’s unnamed in the film but in real life it was called the Nautilus, after the fictional super-submarine in Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), commanded by Pete Mathews (Kenneth Tobey, who’d previously fought monsters in the Howard Hawks-Christian Nyby The Thing in 1951 and another Harryhausen creation, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, in 1953). The sub gets caught on something very far underwater, and a piece of the great whatsit lodges itself onto the sub’s stabilizer fin. When they get back to shore they realize that the fragment is radioactive, and the Navy calls in two scientists, Dr. John Carter (Donald Curtis) – coincidentally also the name of the human hero in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books – and Professor Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue). At first both Mathews and the Navy brass are uncertain, to say the least, about having a woman on the crew (and seeing this movie in the middle of reading Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman made me all too aware of the institutionalized sexism women with this level of scientific expertise had to face in the real world as well). There’s also a rather strange romantic triangle between Joyce, Mathews and Carter – it’s established that she and Carter have been sort-of dating but their interest in each other is more professional than romantic, whereas Mathews just wants to get in her pants (and her lab coats). It Came from Beneath the Sea is a pretty straightforward giant-monster tale in which it’s established that the giant octopus was artificially enlarged by hydrogen-bomb tests in the vicinity of the Mindanao Trench, the deepest ocean in the world, though there’s an oddball scene in which the writers attempt to establish that there have been similar monsters loosed on the world before (including a woodcut of a scene supposedly from the days of the Roman Empire, depicting a giant sea monster attacking a square-rigged sailing ship of a type that didn’t exist in the days of the Roman Empire).

At first the Navy doesn’t believe the monster exists – indeed, there’s a great sequence in which the survivors of a ship that was captured by the monster, and all but four members of the crew were eaten by it, are afraid to tell Professor Joyce what they know for fear they will be declared mentally ill and institutionalized – but Joyce knows enough about how to handle men that she’s able to come on to one of the sailors and get the truth out of him. Ultimately the giant octopus makes its way to San Francisco and literally attacks the Golden Gate Bridge – the scenes of the monster literally tearing apart pieces of the bridge and the Ferry Building are utterly convincing and even now evoke a “How did they do that?” reaction – before the Navy fires a super-torpedo at it and ultimately kills it. There’s an elaborate explanation of how the mechanism works (by setting off miniature harpoons that essentially make hash of the monster’s brain) and an implication that only one of these weapons exists. What makes It Came from Beneath the Sea not only worth watching but genuinely frightening even now is not only the utter credibility of Harryhausen’s effects work but the precision direction of Robert Gordon, who manages to interweave stock footage into the main narrative without the credibility-destroying lacunae all too common in cheap 1950’s films. Gordon manages to make the usual pachydermous exposition at least somewhat interesting, and the monster itself (thank you, Ray Harryhausen!) is utterly convincing as a life form. The only lapses in the effects work are the two shots of model watercraft – the fishing ship the monster attacks midway through the film and the sub, which it latches onto at the end and forces both Carter and Mathews to do deep-sea SCUBA dives (back when SCUBA gear was a major novelty!) to explode harpoons into the monster to get it to release the sub. In both sequences, the model work is way too obvious and gets in the way of an otherwise entertaining movie. One mild surprise at the end is that both Mathews and Carter live – I was expecting the writers to take out one of their male characters so they could pair off Professor Joyce with the survivor – and though 1955 audiences wouldn’t have seen it that way, to a modern viewer they look headed for thruple-dom at the end.