The simple story finds Fred Miller (Tony Randall), a researcher at the Underseas [sic] Development Corp, bullied by boss T.R. Hollister (Jim Backus) into proving the worth of his costly ($200,000) underwater house by agreeing to live there with his family for 30 days. Soon enough, he packs his submarine and moves his hydrophobic wife, Viv (Janet Leigh), teenage children Tommie (Gary Tigerman) and Lorrie (Kay Cole), her boyfriend Harold (Richard Dreyfuss), and his brother Marvin (Lou Wagner) into the fantastic house, which resembles architect John Lautner's famous Chemosphere House in Los Angeles.

The family quickly settles in to life under the sea (the women do all the housework, naturally), and the teenagers, whose far-out band has a record deal pending with a music mogul (Roddy McDowall, in Nehru jacket) named Nate Ashbury (get it?), plot to smuggle out their groovy demo tape. Meanwhile, greedy Hollister, faithless in Miller's plans, dispatches another researcher, Mel Cheever (Ken Berry), to a nearby site armed with equipment designed to sift gold and other valuable minerals from the ocean floor.

Hello Down There's chief asset is the house itself, a riot of primary color and Jetsons-like gadgetry. Art director Jack T. Collis and Set Decorator Don K. Ivey are the real stars, making the house both fanciful yet believable, like an exhibit at Disneyland's Tomorrowland. Watching the film it's hard not to wonder what living in that kind of environment might be like, to wake up to dolphins chattering in the living room pool, to take the submarine out for a drive.

Before he settled into making family films, Tors was best known for his cautious and science-heavy sci-fi films and TV shows (The Magnetic Monster, TV's Science Fiction Theater). Like those projects generally were, Hello Down There is agreeably pro-science with even a soft-peddled, pro-environmental theme thrown into the mix.

The picture was made by people who knew the territory well. Jack Arnold had directed episodes of Science Fiction Theater, and had recently come off a long stretch as a producer-director on Gilligan's Island. Ricou Browning, an expert swimmer who essayed the title role in Arnold's Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), later co-wrote Flipper (1963) and directed Hello Down There's underwater scenes. The entire film was shot in and around Florida, with interiors filmed at Ivan Tors Studios in Miami.

The game cast sells the sometimes puerile material. Randall and Leigh, both of whom sadly passed away just last year, are fun to watch, he for his earnestness and unwavering belief in his house of the future, she for the obvious affection her character has for her inventor husband. (Leigh could be very funny, and didn't get enough chances in movies to be so.)

This was one of Richard Dreyfuss's first films, a picture he probably wishes he could forget. He's not bad, though, given the cliched teenager role he's been handed, complete with purple slacks and love beads. (And yes, Dreyfuss does encounter sharks in this one, too.) Viewers ought to know what they're in for during the animated credits, which bill Arnold Stang (as Berry's clumsy assistant) and Harvey Lembeck (as a too-old sailor) as "Guest Stars," but save "Special Guest Star" status for Merv Griffin, in his greatest performance since Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954).

Video & Audio

Paramount's DVD of Hello Down There is a no-frills release that gets it right where it counts, with a 16:9 anamorphic transfer preserving Clifford H. Pollard, Jr.'s 1.85:1 compositions. The image is sharp with knock-out color. The Dolby Digital mono is clean enough, and the optional (yellow) English subtitles include lyrics for the numerous songs ("Glub, Glub, Glub," "Hey, Little Goldfish") by Jeff Barry. (Dreyfuss mouths several numbers, but his singing voice, obviously someone else, sounds like John Sebastian.) There are no Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

The hostility that greeted this film by some reviewers is puzzling. Perhaps with Randall and Leigh in the cast they were expecting a more sophisticated comedy of the Doris Day-Rock Hudson variety, not a family film full of cute marine animals. But Hello Down There is good clean fun in the best sense of the word, and for its retro-camp value, of interest to those with a taste for '60s nostalgia.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.