An engaging and amusing foray into big-time adventure, Journey to the Center of the Earth is one of those happy accidents where a major studio created great entertainment with a story that begged to be cheapened or ruined. For that we can thank Walt Disney for his fairly uncompromised version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - its high standard obviously had an effect on this lavishly mounted epic. Running to pattern, the Fox producers of Earth signed up James Mason and surrounded him with a capable cast, including teen crooner Pat Boone, who is not at all bad. Best of all, the show's script has an adroit sense of humor that lets the journey be serious, while maintaining a borderline tongue-in-cheek tone. The result is a fantastic adventure with something for everyone.

When looking at Verne properties to exploit, Journey to the Center of the Earth must have seemed a risky proposition. Nobody had touched the tale since a long-lost silent Spanish version, and stories about adventures inside the planet hadn't really caught on as subject matter - except for Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher's cave experience in the 1938 Tom Sawyer, stories set inside the Earth were of the forgettable kind: Superman and the Mole Men, The Night the World Exploded. The closest show to borrowing the Verne concept was 1951's Unknown World, a serious but juvenile adventure about a machine called a cyclotram that drills its way into the Earth's mantle.  ¹

Journey to the Center of the Earth is unique in that it takes its story seriously enough to tell it straight. It's unusually long at 132 minutes, a big chunk of which involves talky preparation and competitive skullduggery on the surface. By the time we head into the crater below Scartarus, our characters are firmly established. Pat Boone is an uncomplicated fellow with a girl left behind in Edinburgh (the underused, terrific Diane Baker of Strait-Jacket and Silence of the Lambs). Peter Ronson is the climbing expert (in real life as well, a nice touch) and non-macho strongman. He's given a pet duck named Gertrud as a fob to the Disney audience.  ² Icelanders probably won't forgive the gibberish that passes for their language coming from Ronson (who is, I would guess, Scandinavian), but he provides needed balance against Boone's persistent singing and rosy-cheeked optimism ("Hi Hi! Professor!").

The final clincher, and a main reason why Journey keeps its sparkle, is the thunderous score by Bernard Herrman. Away from the picture, it's a tad repetitive, but it brings to life every facet of the journey, even when the scenery edges toward the phoney side. Journey, like Herrmann's earlier Garden of Evil, is a 'music & landscape' picture - the staccato rhythms in the Western give it the flavor of a fantasy film. Here the the music is like a dynamic dirge, sinking ever deeper, lower. In the original 4 track stereo release, and here on this superbly remixed DVD, the register of the opening chords sound lower and heavier than anything my stereo has reproduced - making one's stomach rumble like SenSurround!  ³

The other extra is a pristine original trailer, that I don't think I've seen before. It's partly narrated by James Mason, and it predictably trowels-on the association with 20,000 Leagues and Around the World in 80 Days. Mason has to read the line that gives special billing to Gertrud the duck, and the big-sell 'see' checklist fills the screen with 'huh?' names for volcanoes and underground grottoes that might intimidate the easily impressed. And yes, Arlene Dahl does stumble and let loose with a Fay Wray at two amiable-looking Dimetrodons. I just hope they didn't harm the lizards - the main concern of my kids when I showed them the film years ago. The spears may be faked, but that fiery oatmeal or whatever that served as lava, has Roast Reptile written all over it. ⁴

Footnotes:

1. From its trailer, the new release, The Core, looks like a silly rehash of this story, combined with Armageddon-style humor and plotting. The only other below-ground thriller that still appeals to Savant is 1965's Crack in the World, a doomsday story that generates several moments of genuine excitement.
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2. Not as shamelessly used for cartoony comedy as, for instance, Kirk Douglas' seal in 20,000 Leagues, the duck provides some needed relief along the trek. Gertrud is also a quite charming duck, thank you very much, and deserves a statue in the Edinburgh college yard for her supreme sacrifice.
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3. Once again, nostalgia time. Journey to the Center of the Earth was my birthday trip into Honolulu from Hickam AFB on my seventh birthday, and it knocked me out. It had big lizards! It was perhaps the first film we went to to please me, and the first one where I discovered that somewhere out there people made movies just for me ... I missed all the sci-fi pictures of the fifties, and had to discover them at a remove on TV or in revivals later. So far as I was concerned, Journey to the Center of the Earth was the best thing ever put on Earth .... I even remember the weird sound of the stereo track.
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4. Another personal note: the 'Laird of wherever', the young student who gives Mason his prize at the beginning of the movie, was played by Peter Wright, who ended up being a top commercial editor. Savant was his assistant for a few years in the early 80s. Peter had been an aspiring actor in the late 50s and hung out with the likes of Gigi Perreau, Fay Spain and Scott Marlowe (lots of wild stories there), but his red hair and freckles didn't get him cast very often - until Fox needed a young Laird, fast. It's a nice bit role. Peter's background was impressive, too - his father was a top animation director for Disney, and his grandfather was Harold Bell Wright, the Arkansas (or is it Missouri?) author of books that became popular & influential movies, like The Winning of Barbara Worth and The Shepherd of the Hills. The IMDB has Peter mixed up with another, younger Wright, I think, unless his acting career has soared of late and I didn't find out about it.
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