IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA

DARK PASSAGE

Saturday, July 31st 2004 at Creek Park in San Anselmo

Showtime: 8:30 pm

Sponsored by

SF Connection

Golden Gate Bridge. Embarcadero. Ferry Building. Pier 3. Market Street. Crissy Field. Fort Point. Lincoln Boulevard.

Robert Gordon 1955 Columbia Pictures Rated C for Campy

Being a Kid Moviegoer in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Saturday matinee had for me a particular resonance related specifically to The Atomic Age. Any one of us baby boomers will tell you the same thing. Our parents sent us off with our popcorn money clenched tightly in our fists; we looked forward to the latest destructo-fest. It wasn't like the older generation, the Depression kids, watching Busby Berkley musicals (“We're in the Money”) and Warner Brother gangster pix (“Top of the world, ma!”), and it's not like the succeeding generations growing up on Pokemon and Nickelodeon feature spin-offs, or films from video games like Lara Croft, Tomb Raider.

No. My generation lived through the particular schizophrenia of “atoms are going to blow us up” and “atoms are going to fuel your cars, heat your homes, and make life wonderful” - in other words, Atoms for War, and Atoms for Peace. This rush to find a positive side was a reaction to the twin shocks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which pre-dated us by a bit), the subsequent development of the Hydrogen Bomb (the power of which none of us could quite wrap our minds around), and wearing heat-resistant dog tags to school every day and hiding under our desks whenever the noon siren blasted, thinking we had minutes left to live. For me, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the climax of that time period (and the underrated film Matinee depicts that era in a great and entertaining way - perhaps we at Film Night can show it sometime), and it ended with the Great Blackout in the Northeast in November of 1965 (ten years after It Came From Beneath the Sea) - we were sure the Commies had planned and executed it, and we were all done for.

What was it, then, that made us delight in seeing all that destruction on our movie screens, when fear about this stuff reigned in our real lives? Giant ants, preying mantises, metal machines with destructive rays, crawling eyes, blobs, tidal waves, prehistoric dinosaurs returned from the muck (with questionable taste in leading ladies) - most explained by the horrors of radioactive fallout (or perhaps by falling meteorites) would wreak havoc on cities and small towns across America and we'd love it. Things haven't changed much - they've only been enhanced by Dolby sound and digital effects (and “enhanced” is debatable - I'm with director John Waters in thinking the less sophisticated the better). Is it a catharsis? Do we figure that as long as it happens in that darkened room, it won't happen in real life? Is it what Alfred Hitchcock used to describe as the roller coaster experience: you're screaming while you're on the ride, but you're laughing when you get off? It's a release.

Still, the image of the Golden Gate Bridge (and a certain amount of the rest of the Bay Area) being brought down - even by a giant octopus (or pentapus, since the producers couldn't afford the full contingent of tentacles) gives one pause as we finally pull the National Guard off of bridge security detail. We all keep watching the skies.

The world the film presents us with is safer, less ambiguous, than modern politics. Atomic fallout is responsible for bringing this creature out of the depths, and it is atoms - the technological marvel of an atomic submarine - that will be responsible for putting him in his place, or eliminating the danger completely. And on the way, a little romance among the test tubes (years before test tube babies or clones were ever dreamed of, except perhaps by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World). The film admires almost erotically the atomic submarine and pays homage to its science and its military capability (“Man's greatest weapon of the sea!” “Strong enough to absorb any blow!” “[With armaments of] greater force than the worst enemy she might encounter!”) and yet it's as easy to run “as an automatic elevator.” Man ingenuity will once again triumph over nature (or the wild nature man's folly has unleashed, anyway). Unlike in Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, there's no sense that this visitor holds man accountable for his actions.

But then there's Ray Harryhausen's special effects to enjoy, if you wait long enough. Coming off of his first feature, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (an adaptation of his friend, Ray Bradbury's, story The Fog Horn), Harryhausen moved from the destruction of New York to the destruction of San Francisco barely blinking an eye. From there he'd decimate Washington, D.C. in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) before settling into what would become his bread and butter, mythology films, starting with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1957. Harryhausen learned stop-motion creature animation at the feet of the master, Willis O'Brien, who had created King Kong, and worked by his side on Mighty Joe Young in 1949 for RKO. Harryhausen brought this hand-craft (creating small-scale creatures with movable parts and animating them a frame at a time on table-top dioramas, combining them with pre-shot location footage to create seamless effects sequences) to a high art form. Nowadays all this can be done digitally - but it's not the same. Just as some people still prefer LPs to CDs, some prefer hand-done creatures to computer-generated ones. Tim Burton, when directing Mars Attacks! was determined to go to the extra expense to have Harryhausen or someone like him create all the effects by hand. (For one thing, the film was a tribute to those bad 50s Saturday matinees.) It was only when budget considerations kicked in and Industrial Light and Magic animators convinced him they could de-sophisticate the look of the CGI models so they'd have the look and feel of Harryhausen's hand-crafted models did he reluctantly agree to go digital.

Ultimately, It Came From Beneath the Sea succeeds as all these films do, as a product of their time, a snapshot of the particular fears and triumphs of the mid-1950s. But truly, how much has changed, either in life, or in the movies? Those of us who remember that time may smile in remembrance, or shudder in recognition. We may all laugh at the dialogue, or at the cheesy special effects, happy in the knowledge that what we're seeing is, for the moment, safely up there on the screen.

-- Kenn Rabin