Around the World Under the Sea

source: Around the World Under the Sea

Moviecut—Around the World Under the Sea

Around the World Under the Sea

Many years ago a critic wrote the following in reference to the play "Mourning Becomes Electra. I believe it applies to this film: "The play began at 8:00. Three hours later I looked at my watch, and it was 8:15."

*Spoiler/plot-1966, Around the World Under the Sea, A crew of ocean scientists are trying to find the reason the Earth is breaking apart. They go to find out the problem and meet a giant eel that attack their atomic submarine. *Special Stars- LLoyd Bridges plays the lead undersea mariner. David 'Illya Kuriakin- UNCLE' McCallum, Keenan "Great Race' Wynn and Marshal "B-film male Lead King ' Thompson play crusty scientists and sub crew members. *Theme- the ocean is still unexplored for a very good reason. *Based on- Jules Vern early sea stories. *Trivia/location/goofs- Mr Bridges has become type cast as the consummate frogman since his Sea Hunt days in the late 50's. He has done better since in comedy like Zucker Bros "Airplane'. *Emotion- A strange attempt to combine science fiction with big hit disaster movie of the times. The addition of a monster under sea eel attacking the cast is the only interesting element of this flat film of wooden actors.

Typical Ivan Tors- short on plot or scientific accuracy, long on reuse of B-roll material at different angles or magnifications. Miami Beach coast guard station is where the sub launches from for its incredible month long journey around the oceans without a support vessel.

Dr. Doug Standish (Lloyd Bridges) leads a group of scientists on the civilian research submarine Hydronaut. They circumnavigate the globe to place monitoring sensors on the ocean floor to predict earthquakes. The premise is not exciting. The movie struggles to gain any thrills. There is some unconvincing submarine work despite some good underwater work. It's sci-fi from the 50's and 60's. It's science over story. It tries to spice it up with the addition of a pretty blonde lady scientist. It's a mixed bag of futurist sci-fi and broad melodramatic story telling. This is a slow, grinding watch.

If the murky photography shown in this short subject with clips from AROUND THE WORLD UNDER THE SEA ('66) is any indication, the bad comments from others on the feature length version of the film are more than vindicated. In fact, the color photography is murky whether photographed above or below water and the narration is weak. We get a glimpse of an underwater world from a picture-making expedition that had men scouting locations from the Bahamas to Australia. I'm sure they had a more interesting time than these film clips reveal. A few brief shots of LLOYD BRIDGES, SHIRLEY EATON, KEENAN WYNN and BRIAN KELLY are all we get of the actors involved, while most of the time is spent telling us how dangerous the expedition was for combat divers and their underwater equipment, with camera crews swimming among dolphins, barracuda and even sharks. Poorly photographed, it hardly whets one's appetite for seeing the feature film.

This is a gem of disaster from the waning days of MGM. It seems there was a decision that the only way to beat the loss of ticket sales to television was to out-stupid it. With a logic straight out of "Rocky Jones" and a script from Ignoramus Inc., this film busts the audience's tolerance and drives over it. This film must have been dumped by MGM towards the end of production. Listen to the sound. All the scenes at the home base of the sub team have incredibly bad sound for a major studio release. They must have decided that it wasn't worth the cost of rehiring the actors to re-dub their voices so they left the terrible sound. The guinea pigs were so embarrassed by this film that they never acted again.

"Around the World Under the Sea" (1966) has both its admirers and its detractors. The truth, of course, lies between these two extremes. I agree, however, that there is no excuse for a shoddy print. M-G-M did not release the 70mm version in my home city, but the print I saw of the 120- minutes (sic), Panavision and Metrocolor version on first release back in 1966 was very good. I liked the cast too. I thought Lloyd Bridges had the knack of making both his heroics and clichés passably convincing. And, of course, I loved Shirley Eaton. She is one of my favorite stars. I agree that some of the other acting was not the best, and it was very disappointing to find Gary Merrill in such a small and unrewarding role. Nevertheless, Andrew Marton's direction, although typically straightforward, was pretty well on target so far as the action episodes were concerned. In all, back in '66, I thought the movie made a fair diversion for underwater-thirsty action fans.