20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

A few years ago Walt Disney decided to produce the adventure story, Treasure Island, with live actors instead of animated cartoon characters. Then a year later he released his first film on nature using live animals instead of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. Now Disney has tried to experiment again, this time by combining another favorite adventure tale for twelve year-olds with a sequence of scenes on The Living Sea. But the result is at best only mildly entertaining.

The picture's inevitable shortcoming is simply that neither one of these two different types of movies is executed successfully. The underwater shots seem almost stolen from the routine Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef rather than the superior Sea Around Us and only tend to slow down Jules Verne's famous thriller to a turtle--and sometimes snail--speed.

A quarter of stars, James Mason, Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas, and Kirk Douglas, take up most of the space in the submarine. But the actors become submerged in the Nautilus' travels and never seem to matter much in the story. Lorre, as the scientist's apprentice, is surpassed in his bid to provide comic relief by a very talented seal named Ezzy. Unhampered by dialogue, the seal, in fact, puts on the film's best performance, Colorful explosion, an occasional good scene with Mason playing the organ in his captain's quarters, and a ludicrous attack on the Nautilus by New Guinea cannibals also help brighten up this sunless picture.