Rating: ★★

Jules Verne had huge success with his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). He then wrote Mysterious Island (1874) as a sequel. The book concerns five Union prisoners during the American Civil War who make an escape from Confederate custody by stealing a hot-air balloon, only to be caught in a storm and washed up on an island in the South Pacific. Thanks to incredible ingenuity (and an engineer in their midst), they are able to build most of the amenities of civilisation there. They receive mysterious aid, which in the concluding chapters is revealed to be from Captain Nemo who is in hiding on the island.

When it comes to the various film adaptations of Mysterious Island (which actually outnumber the versions made of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), the desert island adventure that Verne told seems to never be enough for filmmakers. Most films keep some of the basic elements – the US Civil War setting, the Northern prisoners escaped in a hot-air balloon, survival on the island, Captain Nemo – some more than others. What is noticeable is the number of considerably more fantastic elements that have entered into the other versions, including most commonly giant animals and insects, as well as everything from time warps to merpeople, doomsday weapons, the island being the location of Atlantis and so on.

The other film versions have included:- the silent The Mysterious Island (1929); an obscure Russian-made adaptation Mysterious Island (1941); Ray Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island (1961) with Herbert Lom as Nemo and stop-motion animated giant animals; the Spanish/French/Italian The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo (1972) with Omar Shariff as Nemo; Juan Piquer Simon’s Monster Island/Mystery of Monster Island (1981); the 22 episode tv series Mysterious Island (1995) with John Bach as Nemo; the Hallmark tv mini-series Mysterious Island (2005) with Patrick Stewart as Captain Nemo; The Mysterious Island (2012) with W. Morgan Sheppard as Captain Nemo and involving time travellers; and the children’s film Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012) with more giant fauna but no Captain Nemo.

This was a serial adaptation of Verne’s novel from Columbia, which was released in fifteen chapters. Serials were a form of film-making that has disappeared today. A serial would run to about 15-20 minutes in length and would appear before the matinee feature (usually along with a cartoon and a newsreel). Each episode would end on a cliffhanger with the hero or heroine in some form of peril or thought killed, where audiences would have to wait to the following week to find out how they survived. The serials began in 1913 and found their greatest popularity during the 1930s and 40s. The last serial was produced in 1956, around the same time that commercial television started to become widespread.

One should note at the time the serial was made there had been no major sound era treatments of either Mysterious Island or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. There had been the early sound era The Mysterious Island (1929) but that had almost nothing to do with the book. There was the Russian Mysterious Island (1941) but I have no information on whether that had received a release in the USA. Before that, you would have to go back to the silent Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1916) to get any screen treatment of Captain Nemo, but that was 35 years old at the time this serial was made. Certainly, 1951 was a mere three years before the Disney-produced 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and its definitive treatment that inspired a wave of Jules Verne adaptations on cinema screens.

The serial is an oddity in comparison to the book. The first chapter is quite faithful to the way that Verne wrote it, introducing the prisoners and their escape from Confederate captivity by hot-air balloon, becoming caught up in a storm and stranded on the island. This version even includes the dog that comes along for the journey, which none of the other film versions have seen fit to include. This version is padded with slightly more in the way of story that Verne gave it, including the addition of a preamble that depicts Cyrus Harding’s capture and imprisonment.

However, once we get to the island, the serial fairly much abandons Verne. About all that it keeps is the meeting with the other castaway Ayrton, the pirates (who do not play as big a part in the book) and the mysterious benefactor who aids the castaways throughout before in the second-to-last episode being revealed to be Captain Nemo, who aids them to escape before the island goes up in a volcanic eruption. The natives and the aliens from Mercury have been added by the film. Though we do get Captain Nemo, there is no real explanation of who he is – people regard him as somebody famous and it is expected that we just know who he is. Being made on a typical serial low-budget, this is a Nemo who comes without the Nautilus.

The book spends all its time with the characters building the rudiments of civilised amenities on the island, eventually with quite a degree of sophistication that includes smelting iron and building a telegraph. By contrast, the serial’s second chapter starts with the characters setting out to find food and shelter but subsequently spending all the time running around the island dealing with the natives, pirates and Mercurians to the extent such that the serial never actually engages in Verne’s desert island survival fantasy. Indeed, rather than build the essence of civilised amenities from scratch, the castaways find a cabin readymade and stocked with supplies of food (although this does get blown up at the end of Chapter 7), while their mysterious benefactor leaves crates of weapons for them.

Most of the time they are pursued by or involved with various schemes up against pirates and natives who wield rather absurd lightning bolt shaped spears. The most notable addition is the alien invaders led by Karen Randle, who arrive in a ship shaped like a cocktail shaker and wield bulbous guns that blows up rocks. Much of the film consists of these parties running around canyons, cliffs and open-air spaces, along with interiors in very fake-looking caves, but not much that looks very island-like. We visit the beach at the very start and in one or two other scenes where people use the boat to head out to the pirates’ ship offshore, but the rest has been shot inland in the Simi Valley, which is some thirty miles from the nearest California shoreline.

Mysterious Island came out in August of 1951. The Thing from Another World (1951) premiered in April of the same year and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) came out a month later in September, both representing the poles of Alien Invasion (or at least alien contact) cinema of the 1950s. It may well be that Mysterious Island added its aliens to take advantage of the alien monster in The Thing but I think it is more a case of two films adopting similar themes coming out around the same time. Certainly, Mysterious Island seems to be just following on from several serials of the 1940s that added alien invaders to the mix as in the likes of The Purple Monster Strikes (1945), Flying Disc Man from Mars (1951) and Radar Men from the Moon (1952), and I think this is simply an extension of that practice.

The one thing Mysterious Island does predict is 1950s cinema’s preoccupation with the Atomic Age where it is revealed that the Mercurians have come to dig for uranium to make weapons. Captain Nemo refers to this as being something “you will later call uranium,” although it is not clear how he knows about how it will be developed in the future. Uranium was discovered by Martin Klaproth in 1789 but was not identified as radioactive until 1896, 31 years after the film’s setting, while its weapons and energy potential did not start being developed until the 1930s.

Mysterious Island is rather dull. Usually in a serial, there are at least one or two memorable cliffhangers but none of those here have any distinction. One of the other great aspects of many serial was the furious often room-wrecking fights but these are rather perfunctory affairs that are all over fairly quickly.

Spencer [Gordon] Bennet (1893-1987) was a prolific director who began work in the silent era. He became known for assorted Westerns and numerous other serials. His other genre works include:- G-Men vs the Black Dragon (1943), The Masked Marvel (1943), Haunted Harbor (1944), The Tiger Woman (1944), Manhunt of Mystery Island (1945), The Purple Monster Strikes (1945), The Black Widow (1947), Brick Bradford (1947), Superman (1948), Batman and Robin (1949), Bruce Gentry (1949), Atom Man vs. Superman (1950), Captain Video (1951), Blackhawk (1952), The Lost Planet (1953), all of which are serials, plus the feature-length films Voodoo Tiger (1952), Killer Ape (1953) and The Atomic Submarine (1959).