Now for starters, I don't want to give the impression that Pennick is in every scene and dominates the movie's 80-minute running time. His part only requires two or three scenes out of him, and he's rather unceremoniously just disappears mid-scene at one point never to return. It is a cool little bit of casting in a movie that has several several oddities. James Best has a bit part as an Army radio operator, Vera Miles and Paul Picerni apparently made appearances in a trailer at some point (I didn't spot them), and one part late in the movie couldn't help but put a smile on my face. As for the rest of the movie? Pretty good so let's do this thing.
On an expedition in the Arctic, Professor Tom Nesbitt (Swedish actor Paul Hubschmid) believes he's seen a prehistoric creature that was unleashed from the thousands of feet of ice and snow by a nuclear detonation. Everyone around him believes that Nesbitt has lost his mind and is imagining things except for Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond), the assistant of Professor Elson (Cecil Kellaway), the world's leading paleontologist. Nesbitt identifies the creature he saw in a sketch and feels even more assured what he saw was real when strange reports of a sea creature attacking ships continue to filter in. The creature looks like it is making its way down the Atlantic current along the east coast heading for New York. With help from an old friend, Army colonel Jack Evans (Kenneth Tobey), Nesbitt tries to convince anyone and everyone how much danger the city is in, but it may be too late.
From the story down to how the sci-fi flick actually looks, my first thought was that 'Beast' was a cheap American knock-off of the original Japanese flick Godzilla. Well, yeah, that one is on me. Beast was released a year before Godzilla (released in 1954). Nuclear detonations here don't create the beast, they just free him from his icy hibernation so it's not a dead on comparison, but it's similar enough. When the beast does reach New York City, the scenes are almost a blue print for the stereotypical shots of Godzilla attacking Tokyo, mass chaos in the streets, the fleeing masses screaming bloody murder as they flee. Where so many of these 1950s creature features are a guilty pleasure though, this is a genuinely good movie, thanks in great part to the special effects work of who else? Ray Harryhausen.
As I know I've mentioned in all my other reviews with Harryhausen in the crew, it's easy to brush this man's work aside. Watch a movie made with computer generated effects and all its polish and clarity, and you get spoiled. To create his animation effects, Harryhausen had to take 24 still frames for each second that was on-screen to create the appearance of movement. That's not the right way of wording it I'm quite sure, but I'm drawing a blank right now to make it clearer. So when you see the beast move through the water or run across the frozen Arctic tundra, Harryhausen had to do hours, days and even weeks of work for a few quick seconds of actual screentime. The scenes of the beast attacking NYC are pretty cool no matter how long the they took to construct, the city serving as a great background for the battle between the cops, the Army and our friendly beast from 20,000 fathoms.
Watch movies like this, and if you're like me, you are just looking for the cast and the acting to be not horrible. I don't need award-winning stuff, just serviceable and not downright embarrassing. Working off a story from sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury (I don't know how close the story stays to his story), the characters are pretty cookie-cutter, but that's not a bad thing. Credited as 'Paul Christian,' Hubschmid overcomes his sometimes heavy Swedish accent to play the intelligent professor no one believes with Raymond playing the love interest and pretty assistant, the only person who believes him. Kellaway as Dr. Elson has a cool part -- including an unintentionally funny death scene -- and Tobey is as solid as ever, playing a similar role to the one he played in The Thing from Another World. Any American or spaghetti westerns will appreciate future star Lee Van Cleef showing up as Cpl. Stone, an Army sharpshooter called in to make a ridiculous shot on the beast. He looks almost bored with the proceedings, but come on, it's Lee Van Cleef, and he's still cooler than you.
As I've watched far too many of these movies over the last month thanks to TCM's Thursday marathons, I've noticed the same trend. We have these creatures/monsters/beasts that can't be stopped so...how do we stop them? The finale doesn't disappoint providing an answer that makes some sense (I guess, I'm not really scientifically inclined) and is executed well. The beast ends up cornered at Coney Island in a roller coaster where Professor Nesbitt and Van Cleef's sharpshooter have to fire a radioactive isotope at it. I'll give the movie this, it's got an interesting use of the actual roller coaster that plays into the solution. Seriously though, this is a good sci-fi movie, and one that set the stage for many more in the 1950s.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms <---TCM clips/trailer (1953): ***/****
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