Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) – DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Pat Boone, James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker
screenplay by Walter Reisch and Charles Brackett
directed by Henry Levin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By any rational standards, the 1959 version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth is swill, an all-pro hackjob that marshalls a vast array of technicians and designers in the hopes that the money and effort expended will mask the total artistic void at its, um, centre. There's no sense of cinema to its mechanical vision of life beneath the surface–and yet somehow, despite Henry Levin's non-direction and the bizarre casting of James Mason alongside Pat Boone, the film works like gangbusters. Watching it is like being a kid at Christmas and getting a thoroughly useless but fun piece of plastic to play with. It won't do you any good in the long run, but as a mass-produced waste of 129 minutes, it has the steel-and-chrome charm of a bloated '50s gas-guzzler.

The film wastes no time in deploying its phoney Hollywoodisms, colour-coding its 1860s Scotland in hues both solid and bland. We're expected to believe that the esteemed scientist Oliver Lindenbrook (Mason) lives here and that he has an avid student named Alec McEwan (Boone) despite the floating accents of all involved. At any rate, the good doctor comes across a rock fragment that conceals a message from an obscure and ridiculed scientist who claimed to have found an Icelandic passage to the centre of the earth, thus proving his theory. Lindenbrook barely has time to shout "eureka" before he's put the wheels of discovery in motion, though he must best an unscrupulous explorer who has killed a rival. Armed with the latest equipment and assisted by the dead rival's wife (Arlene Dahl), they follow their predecessor's marks to the promised locale of the title.

For once, we have a movie that's all surface: while some canny Lacanian will no doubt have a psychosexual interpretation for the whole penetration of earth/womb of tunnels bit, there's no conscious symbolism going on, and it's a strangely liberating experience. You look at a big Styrofoam rock, and you realize that that's supposed to be a rock; you look at a lizard with a fin stuck to it, and that's supposed to be a prehistoric monster; you look at the red-coloured baking soda solution, and you realize that it's supposed to be molten lava. The fact that none of this is in any way convincing somehow enhances the experience: one looks at the brute artifice unmitigated by style and smiles in appreciation of its belief in itself against all odds; in a Jack Smith-Maria Montez kind of way, it has a potent effect. Though nobody is going to mistake it for art, it has a naïve potency that does something art can't do.

In a sense, Journey to the Center of the Earth is not the sort of thing you deliberately seek out on DVD: it's cultural detritus upon which a channel-surfing 10-year-old stumbles one afternoon and can't believe his luck. The film should remain an artifact that floats in space and is randomly encountered, as part of a continuum of movies indistinct from each other and perhaps savoured in distracted moments while moving furniture or painting your nails. There's something to be said for that kind of comfort cinema, whether we celebrate it openly or not.

THE DVD
Fox has pulled out all the stops for the film's DVD 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, which reproduces a sharp and meticulous restoration faithful to the lustrous colours and fine detail one expects from a CinemaScope epic such as this. The DD 4.0 track is just as superb, the subwoofer rumbling ominously during the opening credits and the dialogue ringing loud and clear–sad that far better films don't receive this kind of pampering. Extras include a fascinating restoration featurette in which the faded 1959 negative is compared to the various reissues of the film on video, LaserDisc, and the new DVD. (All I can say is vivre la format nouveau.) The film's reasonably well-preserved trailer is included, as are those for a mountain of other "Fox Flix": The Abyss, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Enemy Mine, Independence Day, One Million Years B.C., both versions of Planet of the Apes, Wing Commander, and Zardoz.

129 minutes; G; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 4.0, French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; DVD-9; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox