Twenty Tousand Leagues Under the Sea

Did you see Journey to the Center of the Earth? Wasn’t it awesome? Well, it was written by one of the very first sci-fi novelists ever, a French (but not Jewish) writer named Jules Verne. His other adventure titles include From the Earth to the Moon, Around the World in 80 Days (which was made into a Jackie Chan movie!)…

…and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A “league” is a measure of distance for water travelling, like a mile is for land. And they are under the sea for that many leagues long of a trip, not that far down. That would mean the Earth was 12 times bigger than it is! But they do go about 4 leagues down at one point, which is deep enough.

Anyway, this is the story that the name Nemo came from, as in Finding Nemo (Hey! That's one of our movies of the Month!). The original "Nemo" was Captain Nemo (the name means “no one” in Latin, by the way), who piloted a mysterious submarine he called The Nautilus, named after a real deep-diving creature that’s sort of a cross between a snail and a squid.

Captain Nemo was hiding on his strange, secret sub until it was accidentally discovered. Thinking it’s a sea monster, the government sends a crew to deal with it, including a scientist and his assistant, plus a guy who is expert at throwing a harpoon. That’s a huge spear used to hunt whales with! Ouch!

But the sub is way more advanced and quickly destroys their boat. Not really a bad guy, just a shy one, Nemo brings everyone aboard. He doesn’t like company, but he can’t let them go, because they will reveal his secret. Of course, with their ship sunk, the crew has no choice but to stay on the sub. So Nemo takes them along on his unbelievable undersea adventures.

The harpoonist is played by Kirk Douglas, one of the great Jewish tough-guy actors. Here, in one scene, he asks the scientist’s assistant to punch him, just so he can prove how tough he is. We think a guy who goes up against whales with just a sharp stick is plenty tough enough for us!

The assistant, meanwhile, is played by a very famous Jewish actor named Peter Lorre (say: LOR-ay). He was in some of the greatest movies of all time, like Casablanca, Arsenic and Old Lace, and The Maltese Falcon. He usually plays servant-type characters who slink about and say “Yes, boss,” but are secretly plotting their own devious plans, heh-heh.

From the 1930s to the ’60s, Peter was in more than 85 movies, first in Germany— his most famous one was simply called M— then in America. Some of his other classics include Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Crime and Punishment, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, Around the World in 80 Days (like we said, by Jules Verne)… and a sort-of remake of this movie, called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Peter also starred in a series of movies about a Japanese crimefighter named Mr. Moto. He was known by his lispy voice and hissing accent; the voice of the cartoon dog Ren from Ren and Stimpy is based it.

The other Jewish person involved in the movie is the director, Richard Fleischer. This was the first of a string of sci-fi and fantasy hits he had. The next was Fantastic Voyage, about a journey inside a human body in a teensy submarine! (It was remade as Innerspace and is being remade again in 2010!) Then came the original Doctor Dolittle, which was a musical, and the Charlton Heston cult classic Soylent Green. In the 1980s, he hit again with a sequel in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan series and a spin-off of it called Red Sonja.

On top of that, Richard made history movies. He directed one of the first movies about Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara (the latest one just came out in 2008) and Tora! Tora! Tora!, which was not about the Jewish Torah but the story of the Pearl Harbor attack. Richard's most Jewish movie was the Neil Diamond (who we talk about here) remake of the Al Jolson classic, The Jazz Singer, about a guy who wants to be one instead of a cantor like his dear old dad.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was made in 1954, way before the kinds of computerized special effects they have today. So it’s fun to watch it, to see what they could do with the materials and imagination they had some 50 years ago. Maybe you’ll just laugh at the effects, but maybe they will amaze and scare you anyway!

In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, we have a great Jewish action actor, a great Jewish noir actor, and a great Jewish sci-fi director all in the same boat… er, submarine! If you liked Little Mermaid, Finding Nemo, and Shark Tale, strap on scuba tank and dive in to this Disney classic, the original underwater adventure!