THE UNDERWATER CITY (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

This American production of the early sixties would make an interesting co-feature with my previous venture into maritime science fiction, F.P. 1 DOESN'T ANSWER. The 1933 film uses SF as a backdrop for a more or less adult drama, but proves somewhat dull going except for its star performer. CITY has no stellar acting chops going for it, but the plot engages better with the SF-premise, for all that the overall treatment is more of the "gosh-wow" variety.

For producer Alex Gordon, CITY might have been a shot at respectability, as most of his fifties oeuvre included low-budget, black-and-white efforts for individuals like Roger (DAY THE WORLD ENDED) Corman and Ed (BRIDE OF THE MONSTER) Wood. Unlike most of the movies Gordon wrote or produced in the fifties, this one was filmed in color. Yet for some reason Columbia released the film in the U.S. in black and white, which probably did not help the film's box office performance.

Dr. Halstead (Carl Benton Reid) gets funding to build the world's first independently functioning city on the floor of the ocean. The only engineer he apparently interviews for the job of supervising the construction is hard-headed engineer Bob Gage (William Lundigan), Bob has zero interest in the wonders of the sea or in harvesting its plenty, but he likes the gams on Halstead's niece Monica (Julie Adams), who shares her uncle's fascination with the Jacques Cousteau life.

So the city gets built, with lots of Scientific American lectures about the sea and its creatures, and though the actors can't make much of this pedestrian dialogue, Gordon (credited on imdb as a co-writer) does put across some of the intrinsic appeal of the science factoids. The plot does foreground a potential problem with the city's construction, then wisely allows the audience to forget it for a while until the inevitable crisis (city's built on a fault line) comes to pass. Halstead doesn't survive the crisis, but both Bob and Monica do, and Bob is belatedly converted to the Life Aquatic. Of course, his conversion is aided by Halstead's belated revelation that the underwater city's extra purpose is that of a bunker for surviving humans in the case of atomic war. Of course, this only makes sense if one assumes that the hypothetical atomic fallout only affects the land parts of the Earth-globe, and doesn't pollute the ocean so that its foodmaking potential would be extremely compromised. But I still give CITY a "B" for effort.