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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2014 |
The Barrymores |
| Film Title |
THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND |
| Alternative Title 1 |
L’isola misteriosa |
| Alternative Title 2 |
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| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
USA |
| Release Date |
1929 |
| Production Co. |
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corp. |
| Director |
Lucien Hubbard |
| Format |
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Speed (fps) |
| 35mm / DCP |
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24 |
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| Footage |
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Time |
| 7078 ft. |
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78' + 9'40" |
| Archive Source |
Rl. 1-9: Národní filmový archiv, Praha; Rl. 10: La Cineteca del Friuli, Gemona |
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| Print Notes |
Rl. 1-9: 35mm, 7078 ft., 78' (24 fps), col.; did./titles: CZE; Rl. 10: DCP (da/from 16mm), 9'40" (trascritto a/transferred at 20 fps), bn/b&w, did./titles: ENG
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| Cast |
| Lionel Barrymore (André Dakkar), Jane Daly [Jacqueline Gadsden] (Sonia), Lloyd Hughes (Nikolai), Montagu Love (Falon) |
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| Other Credits |
| prod., scen: Lucien Hubbard; dal romanzo/based on the novel L’Île mystérieuse di/by Jules Verne (1874); f./ph: Percy Hilburn; scg./des: Cedric Gibbons |
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| Other Information |
| première: 25.10.1929 (Castle Theatre, Chicago) |
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| Program Notes |
The Mysterious Island was M-G-M’s immediate response to the success of The Big Parade (1925) and Ben-Hur (1925). Planned as an ambitious road-show presentation from the start, the adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic 1874 novel about castaways on a South Sea island was ap-propriated a massive initial budget of $600,000, and was to have included the latest in special effects photography. M-G-M planned for the entire production to be in Technicolor to raise it to the next level. Visionary French filmmaker Maurice Tourneur was hired in 1926 to direct the Hol-lywood studio scenes and the island location photography in Hawaii, and J.E. Williamson, who had already filmed a version of Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1916, was to be in charge of underwater photography in the Bahamas. The film was to star Lionel Barrymore as Nemo, Sally O’Neil as his daughter Nita, and Conrad Nagel as Captain Harding.
Production began in July 1926, but was soon beset by problems. Director Tourneur stormed off the set after only a week. He disagreed with producer Hunt Stromberg’s restrictive demands, and went back to Europe for good. Benjamin Christensen, the Danish director of Häxan (Witch-craft Through the Ages, 1922), was his replacement, and picked up where Tourneur left off. But he proved dissatisfied, and set about redrafting the script, causing delays and requiring some roles to be recast. Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, Williamson was to film underwater shots using his patented Photosphere technique – a glass-fronted submersible chamber large enough for a camera and operator. With trained swimming doubles he was to film sunken shipwrecks, under-water skirmishes, and fights with octopi, but the island was hit by three hurricanes in the Fall of 1926, which ravaged $150,000 worth of specialist equipment and underwater sets, and further delayed progress.
After six months of filming under Christensen, only the film’s Russian prologue had been com-pleted. Already vastly over-budget and months behind schedule, the production was shelved in early 1927, in the hope it could be salvaged later. Producer Erich Pommer and director Cecil B. DeMille were both briefly attached to revive the project, before Lucien Hubbard was assigned in 1928. Hubbard was hot from the success of producing the Academy Award-winning Wings (1927) and a series of big-budget Zane Grey Western adaptations at Paramount, including Wanderer of the Wasteland (1924) and The Vanishing American (1925).
Salvaging what had already been shot was not an easy task, as cast members previously under contract to M-G-M had since left, and in their absence large unfilmed plot holes remained. With strict budget limitations, Hubbard had to rework the existing footage into a new story incorporat-ing the remaining cast, which could be shot entirely within the confines of the studio’s Culver City lot, alleviating the risk of further natural disasters and costly location work. Hubbard’s new story dispensed with Verne’s book altogether, and instead expanded upon the Russian pro-logue, adding new characters and increasing the undersea sequences and spectacle. Lionel Barrymore became Count Dakkar, his wife played by Jacqueline Gadsden in the 1926 version became his daughter Sonia, and a new romantic lead, Nikolai, played by Lloyd Hughes, was in-troduced.
Nearly all of J.E. Williamson’s underwater footage was abandoned, and the sea floor was elabo-rately reconstructed in the studio. Hubbard added the discovery of an undersea race of aquatic creatures to the story. “The big mass scenes were done on an open stage and we rounded up all the dwarves in the country, all the midgets we could get,” remarked Hubbard. “We had a special suit made for them and swung them through the air and shot it through the cheapest window glass we could find, and that gave the impression of water.” Traveling mattes, miniatures, and close-ups of marine life were all required to increase the scope and spectacle of the underwater environ-ment.
The final production, released in September 1929, was a mix of Technicolor and tinting, with some shots in the Kelley Color spot-coloring process, as well as a hodgepodge of footage shot both silent and with sound. The color was played up in the film’s advertising, which often avoided the fact that only 80 minutes of the 96-minute running time was in color, in favor of misleadingly tagging it as “100% natural color.” Reviewers were largely impressed by the dramatic use of color, remarking how it often enhanced the science-fiction nature of the story. “Instead of the landscapes and flowers and rich costumes usually emphasized in such pictures,” remarked the Washington Post, “one sees machinery and the marvels of an inventor’s workshop dramatized in color. The flashing of red, green and white signal lights and illuminated dials; the shifting play of colored liquids in complicated glass-tubed devices; the red glare of forge fires in the great workshop where submarines are se-cretly made; the swiftly changing highlights on polished pistons and flywheels, all combine to trans-form what might have been a background into a throbbing, pulsing participant in the scene.”
The final cumulative $1.13 million budget meant that The Mysterious Island struggled to return its cost, and failed. Despite impressive worldwide rentals of $726,000, the film ultimately set M-G-M back $878,000. The excess was written off as another costly mistake. In the end, the film arrived too late to make an impact; despite the added value of color, silents were already old news.
The original color version of The Mysterious Island has generally been considered “lost.” After its initial run, the film was not seen again until the late 1960s, when M-G-M completed its preserva-tion. The film was copied from the studio’s color vault print, but in black & white. This is the version that has since been in circulation, and has been run several times on television in the United States. The color print being screened at this year’s Giornate was preserved in the 1970s by the Národní Filmový Archiv in Prague from an incomplete nitrate print with Czech intertitles. This ver-sion represents the foreign silent release, although it is essentially the same as the sound version, being drawn from the same takes. Unfortunately the 35mm Czech print is missing the final reel, which happily for this screening has been digitally sourced from a 16mm black & white copy with English intertitles from the Cineteca del Friuli. – James Layton
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