PhilPaine.com

Giant Ice­lander Peter Ron­son, and Gertrude the Eider­duck, the real stars of Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of the Earth

I’m very fond of this absurd 1950s Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of the Jules Verne clas­sic. My broth­er tells me that my child­hood fas­ci­na­tion with pale­on­tol­ogy can be traced to being ter­ri­fied by the “dinosaurs” of the film ― small gar­den lizards with rub­ber fins glued to them, mat­ted into the film. Believe it or not, this was top-of-the-line spe­cial effects when the film was made, the only oth­er option being clay­ma­tion. Oth­er unin­ten­tion­al­ly humor­ous ele­ments of the film include the cast­ing of Pat Boone (yes, Pat Boone!) as a young geol­o­gy stu­dent spout­ing the most pathet­ic attempt at a Scot­tish accent in his­to­ry, and a scene where the adven­tur­ers reach “a place with a mag­net­ic field that snatch­es gold away, the junc­tion of the north and south mag­net­ic fields, the CENTER OF THE EARTH!”, which appears to be a whirlpool in an under­ground ocean. The con­cep­tu­al con­fu­sion in the scene tran­scends any­thing you have ever seen in any oth­er movie. Even Ed Wood had a bet­ter grasp of physics. Jules Verne’s nov­el is quaint, today, but it fit rea­son­ably well into the sci­ence of its time. Some­how, the screen­writ­ers man­aged to push the film’s sci­en­tif­ic under­stand­ing to about two thou­sand years ear­li­er than Verne.

James Mason and Arlene Dahl are the lead actors in the film. It had a big bud­get, a lush score com­posed by Bernard Her­mann, and was part­ly filmed in Carls­bad Cav­erns, though that nat­ur­al won­der appears to be filled with cheap junk jew­el­ery and papi­er maché boul­ders. Mason does a won­der­ful job of keep­ing a straight face as they encounter dinosaurs, giant mush­rooms, and the lost city of Atlantis. A vil­lain fol­lows them, played by Thay­er David, and he gets to utter one of the most won­der­ful bad lines in film his­to­ry: “I nev­er sleep… I hate those lit­tle slices of death.” But despite all that high-pow­ered hami­ness, the film is stolen by Peter Ron­son, an Ice­landic olympic ath­lete who got the part because he was the only Ice­landic-speak­ing giant, mus­cu­lar man avail­able in Hol­ly­wood. His char­ac­ter, Hans, seems to have an unhealthy pas­sion for a pet eider­duck, and the duck accom­pa­nies them to the cen­ter of the earth, meet­ing a trag­ic end when the vil­lain gets hun­gry. Hans’ remorse­less march of vengeance is the most won­der­ful part of the film. Peter Ron­son died, last year. This was his only appear­ance in a film.