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Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) More at IMDbPro »

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88 comments in total

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49 out of 51 people found the following comment useful :-
Science fiction epic, quite ambitious for its day, and terrifically entertaining., 3 May 2004

Author: Jonathon Dabell (barnaby.rudge@hotmail.co.uk) from Wakefield, England

Based fairly faithfully on a classic sci-fi novel by Jules Verne, Journey To The Center Of The Earth is an inventive, splendidly-realised, smartly acted film. It must have been quite an ambitious undertaking in 1959 to try to make a film set predominantly in a mysterious, unexplored underground realm populated by fantastic creatures and filled with a host of weird 'n' wonderful sights. However, the makers have done a great job in tackling this enormously challenging source material.

A Scottish scientist, Prof Oliver Lindenbrook (James Mason) discovers that a fellow scientist recently tried to find a route to the centre of the earth. Determined to venture down the same route, Lindenbrook puts together an ambitious expedition consisting of his nephew Alec (Pat Boone), widow Carla Goetaborg (Arlene Dahl), silent but loyal guide Hans (Peter Ronson), and a duck named Gertrude. The foolhardy team begin their descent among the craggy crevices of an Icelandic glacier, and as they make their way into the bowels of the earth they make many a wondrous discovery, from mammoth-sized mushrooms to fearsome prehistoric monsters.

The film is well-paced and thoroughly entertaining. On the whole, the performances are good (Boone is a little too clean-cut, as usual, but he does all right) and the special effects are excellent for their time. Bernard Herrmann provides a crashing music score, and the set design is absolutely tremendous. This is a classic sci-fi film, and any serious fan of sci-fi movies would be a fool to miss it.

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26 out of 27 people found the following comment useful :-
Grand fantasy film-making, fun for all ages., 27 August 2002

Author: haristas from USA

I can attest to the feelings expressed by the last couple commentators about 1959's "Journey To The Center Of The Earth." This is a wonderful family film from the bygone Eisenhower-era of the 1950s. Even though I've been watching it on TV since I was a kid in the sixties, I'd only seen pan&scan versions, and it wasn't until I got it letterboxed on laserdisc that I finally saw what a big-screen entertainment this movie was meant to be. It has wonderful scope and a score by Bernard Herrmann that takes you right down into the bowels of the earth. Listen to it and you'll notice what I mean, as the movie progresses the music keeps going into a lower and lower register. Five organs were used, including one meant for a Cathedral. (The complete original recordings of the score are available on CD from Varese Sarabande.) This movie also has the great James Mason in it, so you know it's got to be good. Sure it's long in the telling and takes a while to get you down that extinct volcano in Iceland, but it's fun all the way with great special effects work by L.B. Abbott and matte paintings by Emil Kosa Jr. The only way to watch this movie is in wide-screen and it's long past due that 20th Century Fox puts this out on DVD in a letterboxed anamorphic transfer. Let's hope that they do it soon.

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28 out of 32 people found the following comment useful :-
Jules Verne's vision, wonderful if somewhat flawed., 19 May 2005
Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

In this day and age when relations between France and America are not terribly cordial, one of the uniting factors in the past has been the popularity of author Jules Verne. If I had to guess I would say he was the most popular French author in the USA and has been that for some many decades now.

His books set firmly in the 19th century offered a wonderful vision of things to come that our own deep seated curiosity will lead us to find. Someone out there correct me if I'm wrong, but the very international Mr. Verne never had a French hero in any of us books. Science to him was not the property of one nation or man, but something that should benefit us all.

His characters for Journey to the Center of the Earth are from Scotland, Sweden, and Iceland. And the story begins in Scotland with Geology Professor James Mason getting a piece of unusual lava rock from student Pat Boone, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that will take them to Iceland and a passage deep into the earth's bowels.

James Mason heads a fine cast and does very well by the part of Professor Oliver Lindenbrook, geology professor and explorer. The film opens at the University of Edinburgh. I am told that even today Edinburgh has kept it's historic traditions and look. The film does capture it in it's opening sequences.

Arlene Dahl, Swedish, plays the widow of a Swedish professor who was a rival to James Mason and sought to beat him to the opening passage in Iceland. He's murdered and she has inherited all the equipment her husband has bought that James Mason needs and she blackmails him into taking her along. Of course that works out just fine for both of them.

Also along is geology student Pat Boone. Now maybe someone who was a Scot should have played Alec McCowen, but Boone was in his heyday as a teenage idol, a clean cut Elvis. That sure brought in the teenybopper trade. Boone is a pleasant singer and he sings a Robert Burns poem set to Jimmy Van Heusen's music.

Thayer David is the descendant of a Count Arne Saknussem who originally found the passage and David wants to keep it for himself. He's our villain and he follows our intrepid explorers into the earth.

Peter Ronson is our native Icelander and since he speaks no English, Arlene Dahl comes in handy as a translator. The most ridiculous part of the film is Ronson's insistence on bringing his pet goose along. I mean, really, what did he think would happen if they ran short of food?

Verne's vision of a hollow Earth with an inner sea is not exactly accepted today. But that doesn't stop from making this a most entertaining piece of cinema.

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29 out of 35 people found the following comment useful :-
Stunning from the beginning to the end, 20 January 2001
Author: Tobias Landes from Munich, Germany

This movie is one of the best examples I can think of for how one can stun the audience just by making the right use of the essence of cinema: pictures. They vary between being threatening, funny, amazing, beautiful and bizarre but all are highly imaginative. In fact, this movie is one of the most imaginative ever made, imagination being a quality that has disappeared almost completely from Hollywood over the last 40 years. It drags you into the world of its superb settings just the way for example "King Kong" did in 1933. This is just the kind of movie cinema was meant for, up from the days of its beginning (see for example "Le Voyage Dans La Lune" by Georges Méliès, 1902). "Journey To The Center Of The Earth" is pure cinema at its best.

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19 out of 22 people found the following comment useful :-
Adventure and danger at the centre of the Earth, 20 January 2005

Author: Chris Gaskin from Derby, England

This is the first and best version of this story. Journey To the Center of the Earth has been made several times since this 1959 release.

A group of four explorers consisting of Professor Lindenbrook, his nephew, a woman and an Iclantic, Hans plus his pet duck Gertrude go on an expedition to the centre of the Earth via an extinct volcano in Iceland.They encounter all sorts of dangers and sights on the way including a large boulder that nearly crushes them, a forest of giant mushrooms, the lost city of Atlantis, an underground ocean and some prehistoric monsters including Dimetrodons and a giant red lizard, which attacks the party as they are making their escape. They get back to the surface in an ancient large dish like object via a volcano! Pat Boone is thrown off course when they reach the surface and ends up in the grounds of a monastery naked and uses a sheep to cover up his private parts! This shocked the nuns of course.

The Dimetrodons are enlarged lizards with fins attached but look good. The music score by Bernard Herrmann is excellent as it is in all his movies i've seen.

The cast is excellent too and includes James Mason (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Pat Boone (who also sings), Arlene Dahl, Peter Ronson as Hans and Diane Baker.

I have seen this movie several times and is an excellent way to spend a couple of hours one afternoon or evening.

Rating: 5 stars out of 5.

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20 out of 25 people found the following comment useful :-
Great Adventure Despite Bloated Script, 14 March 2004

Author: Lechuguilla from Dallas, Texas

The great James Mason is superb as a geology professor who heads a party of five (four people and one duck) on a perilous journey into the depths of the earth. While the film's screenplay may have been a true cinematic rendering of the source novel by Jules Verne, I could have wished for a film with more subterranean adventure and less prefatory fluff.

The film's first 45 minute segment sets up the film's premise, but it takes place totally above ground, and could have been condensed to 10 or 15 minutes. There's lots of professorial bantering; a youthful Pat Boone croons his sweetheart; and he and the professor duel against adversaries in an unnecessary subplot.

But once the explorers finally get underground, the viewer is in for an absorbing cinematic experience, despite a bloated script that has the cast chattering incessantly. Cinematography and special effects effectively convey the physical surroundings as a forbidding, downward trending labyrinth characteristic of a giant cave.

The sets are elaborate and imaginative, though the "mushroom forest" is a tad too "magical"; I kept waiting for Dorothy, Toto, and the cowardly lion to drop by and say hello from the set of the Emerald City.

From start to finish the film has good acting, and there's plenty of humor. And the sound effects and grim music are terrific. The organ music, in particular, lends a strikingly Gothic touch to the nether world look of the sunken city.

Despite a too talky script, this 1959 film deserves to be watched multiple times by kids of all ages for its timeless adventure and sense of discovery.

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14 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
From the days when good writing and acting matter more than CGI, 18 January 2005
Author: ApolloBoy109 from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Though very different from the original book, none-the-less, it captivates any viewer. Well let me re-phrase that -- any viewer who is older than 30. The children who's current tastes run bloody and gory, will not understand the 'grand epic' this film was in 1959. Frankly I'm shocked that younger people have no respect for older films. Such a shame that carnage and computer special effects are more important than an unfolding story, which Journey to the Center of the Earth does so well. From Bernard Herrmann's ominous music to the B-grade dinosaurs, it's quaint and family friendly story featuring James Mason, who decidedly lends class to the project, the youthful Pat Boone, this movie should be in everyone's collection who has children.

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15 out of 17 people found the following comment useful :-
Fun family fifties fantasy flick, 13 March 2006

Author: johno-21 from United States

I first saw this on TV as a kid in the early 60's and it became a TV staple being shown on network prime time before it went to the Saturday afternoon or late night route. Even as a kid I found this highly implausible and accepted it as escapist fantasy. It's a fun movie and is truly a classic. Director Henry Levin's most ambitious assignment as a director to go up against popular Disney fantasy films of the time, capture the imagination of Jules Verne and make it palatable enough for an adult audience. The unlikely cast of dramatic veteran James Mason, singer Pat Boone, beautiful Diane Baker, sexy Arlene Dahl and Iceland born jock Peter Ronson come together surprisingly well. Veteran screenwriter Charles Brackett who wrote for the screen such classics as Sunset Boulevard, Ninotchka, The Lost Weekend, Niagra and The Bishops Wife adapts the Jules Verne novel. Nominated for three Academy Awards for Art Direction, Special Effects and Sound. This movie is probably more fun to people like me who grew up with it from the time when it was made but it's still a good movie and I've seen it many times as an adult. It would be nice to see in it's Technicolor big screen splendor. I would give it an 8.0 out of 10.

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16 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
Excellent for its day, and still fun to watch., 23 August 2004

Author: John Hurst (jhurstsca@cableone.net) from Oklahoma

I saw this one when it first came out (and I was about 9 years old) and was hugely impressed with it, though I couldn't understand why they needed to add a girl to the plot. 40 some odd years later, I am still impressed by what they achieved in the way of plot, acting, and even the special effects still look not bad, but I still don't really see why they felt the need for adding a woman to the mix.<G> But Arlene Dahl is good enough in the part that I no longer feel bothered by it. James Mason is excellent as always, Pat Boone is not, but sings nicely, and the villain is villainous, and comes to a fitting ending, though i do regret that they left out the encounter with the ocean going monsters from the tale. All in all, a very pleasant way to spend part of your day.

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11 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
A guilty pleasure, 17 June 2006
Author: lgrace from Canada

I have always loved this movie. I have it on tape and have almost worn it out. Time to look for a DVD. THe performances are top notch. Even though Pat Boone falls in and out of his accent he does a creditable job as a Scot. Looks very dashing in the Glendarroch tartan! Jenny sounds like she's from America. They needed a scene where someone explains that Jenny is Uncle Oliver's niece from Kansas.

Arlene Dahl was always a favorite in the 50s and 60s as a strong woman. James Mason is excellent as always. Loved the duck, Gertrude! When I saw this movie as a child, I wanted a duck for a pet. My mother was smart enough to refuse.

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