The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (

1955

) ½

During the early 1950s, Americans lived in constant fear of communist infiltration, espionage, and subversion. Later historians and commentators would be quick to ridicule the period and people as paranoid and ridiculous. That is, up until the Venona decodes and the opening of the Soviet archives proved all but the most ridiculous suspicions were grounded in reality. Soviet spies working in the Manhattan project were the reason the Russians built an atomic bomb in the late 1940s instead of the mid-1950s. Senator McCarthy may never have had a list of card-carrying communists in the government’s employ, but nonetheless Acheson’s State Department was riddled with communist agents and fellow travelers that routinely leaked information to Moscow and undermined American policy abroad. The fiction that America was irrationally paranoid during the 50s persists more through the combined weight of all the errors than any objective assessment of the available documents. I say all this because today’s film is very much a product of that environment, and must be understood as such. For most of the film’s runtime we will be left guess, who is loyal? Who is a traitor? Who is spying? Who is hunting spies? And who is just nosey? None of these questions are wild speculation, there really is a dangerous scientific project being conducted, and there really are foreign agents looking to steal it. And it’s important to stress that this would not be a complete fantasy for the people in the first run audience, it would be pretty dang close to real life for most of them. Unlike in real life though there is a sweet looking monster suit added into the mix.

The monster costume will unfortunately not have much screen time, but on the plus side we get to see it right in the first scene, rather than suffer through an intolerable hour of build-up before catching a glimpse of it in all its ridiculous glory. It’s quite a piece of work too. Not content to merely copy the successful suit of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues employs a ridiculously bulky Gill-man suit that makes the titular phantom look closer to a dragon or a sea serpent than any sort of biped. Crucially for our purposes though, he is considered a gill-man because he has two little dangly legs and a pair of undersized arms. Imagine the dragon costumes used in Chinese parades scaled down to fit a single person and you won’t be far off. Unlike similarly bulky monsters, the filmmakers insist of filming the creature in the water, where he cannot help but look even more ridiculous than he would lumber about on dry land. I doubt there is any stuntman living or dead who was athletic enough to make this ludicrous thing appear graceful in the water.

The monster doesn’t waste any time leaping into action, and before the title card has even been shown he capsizes a boat and kills the man piloting it. Later, both boat and pilot wash up on a nearby beach. The dead man is covered in radiation burns, and later on when he is examined with a Geiger counter, he will still be noticeably radioactive. The film cuts to a pair of designer men’s shoes cutting through the foamy surf. They belong to Physicist Ted Baxter. The scientist pauses to inspect the body and the boat, only to be interrupted by the sudden appearance of G-man William S. Grant. Grant, like most government thugs, is accustomed to throwing his weight around and treats everybody like a suspect. He wastes no time with Baxter, jumping right into the hard-ball questions; Baxter for his part dodges every question and insists he’s just a regular guy on vacation (which incidentally couldn’t be further from the truth). He even gives a false name to the G-man, not that it will be able to fool Grant for very long. In the distance, a third man: George Thomas a research assistant at the local college, watches the two men’s conversation with inordinate interest. All of these men treat the dead body on the shore as a matter of course, like they were expecting to find something like this here, leading an observant audience member to suspect that each of them knows a great deal more than they are letting on.

All three men are interested in the work of Professor King, a researcher at the Pacific Institute of Oceanography. King, for his part is acting mighty suspicious too. He locks himself away in his laboratory, not even letting the janitor in to sweep up the place (like all men, the janitor resents not being allowed to do his job, and complains about his presumed mistreatment to no end). Thomas, his former research assistant isn’t allowed anywhere near the lab anymore, though he keeps trying to bribe his way in. King’s secretary Ethel is only able to get the faintest idea about what King is up to by reading the scraps of notepaper he occasionally drops absentmindedly. Even King’s daughter Lois has no idea what the old scientist is up to, despite the fact that he used to love to discuss his work with her. Personally, I cannot think of a single academic discipline less likely to be the target of espionage and intrigue than oceanography, but a recent breakthrough in the world of the film’s science has changed all that. The same Dr. Baxter who is currently checking up on King’s research has recently been able to successfully create a Death Ray using heavy water. This was done in a laboratory, with plenty of controls and equipment but there’s no theoretical reason why the same thing could not be done in the open ocean. There’s something that Baxter didn’t publish in his paper, and that is that so much radiation flying around can easily produce a monstrous abomination. Baxter had to dispose of just one such creature when he made his own death ray. When Baxter finds the monster from the first scene swimming around off the coast, he realizes that King has successfully created an aquatic death ray.

As a monster movie, The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, is only partially successful. The creature is delightful and shows up at regular intervals, but he is only a side attraction to the film’s main appeal: The Cold War intrigue. We will spend most of the film’s runtime unsure of what anyone’s intentions are. Is Baxter’s interest in King’s work just professional scientific curiosity (as he insists it is), or is there a more sinister motivation for his visit? Is Ethel just a nosy old woman, or is she actively spying on her boss, and if so then for who? Is Thomas just bent out of shape at the fact King has kicked him out of the lab or does he have alternate motives as well? Just what does King plan to do with a death ray and a sea serpent? What really works about all this spy vs spy, cat, and mouse intrigue is that you never know who to trust. Only Grant’s motivations appear to be above board from the start, everyone else is plainly up to something. Just what that something might be could be noble or insidious, and the film is careful not to rule out too much too soon. Suffice to say, there are foreign powers (obviously Russia, though as usual for films of this vintage Russia is never named explicitly) interested in King’s death ray.

An added bit of entertainment can be derived from the film’s unfathomably (pun intended) stupid title. A league, at sea at least, the word refers to a frightful number of different measurements, is three nautical miles (3.5 regular miles or 5.6 kilometers). 10,0000 leagues is thus a depth of 35,000 miles. The deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep, is just under seven miles below sea level. Indeed, the diameter of the earth is not even 8,000 miles, meaning this creature must make his home somewhere between the earth and the moon! The title is clearly riffing on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but that title refers to the horizontal distance traveled by the submarine, not the depths to which it descends. What’s more, the creature is never even filmed at particularly low depths, maybe twenty or thirty feet tops. Personally, that an otherwise competently-made film bears such a ridiculous title only enhances my appreciation of it. I’m sure that other object, especially as it seems like I appreciate this film a lot more than most viewers, even those with a taste for 50s sci-fi.