Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969)

Captain Nemo and the Underwater City was a 1969 British film, featuring the character Captain Nemo and inspired by some of the settings of Jules Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It was written by Pip and Jane Baker and starred Robert Ryan as Nemo.

The film was produced on a budget of 1.5 million US Dollars. It had stemmed from an idea that led to Roger Corman’s failed ‘Captain Nemo and the Floating City,’ itself based on a combination of two of Jules Verne’s stories. Though that movie never passed the planning stage, MGM producer Steven Pallos managed to re-create the project having read a series of inspirational articles about Jacques Cousteau’s experiments with deep sea habitats, and the ‘Floating ‘ part of the concept was dropped in favour of ‘Underwater.’

The film drew heavily on the supposed charm of the Victorian era, following agreement between director and scriptwriters to produce a popular escapist atmosphere, more the essence of Michael Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days than of Disney‘s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Changing fashions had rendered the film an anachronism by the time it was released in 1969, almost as though it had been intended for distribution ten years earlier, before the downbeat and socially conscious realism of the Sixties had set the new trend.

Synopsis

The film opens with a mid nineteenth century cargo liner sinking in a storm at sea, in what is presumed to be an Atlantic Gale. As the vessel begins to founder the crew muster the passengers to the lifeboats, one of which capsizes as it is launched, and its passengers are thrown out into the overwhelming seas. Swept below the waves and on the point of drowning, they are rescued by a group of divers who swim up to them to give them air and lead them to the submarine Nautilus.

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