Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

Jules Verne's subterranean lark arrives from 1959 in a condition of almost perfect cultural innocence, which is to say it has nothing on its mind beyond lava, iguanas wearing prosthetic humps, and the sight of James Mason being peevish inside a volcano. The expedition assembles in Edinburgh, descends through Snæfellsjökull, and meets dimetrodons, a whirlpool at the magnetic center of the Earth, and the sunken ruins of Atlantis. Nobody pauses to interrogate power. The Icelandic guide Hans exists as a stock ethnic sidekick with a duck named Gertrud, and the film regards both with the same untroubled affection. This is less a failing of the picture than a document of its moment.

Carla Göteborg insists on joining the expedition to protect her late husband's reputation, and she handles a Ruhmkorff lamp with competence. The arc still terminates in a kiss and an implied wedding, which is where such roles have always ended. Professor Lindenbrook, meanwhile, delivers scattered exposition about volcanic rock and magnetic force whenever the plot requires a theory, then returns to barking at his companions. Knowledge here is a prop, not a lesson. The film wants to thrill us, and it has no interest in improving us.

The enterprise remains a gentleman-scholar pursuit of glory. No economic critique intrudes, no environmental conscience stirs beneath the lava, and the bodies and minds of the travelers matter only insofar as they can be drenched by a whirlpool or buried under a collapsing column. Count Saknussemm eats the duck and is crushed by stones, which constitutes the film's entire theory of justice. The cast is uniformly white and Anglo-American, the Icelandic characters rendered in the comfortable shorthand of 1950s Hollywood. A relic, then, and a pleasant one, preserved in amber for our classification.