Unknown World (1951)

Unknown World is a Cold War allegory about the folly of global nuclear war. It concerns a group of altruistic and dedicated scientists who go deep underground looking for a safe place to save the human race from a future atomic war. It is, we will see, a retelling of Jules Verne's classic (and vastly overrated) 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. Unfortunately, this good idea is ruined by a total lack of scientific creditability, some truly godawful acting, and laughably greasy 1950s haircuts. There are some interesting tidbits to be found in Unknown World, but overall I was very disappointed by the lethargic pacing and heavy-handed preachiness.

It was a production of the famed team of Irving Block and Jack Rabin, who had scored reasonable success with Rocketship XM in 1950. It was directed by Terrill O. Morse, who would next helm the American version of Godzilla in 1956, which is a million times better than Unknown World. Morse and his production crew try hard, and it really seems like they have an important message to tell, but the execution and polish are lacking.

It was first released in October of 1951 and I'll be using a new 2005 Brentwood DVD for this review. The film is pan-and-scan fullscreen and black and white and runs just 73 minutes. The quality of the stock is fairly rough, with frequent damage, discoloration, and even some obvious missing frames. The print that they used for the digital transfer must have been rotting in a film vault somewhere for the last 54 years and it seems that there was not much effort at digitally cleaning the print.

And now on to our show...

A group of smartyhead scientists from numerous disciplines have banded together to promote an audacious plan to save humanity from the inevitable nuclear war. They want to go into the core of the Earth, down deep enough where people could survive the horrors of the atom bomb. They have the manpower, the cool drilling machine, and the moxie to make it happen. The main problem is that they have no money. They pitch their idea to several corporate groups, but so far, no one bites on their proposal. All the above information is presented in a lengthy Citizen Kane-like fake newsreel to open our film. This is just about the only inventive directorial touch in this movie, which is sad as we still have an hour plus to go. The rest of the film is episodic and pedestrian, paced much like Block and Rabin's earlier Rocketship XM, only with a different setting.


Says it all.
The team of scientists are led by Doctor Jeremiah Morley, a geologist by trade who has some of the worst snaggle teeth I've seen on someone who wasn't either a Neanderthal or from Arkansas, truly frightening to look at. [Editor Pam: The rest of him isn't much to look at, either. Clearly he spent his career as a character actor, not a leading man.] He is played by 60-year old Victor Kilian. Our movie's most prolific actor, Kilian would appear in a whopping 127 movies over a 30-year career, though none of his roles stand out to me as especially notable (but I have strange tastes in movies). In 1951, he was blacklisted in the insane Communist witch hunts and had to go back to obscurity and stage work. He's not even credited in this movie, despite his beefy role.


Jeremiah Morley.
Just when it looks like Morley and his scientists will have to pack it up and shelve the project, an ultra-wealthy playboy son of a California media magnate named Wright Thompson steps in with an offer of full finance. The hitch is that he wants to come along on the exploration. The scientists initially balk at this, but they have little choice if they want to continue with their plan.

So, with Thompson's money they construct their fabulous drilling machine. It's about twice the size of an M-1 Abrams tank, with swoopy lines like a 1949 Ford sedan. It runs on treads with wide fenders (!) and comes complete with a full range of sensors and supplies. Its two most distinguishing features are the large pointy drill on the nose and the atomic reactor that powers the machinery. The reactor runs on "concentrated sub-atomic by-products", whatever that is. One of them describes the machine as "an amphibious conveyance based on the principles of ovoidal atmosphere". The team will subsist on food and vitamin concentrates and water from an "H2O condenser" [Editor Pam: something that condenses water from the air?, and presumably bags of Doritos and Vault soda.


The Cyclotram.
Despite the team's amazing machine, there generally seems to be a severe lack of scientific knowledge about the very planet they live on. They claim that "the latest body of theory holds that the inside of a sphere, such as the Earth, is cooler than the temperature at the surface." This, of course, is bullshit. Even, later, when they see an active volcano erupting nearby, they don't think to ask, "Gee, wonder where all that molten fiery lava is coming from?" They also assume that all the lava tubes they plan on traveling down in connect together with the "vast caverns and air pockets" that they're sure the center of the planet is made up of. They're also pretty confident that all these "natural avenues" are both wide enough for the twenty-foot high and wide Cyclotram to fit through and descend at gentle enough grades for the tracked machine to be able to negotiate. Basically, Morley and his people are convinced that the Earth is a cool, hollowed-out sphere, easily accessed by a zig-zag network of wide tunnels with flat floors, leading to huge caverns at the core where human life can be supported. Hmm...no wonder they couldn't get any funding. [Editor Pam: Yes, but if the Earth's interior was depicted the way it really is, the movie would have lasted only a few minutes.]

There will be a total of seven people on this mission, six men and one lady named Joan. They will be six scientists and the benefactor Wright Thompson. I'll try and work their biographies into the body of the review as they do something noteworthy.

I might as well do billionaire Wright Thompson here. He is played by 41-year old Bruce Kellogg, who had a short career in movies, appearing in just eleven in nine years. This was his last credited movie role and he passed away in 1967. Here he plays the arrogant rich man here to perfection, over-confident and greasy at times, and always making it clear that he put up the money for this trip so he has the right to bitch and moan all the time. I think they were trying to go for a Howard Hughes sort of character here, but on a much less grand scale. At first look, you can just tell that Joan will fall in love with him eventually. He looks a bit like a young Tommy Lee Jones.


Wright Thompson.
Since I mentioned her name, I might as well do Joan here, also. Doctor Joan Lindsay is played by 25-year old Marilyn Nash, who would only act in two movies after this one, which is kinda weird because she isn't too bad here. she's a quite attractive woman, I must say, with perky boobs accented by a 1950's push-up torpedo bra. Her hair is heavily styled and always looks wonderful despite all the physical activity she will have to do in the movie. She's both a medical doctor and a biochemist, and an "ardent feminist!". As a feminist, however, she's an abject failure, as she falls for the lameass wooing of Thompson and always seems to acquiesce to her male team members on every decision. [Editor Pam: In 1951 it was radical for a woman to be a doctor. It was okay for women to be nurses, but a woman was really getting above herself if she went to medical school. There was always the risk of "emasculating men" by such unfeminine lack of submissiveness, so society disapproved of women doctors. I suppose the movie didn't want to push the barriers of acceptable behavior for women any farther than this for fear of alienating its audience.]


Joan Lindsay.
They will be going down into the crust via the "world's oldest extinct volcano" named "Mount Neleh" in the Aleutian Island chain off Alaska. The Aleutian chain is made up of volcanoes, of course, but there's not a Mount Neleh. Neleh is Helen backwards, is that the name of someone related to one of the screenwriters perhaps? They're dropped off at the base of the mountain with the Cyclotram by the chartered merchantman Aurora. Strangely, there's no press present. With Thompson's dad being a media magnate and it being his money, you would think that this would be a perfect photo opportunity to garner public interest.


Thanks for the pointer, very helpful.
So they climb in the Cyclotram and head down into the caldera. Down and down they travel, deeper and deeper into the center of the Earth. And then they...well, hmmm...that's about it really. Just about the entire rest of the movie is just shots of the team moving down deeper into the lava tubes. A few things happen along the way, but nothing truly stunning or gripping. I was expecting some Morlocks, or some mutant slime monsters, or maybe some fifty-foot long eyeless bloodthirsty worms, anything to perk my interest. (Well, to be honest, I was really hoping for a lost colony of lesbian naked Asian girls, but I would have settled for some prehistoric throwback dinosaurs or even some sinister aliens. But what I got was a big fat nothing).

All of the scenes of them in the lava tubes were filmed in a rock quarry in the Hollywood Hills, in the famous Bronson Caverns. Some of the more impressive background plates were shot by the second unit director in Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. These supposedly natural lava tubes are awfully open and airy, with enough floor space for the large Cyclotram to traverse with little difficulty. The insert shots of the Cyclotram moving along the tubes are clearly a model inching down a rocky incline, always half-hidden by rocky outcroppings. Most annoyingly, every scene of the Cyclotram from the outside is accompanied by a foleyed in recording of a jet turbine whining at high rpms.

Inside the Cyclotram. [Editor Pam: That Cyclotram looks pretty cramped, with just chairs and no sleeping berths, and in the tradition of Star Trek, it doesn't appear to have any bathrooms. These are some dedicated scientists. They don't even have seat belts!]