Cinema: The New Pictures, Feb. 15, 1960

A Journey to the Center of the Earth (20th Century-Fox). The year is 1880. Professor Oliver Lindenbrook (James Mason) of the University of Edinburgh watches the sun rise over an extinct volcano in Iceland. What a splendid day for an outing! Whereupon the professor brushes a speck of dust from his tweeds, adjusts his rucksack and deerstalker, stamps his stout shoes, grasps his walking stick and casually strolls off—to the center of the earth. Fortunately, he is followed by a Hollywood producer (Charles Brackett) with wit enough to smile at some of the most preposterous pseudo-scientific poppycock ever published by Jules Verne. And so what might easily have been just one more merely colossal ($4,500,000) monster-movie comes off the reel as a grandly entertaining spoof of the boys' book as it was written before the comic strips took over—the sort of kids' picture that makes children gasp and parents grin.

As the hero forges onward and downward, square-jawed and indomitably prissy, his footsteps are dogged by the usual unmitigated cur (Thayer David), and loyally followed by four trite and true companions: a plucky youth (Pat Boone), a good-natured giant (Peter Ronson), a beautiful widow (Arlene Dahl) and a noble-souled duck named Gertrude. (The widow, of course, is present over the hero's most passionately prudish protests. "But madam, think!" he gasps. "The lack of privacy!")

The intrepid explorers scramble down volcanic chimneys, bathe in a grotto lined with glittering quartzes, stagger through regions of miasmal fumes and luminous algae, survive an attack by giant lizards, sail on a raft across an underground sea, get wrecked in the whirlpool that spins around the planet's axis, stumble into sunken Atlantis, and finally are sucked into a volcanic vent and blown out the top of Mount Stromboli (altitude: 3,040 ft.) into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Naturally, their clothes get somewhat rumpled in all the excitement, and after almost a year underground, the supply of bully beef in their rucksacks has run low. But everyone shows a fine, ruddy complexion—zirconburn?—and not once has anybody made an unseemly proposal to the heroine. As a matter of fact, not even the villain is very wicked. The worst thing he does on the whole trip: he eats the duck.

The sets are fun, and properly improbable. Not many of the situations in the script can be found in the book, but Scenarist Walter (Titanic) Reisch has at times improved on the master himself. Producer Brackett's dialogue has a Vernal freshness and LIFE Science Writer Lincoln (The World We Live In) Barnett, retained as a technical adviser, has shrewdly inserted his scientific facts so as not to impair the general implausibility. On the whole, the film seems sure to enhance Author Verne's reputation as the best dead writer Hollywood ever had. In the last five years three of his novels (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, From the Earth to the Moon) have been made into movies that, taken together, have grossed more than $45 million.