Probably my umpteenth viewing of this film and it probably should be my last. I viewed the "making of" feature this time and learned a few things.
Apparently the original story was to going to have the balloonists crash on a "Skull Island" type of place where the characters would fight off prehistoric creatures in order to survive. Had they went down that path, The Mysterious Island would probably have ended up more like King Kong.
Harryhausen and his producer Charles H Schneer, hired a talented blacklisted director, Cy Enfield who had lots of input into the story and characters. Enfield was able to realign the story and get it back to its basic Jules Verne adventure roots.
The composer Bernard Herrmann obviously was tuned into this material. Herrmann was working with Hitchcock at the time and he would write scores like Psycho and then switch over to the Harryhausen fantasy films.
The Mysterious Island is one of the better cast and acted Harryhausen films. The characters actually seem like real people for a change instead of the usual human props for the monsters to attack.
When it came to the special effects, Ray Harryhausen was the whole show. Besides animating the monsters, he did the conceptual designs, worked on the miniatures and models and contributed to the optical and matte shots in the film.
101 minutes.
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