For Ray Harryhausen, the '50s were stage one of his career as a special effects ace whose stop-motion-animation effects were far more important to the success of the movies he worked on than any actor or director. Harryhausen had gotten his start working for Willis O'Brien on the Kong-like ape adventure Mighty Joe Young, and afterwards had struck out on his own making pictures like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and It Came From Beneath the Sea. 20 Million Miles To Earth was Harryhausen's final statement on the monster-on-the-loose theme: a year later he redefined the fantasy film with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and thereafter focused on elaborate fantasy and mythologically-based stories, including other Sinbad adventures and Jason and the Argonauts.
Harryhausen, like O'Brien, specialized in bringing character to his foot-tall rubber animation models, and he had always been inspired by the pathos that O'Brien brought to the 1933 King Kong. There's a touch of that in the death throes of the crocodile-like Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but the octopus creature in It Came From Beneath the Sea and the spacecraft and aliens in Earth vs. The Flying Saucer offered little opportunity to generate sympathy. For 20 Million Miles to Earth, Harryhausen developed a deliberately man-like space alien which he called a Ymir (although the monster is never given a name in the film). While it sported a dinosaur-like tail and legs, the Ymir's body was manlike and its face capable of a certain amount of expression. In the film, a U.S. spacecraft returns from an exploratory trip to Venus and crashes in the ocean near the coast of Italy; one survivor of its crew (William Hopper) is rescued and a small, egg-like object washes ashore and is sold to an Italian naturalist by a streetwise young Italian boy named Pepe (Bart Braverman).
In a cool little sequence the jelly-like egg bursts open in the naturalist's trailer at night and the Ymir, which at this point is only about ten inches tall, claws its way free, blinking and shielding its eyes from the light when the naturalist enters the room. Fascinated by his discovery, the naturalist attempts to cage the animal, which is growing at a greatly accelerated rateby the next morning it is nearly the size of a man and it quickly tears its way out of the iron cage and takes a jaunt into the Italian countryside. Meanwhile, the astronaut tells the authorities that a "specimen" of life from Venus is missing from his ship, and a search for the creature begins.
20 Million Miles to Earth is nothing if not a typical '50s monster movie with all the requisite clichés: a handsome scientist hero, a love interest (Joan Taylor as the naturalist's attractive, American-accented daughter), a kindly older scientist (Frank Puglia as the naturalist, Dr. Leonardo), and plenty of gruff military men. The little Italian boy Pepe was practically resurrected as Lope in Harryhausen's The Valley of Gwangi. The acting overall is barely passable (Hopper is a particularly lifeless hero), but Harryhausen's creature holds your attention throughout: the Ymir is truly trapped in a world he never made and stalks through the picture simply trying to get a bite to eat (it supposedly thrives on sulfur), but throughout it's attacked, first by a farmer's dog then by the farmer himself, then seemingly the entire Italian military with Hopper at its head.
The early scene in the farmer's barn is a technical marvel and is probably the most frightening thing Harryhausen ever did until his creepy Medusa sequence in Clash of the Titans: after dispatching the dog, the Ymir climbs up into the rafters until it's prodded down by Hopper and a wooden pole. When the assembled military men are unable to coax the creature into a wagon the farmer unwisely jabs the Ymir with a pitchfork, after which the monster savagely mauls the man while Hopper fruitlessly attempts to get its attention by bashing at it with a two-by-four. Finally turning on Hopper the creature advances directly on the retreating camera, horrifyingly underlit in a bravura sequence of pure horror.
The Ymir is eventually captured and paralyzed with electricity, and in the confines of a zoo in Rome it grows to gargantuan size, just in time to be accidentally set loose again so it can tangle with an animated elephant (another plot device resurrected in The Valley of Gwangi). After killing the pathetic mammal the Ymir rampages into the center of Rome and hides out in the awesome confines of the Coliseum, where it is finally dispatched with a bazooka. Harryhausen's staged death scene for the creature isn't exactly King Kong, but it does make you feel bad for the guy.
20 Million Miles to Earth is part of Columbia's ongoing DVD treasury of Ray Harryhausen movies, and I only wish the studio showed half as much respect for Godzilla (with its continuing parade of crappy pan-and-scan kaiju releases including the upcoming Rodan) as it does for the stop-motion master's repertoire. 20 Million Miles to Earth has no new extras but it does feature both the lengthy and beautifully done "Ray Harryhausen Chronicles" documentary and the period short "This Is Dynamation." While 20 Million Miles to Earth was essentially a full frame movie, Sony shows a nice respect for the owners of widescreen TVs by including a 16x9 version that cuts a bit off the top and bottom but still presents the movie in an extremely crisp fashionand if you really want to watch it, there's a full-frame version as well. Harryhausen's color fantasy films are more beloved but his black and white sci fi period is still important, and this film is really the cream of the crop. Long live Ray!
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