Introduction How a French Author Met Hollywood

From the outset of his career as a novelist in the 1860s, Jules Verne was an author who broke the rules. He not only defined a new genre, science fiction, but also appealed to a wide audience—readers of all ages around the world. Now, going on 150 years later, his novels continue to sell in all languages as well as in condensations for children and comic books.

In the 1870s, Verne’s stories became stage blockbusters, and they remain staples of the theater. By the beginning of the twentieth century, his tales emerged as mainstays of the screen. From trick films to the introduction of special effects, color, widescreen, and three-dimensional filming, and in television specials, series, and miniseries, whether live action or animation, Verne has conquered every screen form. In these pages, I discuss all of these forms, and the reader will learn how Verne films have also resonated in theme parks and video games.

Just as Verne’s writing broke the rules, so too do the screen adaptations. There is no one-to-one correspondence between a novel and a film; Verne’s stories have given rise to multiple versions, adjusted for various mediums, produced for all audiences. To understand Verne films involves not only discussing famous titles, spectacles that have triumphed over the movie screen and echo on television and video release, but also analyzing others that, although less recognized, are no less deserving of attention.

Few writers have enjoyed such enduring screen success as Verne in so many forms. In these pages, there has been no need to reach for or suggest abstract influences or tenuous links between these films and the author: they all are squarely rooted in his writing. Such films nearly always advertise their source; the phrase “based on Verne” presells a film and is a form of box office insurance no less than a big-name star. At the same time, Verne films reveal a historical development, an intertextuality, as they interact with the influences of previous versions, screen technologies, and publishers’ treatments of the author. Verne films continue to evolve today in ever more complex recognition of the fact that when we are speaking of Verne, the text of his writing essentially now includes an awareness of his screen adaptations.

If you pronounce Jules Verne’s name with the proper French lilt, outside of some academic circles you’ll receive only bewildered stares. When his works were presented in 1970 to my sixth-grade class through scholastic Book services, school chums called him “Julius” Verne; Isaac Asimov recounted how he thought the name was “Jewels Voine.”¹Close Whatever the pronunciation of Jules Verne’s name, he has long been the best-loved French author among English speakers, who have adopted him as one of their own—and screen adaptations have played a major role in public understanding of his work.

Even for those few who have not read Jules Verne (1828–1905), the author’s very name conjures a submarine traveling twenty thousand leagues under the sea, a tour against the clock around the world in eighty days, a trip from the earth to the moon, and a journey to the center of the earth. Verne’s name is synonymous with scientific progress and the challenges, glories, and disasters it has brought. More than simply an author, Verne is a phenomenon of the scientific age; in him we see both a reflection of our advances and the perils they have engendered.

Despite Verne’s adoption of a nineteenth-century romantic sensibility, his enthusiasm for the idea of “progress” was tempered from the time of his earliest stories, whether by the insanity of the Arctic explorer in Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866) or by Captain Nemo’s use of the Nautilus as a warship in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870). Verne’s publisher rejected his 1863 novel Paris in the 20th Century as too downbeat, and it was not published until some 130 years later to recognition as a pioneering dystopia. Verne introduced not only science into the novel but also the attendant social concerns, revealing technology’s effect on humankind. He never concentrated purely on gadgets or machines but rather on their effect and context, regarding science, society, and politics as intertwined.²Close He was one of the first authors to study the relationship between humanity and nature, noting his heroes’ practical dependence on the environment in a global perspective. Verne’s works are shaped by conditions around the world, and Vernian characters’ motivations are less personal than the result of political, colonial, and economic forces, such as Nemo’s battle against British imperialism or the struggle for Hungarian nationalism in Mathias Sandorf (1885).

The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century conceptions of Verne as a prophet of the future have been increasingly supplanted by recognition of his status as a literary figure. On the European continent, Verne has been revived and esteemed since the 1950s, studied from a variety of ideological and methodological viewpoints, and utilized by many of the most prominent figures in contemporary theory and criticism. Structuralists and post-structuralists as well as critics from the Marxist to the psychoanalytic schools have found the Verne canon especially amenable to their endeavors.

Growing up in the seaport hub of Nantes familiarized the young Jules with the lure of distant horizons. A contradictory influence emanated from Verne’s father, a lawyer who enforced a strict, by-the-clock life on his family, tendencies that Verne would later mock in his characterization of the human machine, Phileas Fogg, in Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Resolving the conflicting influences of rationality and imagination resulted in a duality that would form the foundation of Verne’s fiction; he found his creative métier by combining scientific background and adventurous incident through science fiction.³Close

In 1886, Verne was shot by his brother’s son, Gaston, who had become mentally unbalanced; the bullets left Verne walking with a cane, and Gaston was sent to an asylum. Yet Verne rebounded by becoming a member of the town council of his adopted city of Amiens; he concealed conflicts in his life and writing under a conventional, respectable surface, which Jean Chesneaux calls the “bourgeois facade.”⁴Close His radical, unconventional inclinations were exposed only in his fiction, Walter James Miller argues, confronting the reader with rebels and dissidents “who have rejected all shackles of society and convention,” such outcasts as Hatteras, Nemo, and Robur, “the master of the world” in the 1904 novel of that title.⁵Close Indeed, Verne’s own grandson regarded him as an undercover revolutionary with the temperament of an anarchist.⁶Close Yet only his Bohemian life in Paris while he tried to become a playwright at the end of the 1840s and the early 1850s was in any way unusual, and even that period fell along familiar, accepted lines for a struggling artist. Verne disdained Rousseau, opposed the Paris “commune,” and was antifeminist and anti-Dreyfus.

One of the most vital aspects of Verne’s novels is their underlying psychological power, with a combination of idealism, disillusionment, and a streak of misanthropy projected onto many of his characters.⁷Close These characters are often mythic types, larger than life, epitomizing tendencies, emotions, and ideologies that become their dominant traits; Verne was more interested in exploring these extremes than in creating three-dimensional human beings. His oeuvre is filled with obsessed individuals, often hostile or indifferent to the people around them and to the mores they impact, although these individuals are not simplistic “mad scientist”–style caricatures. Hatteras is attracted like a magnet to the pole; Robur to the air; Nemo to the sea; the Baltimore Gun Club to artillery that can provide travel to the moon or change Earth’s axis (as in From the Earth to the Moon, 1865; Around the Moon, 1869; Topsy-turvy, 1889); Godfrey Morgan to imitating Robinson Crusoe (The School for Robinsons, 1882); Palmyrin Rosette to his comet (Hector Servadac, 1877); Lidenbrock to the center of the earth; Fogg to speed and Fix to pursuing Fogg (Around the World in Eighty Days).⁸Close

These characters hardly seem the type to become favorites among American readers, yet they did. This popularity was in part a result of Verne’s fascination with the United States, which in the nineteenth century was still part of the new world and a nation symbolizing hope and the future. More than a third of Verne’s novels feature the nation, its citizens, or the American continent. The United States was the land of Yankee ingenuity, inventiveness, and industrialization, part of the technological wave that formed the undercurrent for his series “Extraordinary Journeys.” The prototype of such a practical American is found in the characterization of Captain Cyrus Smith in The Mysterious Island (1875). Despite the lack of tools and supplies, Smith transforms the castaways’ deserted Lincoln Island into a metaphor of the Industrial Revolution through his knowledgeable use of raw materials.

However, Verne also saw the United States as full of cranks, frauds, and schemers for whom no undertaking was too audacious or extravagant and who often were possessed by the hubris of self-destructive greed: science creates a doomed millionaire’s city in Propeller Island (1895); the nation is transfixed by the competition engendered in The Will of an Eccentric (1899); Virginia astronomers claim priority over discovering gold from outer space in The Hunt for the Meteor (1908).⁹Close New York is the location of the Barnum-type huckster who claims to have unearthed the skeleton of a 120-foot-tall prehistoric man in “The Humbug” (1910). To Verne, the United States was a center of mechanical engineering, whether the hot-air balloons of the Weldon society in Robur the Conqueror (1886) or the exploits of the Baltimore Gun Club. In proclaiming himself “master of the world,” an even more dangerous engineer, Robur, centers his exploits in North America, revealing an unexplained affinity that obliges him to exhibit his final vehicle, the Terror, nowhere else.

The sincerity of Verne’s interest in the United States is demonstrated by the fact that he had already used this country as a setting for From the Earth to the Moon and The Blockade Runners (1865) before his books were discovered in America through English-language translation. Verne made his only journey to the United States in the spring of 1867, a time when he was virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, although his books were already best sellers in France. The highlight of his trip was a visit to Niagara Falls, the memory of which proved so durable that more than two decades later he laid pivotal episodes of several subsequent novels there and recounted his journey in A Floating City (1871). Verne hoped to return someday, until advancing age and ill health finally made such a trip impossible.

English readers caught up with their French brethren during the 1870s and literally could not get enough of Verne for the next twenty-five years. His works began their regular serial and book publication, and every new story was eagerly awaited as the product of a reliably exciting and imaginative author. He was in the unusual and enviable position of writing books that appealed in their totality to adults but were still accessible to young people, and this ability to write on multiple levels was one of his outstanding talents.¹⁰Close Like his predecessor and model Edgar Allan Poe, Verne offered thrilling surfaces but also deep literary subtexts. In France, Verne’s books were awarded as school prizes, and around the world his volumes became a typical holiday gift for adolescent readers, a status they still retain.¹¹Close

His popularity may have been due in part not only to his frequent use of American settings and characters but also to his use of familiar generic traditions—historical adventure, the Robinsonade, the Poe-style fantasy—that were internationally recognized. In the first flush of enthusiasm for Verne, critics hailed his writing as a new form of entertainment. There had been no predecessor by which to judge his work, and not until the advent of H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was there a literary yardstick by which Verne could be compared.

By the late 1880s, imitators appeared in many countries who often outsold Verne’s later works. Many readers, however, did not know of the literary damage committed by the poor translations that were often rushed into publication for the mass market of the day. In rendering Verne’s French to English, translators felt free to omit or alter sections, and they mangled technical passages. Characterization and complexity were habitually diluted, distorting motivations, shifting personalities and even names and nationalities. One-fifth of the text of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas simply disappeared in the Lewis Mercier edition of 1873; two decades later such habits remained with the 1895 British publication of a Verne novel about Ireland, Foundling Mick.¹²Close

Translators even added passages that they felt Verne neglected to include. The notorious Edward Roth, who also rewrote Hector Servadac and Around the Moon, proudly announced in the preface to his version of From the Earth to the Moon that he had probably improved on the original.¹³Close More than incompetence or commercial deception was operating here. Censorship of Verne became the norm as translators routinely deleted passages judged to be potentially offensive to conservative political and religious sensibilities. For instance, in deference to nineteenth-century British imperial sensibilities, W. H. G. Kingston reversed the motivation Verne gave Captain Nemo as he explains his early life in The Mysterious Island. In the original French version, Verne has Nemo reveal that, prior to his nautical exile, he was the prince Dakkar and had absorbed the teaching of the West in order to overthrow England’s rule of his native India. In Kingston’s version, however, Dakkar went to the West to learn to better his primitive people. Even in a more pro-empire Verne story of India, The Steam House (1881), a typical footnote appears in both British and American editions when Verne’s chapter on the 1857 rebellion mentions British atrocities: “The translators beg to say that they are not responsible for any of the facts or sentiments contained in this account of the mutiny.”¹⁴Close The situation did not improve eight decades later; a 1959 edition of The Steam House simply deleted the chapter in its entirety.¹⁵Close

Political questions became the deciding factor in whether the latest Verne books would be published in English. One or more Verne titles continued to be published annually in France until 1910, but after 1898 only two of these books appeared simultaneously in English. The reason was not commercial: in England and the United States, new editions were issued of even such minor novels as Claudius Bombarnac (1892) into the 1920s. The portrayal of colonial depredations had become more embedded in Verne’s later works, and other issues emerged that Anglo-American publishers of the time were unprepared to present. For instance, The Aerial Village (1901) told of a “missing link,” an African creature more manlike than ape, and The Kip Brothers (1902) was sympathetic toward the struggle of Irish Catholics for independence from Britain.

Although Verne died at age seventy-seven in 1905, more than a century ago, a selection of his works are commonly available in even the smallest bookshops throughout the Western world. His popularity is global; UNESCO surveys consistently reveal that he is one of the most widely translated authors of all time. Today “Verne” is a name that continues to face us not only from near-permanent best sellers but also from adaptations in children’s editions, comic books, postage stamps, and, perhaps most prominently, movies and television.

Before his death, Verne had seen some of his dreams come true. The Wright Brothers had flown the first heavier-than-air machine, but perhaps just as important was the development of modern sound and motion picture technology to record and replay events, as suggested in his 1892 novel The Castle in the Carpathians. Here, Verne wrote of a baron who can listen to recordings of his love, a deceased opera singer, as well as project a ghostly, chimerical image of her.¹⁶Close Verne was probably aware even before his death that his stories were an active source of inspiration for the new medium of motion pictures; several adaptations had already appeared in France before 1905. After beginning his writing career with farces and musical comedies for the French theater, from 1874 to 1883 Verne wrote (usually in collaboration) spectacular stage versions of his novels Around the World in 80 Days (1874), The Children of Captain Grant (1878), Michael Strogoff (1880), and Keraban the Inflexible (1883). Because his publisher encouraged only science fiction with an earthbound, contemporary, and pedagogical bent, Verne also wrote an original play, Journey through the Impossible (1882), that used many characters from his novels and had them traveling from the depths of the sea to a distant planet.

Hence, spectacles that could draw huge audiences were a major part of Verne’s career, and understanding his legacy always required going beyond the printed page. Even in his own time, readers enjoyed his stories while simultaneously seeing theatrical presentations. In the twentieth century, the Vernian book and stage text would expand because of a new medium, with the accumulation of impressions gained through many screen versions. For the generation of Baby Boomers and those following them, film adaptations have been a defining element in the discovery of this author. Verne has been brought to the screen not only in the United States but also around the globe, in most of the European countries and from Mexico to Russia to Japan.

For instance, when I first encountered Verne as a ten-year-old in 1969, many movie adaptations were already showing on television, and since then such visual renderings have continued to be produced for both the large and small screen. As with so many other future Verne enthusiasts, films led to seeking his books; viewing and reading became unavoidably intertwined.

Verne on screen encompasses every form, from early movie shorts and serials to feature films, all types of television, animated and live-action, for both education and entertainment—not to mention hundreds of audio versions and radio broadcasts. A study of Verne in film is necessarily distant from the tradition of adaptation studies, which is usually ahistorical—with the typical formulation of a canonical author (from Jane Austen to Ernest Hemingway) and a given novel compared to a live-action feature.

Verne’s influence has led to more than three hundred film and television versions of his stories around the globe (and another hundred films have told of his life in documentary form or as a biographical reenactment).¹⁷Close This number of Verne adaptations is second only to screen versions of the plays of William Shakespeare or the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. No less than Shakespeare, Poe, Doyle, Dickens, and Burroughs, Verne was a major box office name; like Poe, he could rival many performers as a “star” and thus as security to finance a production. However, whereas the Doyle, Dickens, and Burroughs adaptations have centered largely around three mythic characters—Sherlock Holmes, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Tarzan, respectively—Verne’s Captain Nemo and Phileas Fogg are not the sort of titans around whom Verne films must be organized in the way required for an examination of Dickens, Doyle, or Burroughs. In Verne’s case, it has not simply been individual stories or characters that have appealed to filmmakers, but a substantial portion of his oeuvre. Nearly half of his sixty-eight novels have been brought to the screen; in the Anglophone world, some twenty different stories, along with his biography, have been adapted into approximately ninety films and television productions, Hollywood setting the tone and standard in the best-known adaptations. (I use the name “Hollywood” in its widest context, not simply for those productions filmed or shot within the city’s geographical locality, but to indicate the industry’s commercial influence in the Anglo-American world; financing of British or Australian films typically includes some American funding or distribution guarantees.) Given this formidable number of films to cover, spanning more than a century, in this book I discuss only Verne films either made or coproduced in the English language, whether live action in movies and television or animation. This is not to denigrate other nations’ Verne films; far from it—I have analyzed many of these non-English adaptations in articles and hope to continue to do so in the years to come.¹⁸Close

At the same time, it is important to concentrate specifically on those films derived from Verne—although some films do not openly credit him, and others that do acknowledge him nevertheless have little or no resemblance to his narratives. Hence, I have examined films that are either sold as based on Verne or, lacking that label, have nonetheless clearly adapted his narratives. Equally significant in my study has been the publicity surrounding these films, especially in pressbooks revealing the use of the Verne connection. By contrast, to loosely trace offshoots or the influence of Verne on cinema generally results in a spiral that quickly encompasses generic motifs and films derived from other authors’ ideas.¹⁹Close For instance, the broad range of “center of the earth” stories is virtually its own subgenre, with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar saga an equal if not greater inspiration. Some movies as disparate as Rodan (1956, imported from Japan) and Death Race 2000 (1975) have used the Verne name in advertising slogans, but their content has nothing in common with anything conceived by the writer.

In this review of more than a century of Verne on the English-language screen, I analyze each film in critical terms as well as in relation to the original work, and in discussing the first adaptation of a work, I describe the source itself. All theatrical film releases are included in the review, along with those broadcast on television and given mainstream commercial video release; I have neglected only a smattering of educational films for classroom consumption that had ephemeral distribution and miniscule viewership. The approach to each film depends in part on its importance, although in a few instances commentary is briefer because the film apparently does not survive or has been impossible to locate. To fully reflect Hollywood’s ongoing fascination with Verne as well as its peaks and valleys, I also note those occasions when a foreign production received domestic distribution, whether on the big screen or television. This has happened periodically since the beginning of Verne filmmaking, although by contrast Hollywood’s saturation of overseas markets—in the theater and on the small screen—remains unabated.

I examine Verne films that were box office hits in their time and that remain cinematic landmarks as well as others that were produced on a lower budget but are no less significant and have largely been forgotten.²⁰Close Many of these films are accessible on television, and their availability has increased on video since the late 1980s; Verne enthusiasts will be able to retrace my research path and see many of these films for themselves.

It would be possible to analyze all of these films encyclopedically or to arrange them by source, but doing so would lose crucial elements highlighted through a chronological approach that takes into account the intertwined industries of filmmaking and publishing.²¹Close A chronology also reveals the intertextuality as various versions of different stories were produced simultaneously and successively. There have been “cycles” of Verne filmmaking in both live action and animation, and through this historical approach I am able to reveal the degree to which a film of one story often impacted not only a remake but also a film of another story. Simultaneous, related currents have also run in Verne publishing; filmmaking hardly occurred in a vacuum, and numerous exchanges have been made between the visual media and the appearances of Verne books, comic books, biographies, and children’s editions. Such trends as the emergence of Verne animation and film pastiches clearly echo the developments in the print media. So, too, the more Verne titles in print, the more often filmmakers turn to a variety of stories, and the opposite trend occurs when the number of stories available to readers becomes limited.

To understand the screen incarnations of Verne works (such as Journey to the Center of the Earth [1864]) requires an understanding of versions over the years; these films look back not only at the author’s words but also at the previous adaptations. This proclivity is not limited specifically to a given story, but also to characterizations, most notably Phileas Fogg and Captain Nemo, both also frequently offered in original screen pastiches. Design elements may relate to preceding formations; for example, the screen configurations of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus sometimes emulate predecessors but also sometimes strive to distinguish themselves.

Several recurring topics appear in the analysis of these films. Do they retain Verne’s original characters with the same traits? How does the enactment impact characterization, and is the dialogue commensurate with the setting or a more modern vernacular? Are the themes the same ones that Verne addressed, or are they expanded, or are others substituted in their place? Is the ending to the story the one provided in the source, or is it modified or altered completely? What myths about the author does this alteration create? Is the period the one intended by Verne, or is it shifted to another time or updated in other ways—for instance, by adding advanced technology not foreseen by the author (such as atomic power)? How do such technical aspects as color, widescreen, special effects, and three-dimensional filming contribute to visualizing Verne’s imagination? How has the mimetic tradition of Verne filmmaking been enriched by the constant contrast and exchange with that which is more representational and experimental, especially the animated offerings?

Here then is an exploration of a specific industry’s treatment of an author over more than a hundred years. It reveals the degree to which his name provides a presold product to audiences and producers. At the same time, the fluctuating popularity of the novels impacts the making of Verne films, which in turn shapes perceptions of the author. It will become clear that fully understanding the Anglophone reception of Verne in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries requires knowing how Hollywood has brought the author to the screen. Verne and the film industry have become inseparable, and the Hollywood treatment of Verne in turn has had global ramifications and influence, shaping his reputation and the way he is read.