The New Pictures

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.

Ikiru (Toho; Thomas J. Brandon), made in 1952 but only recently pried out of a Tokyo film vault by an enterprising U.S. distributor, has long been acclaimed by film buffs as perhaps the finest achievement of Japan's most vigorously gifted moviemaker: Akira (Rashomon) Kurosawa. The judgment is difficult to dispute. Despite heroic defects--and partly because of them--Ikiru ("To Live") is a masterwork of burning social conscience and hard-eyed psychological realism: the step-by-step, lash-by-Iash, nail-by-nail examination of the Calvary of a common man.

An X-ray plate fills the first frame of the film. "This X ray shows the stomach of the main character in this story," the narrator calmly announces. "Symptoms of cancer can be detected. But he is still unaware of the fact." The face of the victim (Takashi Shimura) fills the screen. He is a dull-eyed, dried-up, middle-aged bureaucrat, a worn and fading rubber stamp. He goes to the hospital, learns his fate: six months to live. He is shattered. For the first time in 30 years he misses work--one. two, three days in a row. He starts to drink. "I can't die." he mumbles to a stranger he meets in a bar. "I don't know what I've been living for." The stranger replies fiercely: "Greed is considered immoral, but it isn't. Man must have the greediness to live!"

The stranger takes the hero on an all-night binge: amusement parks, dance palaces, nightclubs, whorehouses. When the night is over, the hero vomits up everything he has swallowed, everything that has happened. Next morning, on the way home, he meets a healthy, natural, vital young girl. She seems like life itself to him, everything he has missed. He pleads: "I won't be able to die unless I [can] live like you for just one day." She replies: "I only eat and work. I just make toy [bunnies]. I feel as if all the babies in Japan are my friends now." A great light breaks on the doomed man's brain; a desperate resolve shapes in his soul. In fumbling, ecstatic phrases he says what Shakespeare's Edmund said:

I pant for life: Some good I mean to do Despite of mine own nature.

The film's faults, along with its Asiatic strangeness and its painful subject, will surely scare away most U.S. moviegoers. Director Kurosawa is in such raging and relentless earnest that he labors almost every point he makes. And the film maintains its intensity at much greater length (2 hr. 20 min.) than the average spectator can be expected to tolerate. Furthermore, Actor Shimura, though at moments transcendently right and revealing, rather too continuously resembles a Japanese Jiggs who has just been beaned by the eternal rolling pin and is about to say tweet-tweet. But the minor actors are often superb. The camera work, the cutting, the use of flashback and sound track are spectacularly apt and original. And the great strength of the picture is the total seriousness and importance of what Kurosawa has to say: to live is to love; the rest is cancer.

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