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Synopsis:
A Mexican fishing community is rife with rumours of a mysterious
undersea figure dubbed the "Sea-Devil". One of a team of pearl
divers encounters this creature, which has silvery skin, fins, and
huge eyes. The divers rush back to their boat, where their employer,
Don Pedro Zurita (Mikhail Kozakov), berates them for their
cowardice, abusing one man and pushing him off the boat.
Unfortunately for Don Pedro, Gutierre (Anastasiya Vertinskaya), the
young girl he hopes to marry, witnesses this act of bad temper. She
turns from him in disgust. Don Pedro complains about Gutierre’s
coldness to her father, Balthazar (Georgi Tusuzov), the boat’s
captain. He then tries to kiss the girl by force, but she breaks
from him and dives into the water, swimming hurriedly away.
Watching, the horrified men see a shark in her vicinity. Don Pedro
leaps into a row-boat and goes after her. Fortunately for Gutierre,
the "Sea-Devil" has also seen the shark. He draws a knife and swims
to the rescue, just as Gutierre is attacked. He struggles with and
kills the shark, while the unconscious girl drifts slowly to the
bottom of the bay. The Sea-Devil gathers her gently into its arms
and swims with her to the surface, lifting her into the boat of the
astonished Don Pedro before vanishing. Back on the ship, Don Pedro
claims that he killed the shark and saved the girl. That night,
Balthazar tries to talk Gutierre into marrying Don Pedro, on the
grounds that he saved her life – and that he, Balthazar, is heavily
in debt to him. The harassed girl finally agrees. Later, as the
miserable Gutierre stands alone on deck, someone speaks to her. A
silvery creature is clinging to the ship’s anchor-line. The startled
girl screams, and the men come running. Don Pedro orders them to the
nets, but in superstitious terror, they refuse. Don Pedro looks out
to sea, and sees his quarry diving from a reef. The Sea-Devil swims
to an underwater cave covered by a metal grill, which moves aside as
he approaches…. A journalist, Olsen (Vladlen Davydov), visits the
cliff-top home of his friend, the world-famous scientist, Dr
Salvetor (Nikolai Simonov), questioning him about the Sea-Devil,
which Salvetor dismisses as a myth. Don Pedro and Balthazar search
the waters, finally entering an inlet at the base of the cliffs.
Balthazar goes diving, and finds the grill-covered cave which, he
tells Don Pedro, leads to land. Over lunch, Olsen and Salvetor
discuss the state of society. The scientist reveals to Olsen his own
scheme for saving mankind, taking him to his laboratory. At one end
is a huge glass wall, which holds back the sea. Salvetor calls into
a speaker, and the "Sea-Devil" appears. It takes off its strange
headgear, revealing itself as an ordinary young man. Salvetor
introduces him as Ichthyander (Vladimir Korenev), his son. He then
explains to the stunned Olsen that, as a child, the boy suffered
from a serious lung disease, which he treated by giving him a
transplant of shark gills. Sending Ichthyander away, Salvetor
reveals his plan for "an underwater republic". That night, Salvetor
scolds Ichthyander for his behaviour, telling him that he is
attracting too much attention. The boy tries to tell his father
about the beautiful girl whose life he saved, but Salvetor brusquely
changes the subject, ordering his son to bed. When Ichthyander asks
to sleep in the sea, his father warns him that too much time
underwater will destroy his lungs. Unable to stop thinking about
Gutierre, Ichthyander defies his father, heading not just for land,
but into the heart of the city….
Comments:
Sometime in the past – and there must have been a precise moment,
although I’m yet to pinpoint it – science fiction screenwriters
became self-conscious. Oh, sure, they were still willing to churn
out crappy, derivative films, with cardboard cutout characters and
denouements you could see coming eighty-nine minutes and thirty
seconds before the end credits. But nevertheless, all of a sudden,
something was missing. And that "something", to my endless regret,
was Truly Pointless Science. You know the kind I mean. The kind that
flourished from the thirties through the fifties; the kind that
turned grown scientists into drivelling, wild-eyed obsessives; the
kind that inevitably provoked an incredulous gasp of, "Why – you’re
insane!"
from the individual privileged enough to have The Big Picture
explained to them. (Their next line was almost always, "I’m calling
the police!" Unsurprisingly, it was also almost always their last
line.) For several glorious decades, movie scientists were happy to
toil away on bat re-bigulators, tissue enphosphorators, animal
humanifiers and romantic triangle disentangulators; until one day,
some interfering little creep (probably the same one who pointed out
the design flaw in the Emperor’s snazzy new outfit) felt compelled
to ask, "Yes, but what’s the point?"
And then it all stopped. Movie Science had its feelings hurt. And it
reacted by becoming sensible. And, all too often, let’s face it -
dull. So, although a large part of me yearns to see science depicted
accurately on the screen, there’s
another part of me – small, but
surprisingly vocal – that mourns for the days of Seriously Silly
Science. This is why a film like Bats – otherwise,
a depressingly predictable little effort – can send me into a swoon
of giddy delight, by producing a Mad Scientist who, when someone has
the temerity to question
his plan for creating giant, omnivorous, killer
Chiroptera, simply
raises his eyebrows in a puzzled way and says, "I’m a scientist.
That’s what we do." And – to cut an extremely long and digressive
introduction short – it’s why one (only
one) of my responses to Amphibian Man
is a fit of helpless, joyful giggling,
brought on by "world-famous scientist" Dr Salvetor’s plan to rescue
humanity from itself by – giving everyone in the world a transplant
of shark gills and making them live underwater. As the
understandably gob-smacked Olsen listens in stunned silence,
Salvetor goes all starry-eyed, dreaming of "an underwater republic",
where there are "no rich and no poor", where mankind will be "freed
from oppression" and able to "pursue happiness". And to make all of
this happen, all that everyone has to do is….is….
[Uhhh….nnnno….must….fight….urge
to….quote Simpsons….uhhuhhh….nnnno….impulse….too
strong----]
Homer:
Under the sea, under the sea/There’ll be no accusations/Just
friendly crustaceans/Under the sea!!
Marge:
Oh, Homer, that’s your answer to everything! To move under the
sea! It’s not
gunna happen!
Homer:
Not with that
attitude.
Which,
to this viewer’s infinite amusement, is pretty much how the
discussion of this, uh, revolutionary scheme goes in
Amphibian Man, too. Rather than take exception to the
scheme on the most obvious level, i.e. it is utterly freaking
ludicrous,
political agitator Olsen takes the higher ground, arguing that
wherever you have mankind, you will have mankind’s problems, and
conflicts, and attitudes. Olsen does express his admiration for
Salvetor’s "miraculous hands" (I’ll
say! We never do get to see the results of Salvetor’s handiwork, by
the way: Ichthyander spends the whole film with either his collar
turned up, or sporting one of a huge collection of snazzy cravats),
but fails to follow the thought through to its logical conclusion –
just who is
going to perform surgery on the entire
human race!? (And there’s another
fundamental objection that no-one in the film bothers to make, so it
looks like I’ll have to do it myself: what about a little compassion
all the poor sharks??)
The two men are interrupted at this point in their discussion, but
you feel that had the conversation gone further, Salvetor would have
ended up agreeing with Olsen, although not in a good way. Even by
the standards of movie scientists, Salvetor is, uh, one odd fish.
When Don Pedro and Balthazar pursue their "Sea-Devil" to the base of
the cliffs, Don Pedro asks who lives in the house perched on their
summit. "God," replies Balthazar simply, going on to explain that
the man who lives there "heals the lame and the blind". Olsen, too,
praises Salvetor for his work in "finding cures" (unspecified), and
generally the man is lauded as a benefactor of mankind. Yet clearly,
it is not love of mankind that drives him. On the contrary.
Questioned by Olsen, Salvetor says only of his work, "I am a
scientist. It is my duty." But there is more to it than that. There
is a distinct sense that Salvetor, too, has come to see himself as
"God", loftily dispensing favours to the swarming masses with whom
he nevertheless refuses to have any personal contact. Clearly, such
arrogance and egocentricity can only end in disaster; and sadly,
inevitably, it is not Salvetor himself upon whom his sins are
visited, but poor Ichthyander. While we may forgive Salvetor
experimenting upon his own child in order to save that child’s life,
what follows puts the scientist beyond the pale. (Assuming, that is,
that he wasn’t already there. We are given no reason at all to think
that Salvetor’s son didn’t always
bear his piscine moniker. If the poor little bugger ever had to
attend public school carrying a handle like that, he was probably
thrilled to bits when his father broke it to him that in the future,
he’d be living under the sea, under the sea. Well – at least up
until he laid eyes on what his father expected him to
wear: a body-suit
of silver sequins accessorised with silver flippers, fake fins, a
pointy head-piece, and large bug-like goggles. [We never get an
explanation for this,
either.] All in all, he looks remarkably like a camp version of the
creature in War Gods Of The Deep.) Not content with
cutting himself off from humanity, Salvetor forces his isolationist
views upon his son as well, denying him all human contact, and
angrily berating him for "being too conspicuous" when tales of the
"Sea-Devil" make their way into the newspapers. (It doesn’t seem to
occur to him that his son would be a lot
less conspicuous
dressed in something other than body-hugging sequins.) But, as
Salvetor has to learn the hard way, you can’t fight human nature.
Already chafing at the restrictions of his life, and desperately
lonely, Ichthyander’s rescue of Gutierre triggers a rebellion on the
boy’s part, and sets in motion a chain of events that throws the
lives of all of the film’s characters into chaos – and in some
cases, tragedy.
And
this brings us to the point at which, in truth, this review
ought to have
begun. My rantings and ramblings on movie science and gill
transplants and the like have probably given those reading an
entirely false mental image of Amphibian Man. The
mad science is there,
all right, and perhaps inevitably, it’s what I remember most vividly
between viewings; but it’s not really what this film is all about.
Simply put, Amphibian Man is a love story; and one
played out with such straightfaced sincerity and conviction that it
rises above its more risible aspects, and becomes a perfectly
charming fairytale – Beauty And The Beast meets
The Creature From The Black Lagoon. (And of course,
in such a framework, Ichthyander’s gills become much easier to
accept.) In the very best fairytale tradition, Ichthyander no sooner
lays eyes on Gutierre than he falls irrevocably in love with her.
His attempt to confide in his father brusquely curtailed,
Ichthyander decides to take matters into his own hands, venturing
into the depths of a frightening foreign land: The City. As he
searches, innocently expecting every woman he meets to
be Gutierre,
Ichthyander undergoes a string of adventures, some comic, some
terrifying; and in the end, he succeeds in finding the object of his
desire standing outside her father’s small shop, talking to Olsen –
who is, by the bye, also unavailingly in love with her. Evading his
father’s friend, Ichthyander follows Gutierre into the shop, and
without loss of time declares his love for her. Half-charmed,
half-frightened by this ardent stranger, Gutierre tries to deflect
his declaration by turning it off as a joke. "This must be love at
first sight!" she replies laughingly. "Is there any other kind of
love?" responds Ichthyander simply, and
bam!! – Gutierre’s a goner as well. (It
does not – and could
not, of course – compete with "I came across time for you, Sarah",
but as science fiction "lines" go, that ain’t a bad effort.) Don
Pedro – whom Gutierre has been bullied and guilted into accepting –
chooses this of all moments to enter the scene, and understandably
doesn’t care for what he sees. The two men clash, with Don Pedro
calling in the law. Ichthyander evades this initial pursuit,
courtesy of a convenient street-cleaning truck, but the damage has
been done – on all counts. Amphibian Man then
devotes some time simply to watching its two young people as they
come to terms with their feelings for one another. The solitary
Ichthyander indulges a fantasy of Gutierre living with him under the
sea, under the sea. This is one of the film’s most beautifully shot
sequences (among many), and also contains an intriguing touch of
reality: although dressed in a matching sequined body-suit, the
fantasy Gutierre still swims by kicking her legs, like a "normal"
person, while Ichthyander moves through the water by undulating his
body, dolphin-like – the boy’s involuntary admission of the gulf
between himself and his love, perhaps. Gutierre, meanwhile, is
confident enough to make a public declaration of her love, meeting
with Ichthyander at the local fiesta, and dancing for him before an
admiring crowd. But Don Pedro and the local police – and
consequently, disaster – are hot upon the heels of the young couple,
and a further confrontation ends in Ichthyander’s apparent death.
The distraught Gutierre gives up her struggle for freedom and
marries Don Pedro – only to discover too late that Ichthyander has
survived his seemingly fatal plunge from the cliffs outside the
town.
One of
the pleasures of Amphibian Man is its ability to
catch the viewer off-guard. It certainly does so here when, having
spent the first half of its running time setting the distinctly
Mephistophelian Don Pedro up as Irredeemably Evil (he doesn’t finish
each sentence he speaks with "Mwoo-ha-ha!", but he might as well),
it then decides to cut him some slack. The impression left by the
film’s early sequences is that the main reason Don Pedro wants
Gutierre so badly is because he can’t have her. So it comes as a bit
of a shock when it is borne upon the viewer that his feelings for
the girl are just as sincere as Ichthyander’s – but that he is
incapable of finding an appropriate way of expressing them. The
marriage starts – or rather, doesn’t
– on extremely rocky ground. Gutierre
may have married Don Pedro but, we find, that’s as far as she’s
prepared to go: her very first act on entering her new home is
literally to barricade herself into her bedroom, stacking every
piece of furniture she can move against the door. And Don Pedro –
angry, frustrated and humiliated as he is – puts up with the
situation, making no attempt to force himself upon his wife, and
this in spite of the constant jeers and haranguing inflicted upon
him by the middle-aged harridan who also occupies his house.
(Whether she’s his mother or merely his housekeeper we never do find
out, but hoo! – what a bitch!)
Several nights after the wedding, Balthazar staggers in, blind
drunk, announcing that he’s blown all the money intended to fund the
capture of the Sea-Devil, and adds insult to injury by accusing his
new son-in-law of keeping Gutierre locked up. (If we needed any more
proof that Don Pedro loves Gutierre, we have it in the fact that
he’s willing to put up with having the appalling Balthazar for his
father-in-law.) But despite all of these mortifications, Don Pedro
doggedly maintains his policy of restraint – at least until he
discovers that Ichthyander has managed to contact Gutierre, and that
the two of them are about to elope. Not surprisingly, Don Pedro’s
thoughts then turn to revenge – and less surprisingly still, he
manages to come up with a scheme that both punishes his erring wife
and his successful rival, and
makes himself scads of money in the process. At this point, the
film’s SF/fantasy elements kick in again, as Olsen and Salvetor come
charging to the rescue in the latter’s private submarine. (We also
learn that Ichthyander has the ability to communicate with dolphins;
and really, the longer Amphibian Man goes, the
harder it is to believe that it wasn’t the direct inspiration for
Marine Boy and perhaps, in time, for The
Man From Atlantis.) The rescue party succeeds in freeing
Ichthyander, although Salvetor refuses to interfere between Don
Pedro and his wife. Don Pedro responds by sending in his tame police
force, and both Salvetor and Ichthyander find themselves
incarcerated. But all is not yet lost, as one of the "masses" whom
Dr Salvetor has so relentlessly spurned comes unexpectedly to the
rescue: a prison guard, whose son’s life was saved by Salvetor’s
skill. (Tellingly, while the guard knows Salvetor well enough, the
great humanitarian hasn’t the faintest idea who
he is.) Chastened
by his recent experiences, Salvetor begs the guard to save
Ichythyander. Tragically, the "Sea-Devil" has been locked not into a
cell, but into a tank of water – thus depriving him of the time on
land necessary for his well-being, and threatening his very life. It
is up to the selfless Olsen to try and find a way of rescuing his
friends, even though he knows that freeing Ichthyander will mean
surrendering his faint hopes of Gutierre forever.
Amphibian Man
may be a love story, a fantasy and a science fiction film, but it
would scarcely be a Soviet film of 1961 if there weren’t a healthy
serving of politics mixed in with the romance – although it never,
thankfully, intrudes upon the main story. Ultimately, each of the
four male characters represents a particular doctrine, the rights
and wrongs of which are examined through the film’s action. Not
surprisingly, it is Don Pedro and his relentlessly grasping
capitalism that come in for the most stringent criticism. This is a
man incapable of leaving money out of
anything – an attitude, the screenplay
implies, that brings its own punishment. It is, after all, Don
Pedro’s vile treatment of the workers in his employ that, above all
else, repulses Gutierre. Not that he is capacity to appreciate her
feelings upon the subject; and nor does he understand why, having
offered the incarcerated Dr Salvetor a business deal – his freedom,
and a great deal of money in return for an army (navy?) of amphibian
men with which to exploit the oceans – the scientist rises up in
righteous indignation and throws him out of his jail cell. The clear
inference is that Don Pedro’s obsession with money is inexorably
tied to an emotional and moral lack – although which of these caused
the other is hard to say. And while the film champions Dr Salvetor
over Don Pedro, it is no less critical of the scientist and his
policy of---well, I’m not sure what
you’d call it; a particularly brutal form of enforced benevolence,
perhaps. By placing himself so far above the people he purports to
serve, the scientist becomes so lost in his vision of himself as
mankind’s saviour that he is unable to see the damage he is causing
to those nearest to him. His sin, clearly, is intellectualism
without heart. In contrast, Ichthyander is all heart, all impulse,
all feeling. In fact, the film’s examination of Ichthyander’s
"politics", if indeed you could call his instinctive generosity
that, is one of its most intriguing aspects. The boy practises what
might be termed emotional communism. He looks around the world, sees
enough for everyone, and is unable to understand why such bounty
cannot simply be shared amongst all who might need it. This view
first manifests itself during his visit to the city, when a poor
child is caught stealing from the basket of a fishmonger who has
stopped to laugh at the man frolicking in the town fountain.
Ichthyander is bewildered by the man’s anger, when clearly there are
enough fish for everyone present – and so observing, he proceeds to
distribute them amongst the gathered crowd. This, naturally enough,
brings the police down upon him. However, fortunately Ichthyander
finds a wad of bills within his coat pocket and, having only the
vaguest notion of its value, hands it over to the startled
fishmonger. This action forces the crowd to revise their opinion of
him. Having pegged him at first as a madman, they now decide that he
is a mad millionaire
– which of course makes all the difference; the police simply fade
away. Later, Ichthyander’s lack of understanding of money surfaces
again when he gathers a handful of pearls as a present for Gutierre.
She, alarmed by the value of the proffered gift, refuses to take
them. Ichthyander – who has offered the pearls merely as objects of
beauty, with no thought to, or indeed conception of, their monetary
value – is immeasurably hurt by this rejection, and without
hesitation, tosses the pearls back into the ocean.
What is
interesting is that Ichthyander’s behaviour is not vindicated by the
events of the story. The film may sympathise with, even admire, his
conduct, but ultimately, it also dismisses it, however regretfully,
as hopelessly naïve and impractical. Out of the water and
confronting reality, the boy’s sincerity, his generosity, and his
sense of honour are simply not enough. There is a streak of
commonsense underlying the romanticism in Amphibian Man,
and in the end, it is Olsen and his personal brand of level-headed
socialism that is given the big thumbs-up. The journalist may want
to "save the world" as much as Dr Salvetor, but he puts his theories
into practice in an infinitely more practical way, and always
keeping in mind mankind’s limitations – and more importantly, his
own. Without trying to force his views onto anyone else, Olsen has
committed himself to fighting those battles that are within his
power, struggling to improve the social conditions in his own tiny
corner of the globe. It is not an easy fight, nor indeed an
inexpensive one. With his constant run-ins with The Authorities, his
tireless, if not always successful, efforts to keep his newspaper
operational, and his rueful acceptance of a life of personal
hardship, Olsen would be the last man alive not to admit that money
can sometimes be – very useful indeed….
The joy
of Amphibian Man is that it is simply never what
you would expect a Soviet film of the early sixties to be. First and
foremost on the list of surprises is the film’s setting. With its
sun-drenched Mexican coastal town, its cliffs and sparkling seas,
and its supporting cast of skimpily dressed young people, all intent
on a good time, the action seems distinctly un-Russian. Excellent
use is made of the film’s locations, particularly during
Ichthyander’s flight through the city, when ordinary places and
events suddenly become invested with terrifying or sinister meaning.
Most memorable, perhaps, is when Ichthyander finds himself by the
docks as a cow is being air-loaded onto a boat. As the frightened
animal lows and struggles, the bewildered boy is suddenly unable to
take any more, and bolts through a maze of high, cramped buildings
and dry, narrow, dusty streets. These sequences are in stunning
contrast with those set in Ichthyander’s garden in the sea, where
lovely photography and clever, stylised art direction combine to
create a fantasy world so lovely and peaceful that the viewer can
almost sympathise with the mad schemes of Dr Salvetor. For the most
part, the underwater scenes are very well-realised, if not entirely
seamless (witness the moment when a small ray helpfully presses
itself against the glass of the tank in which it is being filmed!).
Unfortunately, the least successfully executed sequence is also one
of the film’s most important, the shark’s attack on Gutierre. We’re
given a nice clear look at the creature in question; enough to
realise that it’s a harmless reef shark of no more than a foot or
two long – and the trick photography used here is no help at all.
(Note to film-makers: forced perspective monsters might be cost
effective, but – trust me on this one –
they just don’t work.) This is an
unfortunate glitch, but still, the film survives it. On the plus
side, Amphibian Man
boasts some beautiful cinematography,
wringing the most out of its locations – and its cast. Both Vladimir
Korenev and Anastasiya Vertinskaya are Very Pretty People Indeed;
and much is made, photographically speaking, of their matching dark
hair and vivid blue eyes. The film’s production design is also a
treat, particularly in Dr Salvetor’s "futuristic" house and
laboratory (I’m particularly enamoured of the bathyscope-shaped
elevator!). And there are some other incidental pleasures, as well –
such as Don Pedro’s wardrobe, which runs the gamut from a sand-coloured
suit enlivened by open brown checks and underlaid by the inevitable
black roll-neck skivvy, to a thoroughly lurid black and scarlet
dressing-gown – the latter his outfit of choice when prowling
outside his recalcitrant bride’s bedroom. (If I were Gutierre, I
wouldn’t let him in either! Speaking of Don Pedro, he’s responsible
for my very favourite moment in the whole film when, having
discovered Olsen’s plans for extricating both Ichthyander and
Gutierre from their respective predicaments, he bellows
hysterically, "He’s running away to
Australia with MY WIFE!!" – the
geographical destination of the eloping couple being, apparently,
the very last straw.) Another of the film’s virtues is its score by
Andrei Petrov, who is now in the fifth decade of his cinematic
career. But this being a science fiction film of the sixties,
Amphibian Man doesn’t just have a score – it has
songs. The
first, by a guitar-strumming street singer, is an extremely strange
and depressing little number all about how everyone would be better
off dead, and fisherman are the luckiest people in the world because
there’s a good chance they’ll be drowned at any moment. And the
second--- Ah, my friends, the second!
In a jaw-dropping sequence, while Ichthyander wanders the streets of
the city at night, the viewer given a privileged look inside a
nightclub, where a smouldering torch-singer extols the masculine
charms of – the Sea-Devil! What was
it, I wonder, about the fantasy films of the sixties, that compelled
their makers to include such a fabulous
selection of theme songs!? "Song Of The Sea-Devil" may not displace
"GREE-EE-EEN SLI-II-II-IIME"
(from the film of the same name) from the top of my personal hit
parade, but it does join "Tivoli Nights" from
Reptilicus,
"The Words Get Stuck In My Throat" from War Of The
Gargantuas and the theme from Journey To The
Seventh Planet in my top five. And just because I like you
all so much – you’ll find the lyrics to "Song Of The Sea-Devil" in
Immortal Dialogue….
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