Wed 11 Jun 2014
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: THE GIANT BEHEMOTH (1959).
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , SF & Fantasy films[18] Comments
THE GIANT BEHEMOTH. Allied Artists Pictures, 1959. Gene Evans, André Morell, John Turner, Leigh Madison, Jack MacGowran, Maurice Kaufmann, Henri Vidon. Directors: Douglas Hickox & Eugène Lourié.
The Giant Behemoth is an America-British science fiction/horror film starring Gene Evans (who appeared in several Samuel Fuller films and in Richard Fleischer’s Armored Car Robbery, which I reviewed here) and André Morrell (Quatermass and the Pit).
The two actors portray scientists tasked with stopping a giant radioactive dinosaur from reeking havoc on England. Think Godzilla transported to Cornwall and London and you’ll have a pretty good idea what this film is all about.
That’s not to say it’s simply a throwaway creature feature with amateurish acting and even worse special effects. It’s not. Ukrainian-born director Eugène Lourié, who had worked as a production/set designer for such directors as Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls, and Samuel Fuller, clearly put care into the project. Indeed, while no cinematic masterpiece or a classic worthy of academic scholarship, The Giant Behemoth is actually a solid 1950s sci-fi film, one that showcases the fact that worries about the effects of atomic testing were hardly limited to Japan.
The plot is about as straightforward as you would expect. Dead radioactive fish wash up on the Cornwall beach and American marine biologist Steve Karnes (Evans) is on the case. He partners up with British scientist, Professor James Bickford (Morell) to figure out what is going on.
It turns out there’s a giant Paleosaurus on the loose. Oh, and it’s radioactive too. (And why wouldn’t it be?) The two men work with the British military to stop the behemoth, but not before the growling giant lizard stomps around London a bit, wrecking a power station and picking up a car and dumping it in the Thames.
The film can definitely feel dated at times. It takes suspension of disbelief to fully appreciate the film for what it is, namely a better than average monster movie. The movie neither goes for cheap thrills, nor demonstrates implicit contempt for its audience. Slow moving at times, The Giant Behemoth admirably avoids the stilted, laughably amateurish acting that plagued too many of the creature features of that era. Both Evans and Morell appear to take their roles seriously. The story’s not much, but then again it doesn’t need to be.
By far, the weakest aspect of the film is that it’s so obviously a knockoff or, if one is feeling charitable, an homage, to Godzilla. And as in the original Japanese version, we don’t see much of the creature for the first thirty minutes or so. It’s in the ocean somewhere doing whatever dying radioactive dinosaurs do. We’re supposedly just waiting in suspense for the guy to show up. Problem is: in The Giant Behemoth, the oversized angry dinosaur takes a bit too long to appear on the screen in its full glory.
The movie does, however, succeed in having some great moments. While the special effects are, in many ways, completely antiquated, there are a couple of scenes in which the dinosaur is lurking about London that just look just fabulous in crisp black and white. I’ll take those over most lavish and expensive computer graphics any day.
I wouldn’t call The Giant Behemoth a great film by any stretch of the imagination. But, provided you know what you’re getting yourself into, that doesn’t stop it from being a surprisingly enjoyable one.
June 11th, 2014 at 10:20 am
I’ve always had a soft spot for the two British “Godzilla” movies, this one and GORGO.
June 11th, 2014 at 10:30 am
Throughout the mid- to late 50s, my brother, our friends and I used to see a ton of movies like this one on Saturday afternoons, but (as I recall) our primary purpose was to go and laugh at them. I watched most of this one with Jon last night and was surprised to see how effective and well done it was.
We might still have laughed it back then when it played our town, if it ever did, but there are some scary scenes in it that just might have stopped us in mid-hawhaw.
June 11th, 2014 at 1:05 pm
I saw the film a few years back, and was surprised at just how effective it was. Evans and Morell really sell the picture, treating it as though it were a much more distinguished and expensive movie (I’m a huge fan of Morell, and I really never saw him give a poor performance). You can’t help but wonder if it would be better known if only they had been able to get the skill of someone like Harryhausen to animate the monster.
Funny reading about sea-monsters: the other day I read an article in the newspaper. It seems that scientists are tagging sharks off the coast of Austalia. The had attached a monitor to a 10ft long Great White, and were surpised when the tag washed up on the shore a few days later. After reading the info from the tag, it was revealed that the shark had, in fact, been eaten by another predator. Whatever it was had gulped down the Great White in a couple of bites. The scientists revealed that they had no idea exactly what sort of creature could eat a shark like that in a couple of bites, they only knew that it was BIG!
June 11th, 2014 at 1:42 pm
I like Morell quite a bit as well. One of his greatest performances in my opinion was in the BBC version of Orwell’s “1984” directed by Nigel Kneale. He played a cold, cruel O’Brien to Peter Cushing’s Winston Smith. (Donald Pleasence, who we discussed in the Will Penny review was also in it!)
That’s interesting, and somewhat scary, about Australia. It’s amazing how *little* we know about the oceans and ocean life. Every once in a while some creature that no one has ever seen before washes up on some shore somewhere. Who knows what lurks beneath!!!!!!
June 11th, 2014 at 1:46 pm
Also, I agree re: Harryhausen. I’ve long been a fan of his work. I grew up with Clash of the Titans which was a childhood favorite.
Supposedly, Lourie was going to have Willis O’Brien (King Kong) do the special effects, but apparently that didn’t happen.
June 11th, 2014 at 3:03 pm
There’s just something about the redundancy of a title like THE GIANT BEHEMOTH that has always struck my English-Major mind as amusing, but you’re right; not a bad film at all.
June 11th, 2014 at 3:08 pm
Dan: I thought about that too. As if we needed to know what type of behemoth it was: large or small?
June 11th, 2014 at 4:32 pm
Morell’s O’Brien is superb, helped by the fact that he and Cushing were old friends who appeared in quite a bit of stuff together (check out the little known Hammer thriller CASH ON DEMAND, where he is a charming bankrobber who forces Manager-from-Hell Cushing to rob his own bank). To me his is the definitive Professor Quatermass, and I always think that it was a shame that the last story from the 70s was not done a few years earlier, so that he could have played the elderly Quatermass.
Jonathan: It’s nice to see that I’m not the only one who loves CLASH OF THE TITANS. It does seem to get short shrift from some Harryhausen fans.
As regards Behemoth…shouldn’t it actually have been The Giant Leviathan? In religious texts Behemoth is the monster from the land, whilst Leviathan is the Sea monster.
June 11th, 2014 at 4:49 pm
Hmmm.. Not sure. Maybe they thought that “Leviathan” would have had some sort of political connotation? Or maybe I’m just over thinking it.
I always liked Bubo the owl in Clash of the Titans
June 11th, 2014 at 6:12 pm
I don’t think ten feet is a very large great white. Seems like a really large great white would make easy work of a ten footer…
June 12th, 2014 at 12:58 am
That’s a twenty-footer!
Twenty-five…Three tons of him.
June 12th, 2014 at 4:50 pm
Don’t forget Morel as Watson to Cushing’s Holmes in the Hammer production of Hound of the Baskervilles. An eye opener for me since at that time I had only seen Bruce and Howard Marion Crawford from the Sheldon Reynolds series with Ronald Howard.
This one comes so close but unlike Gorgo doesn’t quite have a good enough story to overcome the bad sfx despite the actors.
Quite a few American actors were doing British sf right then, including Marshall Thompson, Forest Tucker, Dean Jagger, Dennis O’Keefe (The Diamond Wizard). I suppose if you stretched the limits of sf you could even call James Stewart in No Highway in the Sky as science fiction since it is fiction about a scientific problem.
Anyone recall the Danish Godzilla, Reptilicus?
June 12th, 2014 at 7:45 pm
The special effects just weren’t good enough for the script. There are some great shadowy black and white images, but the dinosaur looks the same and does the same thing too often. Still, better than many from the era
June 12th, 2014 at 8:31 pm
Haven’t seen “Reptilicus,” but I believe the U.S. version is on a 4-pack of sf/monster films. One of those DVD’s that sell for like $5 but have four movies of that genre from that era.
June 13th, 2014 at 3:43 am
REPTILICUS looks like a hand puppet, but it still runs a distant second to THE GIANT CLAW in the “real-dumb-giant-monster” sweeps.
June 13th, 2014 at 4:38 pm
Dan
Agree 100%. The Giant Claw maybe the single worst sfx monster I have ever seen and that includes an ape headed robot in a fish bowl helmet and the Japanese King Kong.
December 4th, 2014 at 10:46 am
One interesting thing about this very good film is the utter confusion that has been created by the directorial credit on the British prints of this film, which credit Eugene Lourie AND Douglas Hickox as directors. It is interesting because Mr Hickox was not a “co-director” on this film. What he actually did on the film is not quite clear. Most of those who have been looking into this credit mystery suppose that he was merely a second-unit director working on the crowd scenes, which would make sense because he was an assistant director until he got his directorial break around 1970.
The source of the confusion would appear to be in the financing of the project. It was a common practice among producers who would get foreign backers for some or all of their budgets was the insistence of said backer to include a film worker of his nationality to appear on the credits. A famous example of this was the epic film EL CID from 1961. In order for producer Samuel Bronston to obtain Italian financial backing for the project he was required to include the name of an Italian somewhere prominently in the credits. To the chagrin of composer Miklos Rozsa, who wrote that film score for EL CID, Bronston added the name of an Italian composer to the music credits of the Italian release of EL CID. All other prints had only “Music by Miklos Rozsa”. Now, that Italian composer did not write a single note of music for EL CID, but his name appears on the credits of the Italian release.
I suspect the same thing happened in the case of BEHEMOTH. Knowing the shenanigans of producers like David Diamond I have no doubt that in order to obtain British financing he was obligated to include the name of a British technician in the credits on the British prints and so decided to use Mr Hickox’s name as co-director. This anomaly has now become fact, unfortunately, since so many references accept the British titles at face value – even as they are strangely silent on the fact that most other international prints contain the name of Lourie only. This is sad because it deprives Lourie of the sole credit he deserves and gives a misleading idea of the career or Mr Hickox.
December 4th, 2014 at 12:20 pm
Fascinating inside information. Thanks!