On September 26, 2013, we will be showing the definitive screen version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. However, a lot of people do not realize there was an earlier silent version of the film made in 1916.
The director of the 1954 film, Richard Fleischer, refers to it in his memoir Just Tell Me When To Cry:
“We were having dinner and celebrating our decision to shoot at Lyford Cay when our Bahamas expert and guide, Howard Lightbourn, said to me, ‘You know, there’s a real old guy lives here in Nassau who made the first movie version of Twenty Thousand Leagues forty years ago.’ I was surprised. I didn’t even know there was an earlier movie. ‘He’s a friend of mine. Name’s John Williamson. He’d love to meet you.’ ‘Great,’ I said. ‘How about tomorrow?’
J.E. Williamson turned out to be a thoroughly delightful old gentleman. Tall and thin, with hawklike features and a shock of pure white hair, he wore a rumpled white suit and a Panama hat and looked like an ancient southern plantation owner. He had, indeed, made the first Twenty Thousand Leagues forty years ago, and yes, it was a huge success when it opened. The whole thing felt a little weird. We spoke of the same problems facing me that he faced so many years earlier: working underwater; the Nautilus submarine; the fight with the giant squid; the underwater burial sequence.
Finally he said to me, ‘I understand you’ve been all over the islands looking for underwater locations.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And where did you decide to do them?’
‘Well, we found a beautiful reef right here, just off the tip of the island, called Lyford Cay.’
‘Why,’ Williamson exclaimed in astonishment, ‘that’s exactly where I shot my picture!’
I’d had not only the whole Caribbean, but the entire globe to choose from, and yet I’d picked the exact spot that he had chosen for the original film four decades earlier. Williamson and I embraced like long-lost brothers.”
The following is the opening to this silent movie. There are complete versions of it on the Internet, but the quality is not as good as this shorter video. Perhaps one day the Silent Film Society of Chicago can play a theatrical print of it in a future program. (Youtube is no place to watch a movie for the first time.)