swirling oceanic whirlpool underlies the credits, before we are transplanted to a polar landscape where an A-bomb test—bafflingly titled "Operation Experiment"—is underway. A voice-over explains the scenario, and then we witness the test from the viewpoint of the assembled scientists and military men, along with shots of stock footage of mushroom clouds and crumbling ice floes. Afterward, the researchers set out to collect test data from various observation devices. During this procedure, our protagonist, Dr. Tom Nesbitt (Paul Hubschmid) witnesses a roving dinosaur shape which sends an avalanche down on him and his buddy. Surviving the crushing snow, Nesbitt is sent back to the USA to recover. In the hospital, he tries to convince the military man in charge, Col. Jack Evans (Kenneth Tobey), of the reality of the beast. But no one believes Nesbitt, and a psychiatrist even succeeds in instilling self-doubt in the witness.
But soon, news of two ships crushed by a "sea serpent" sends Nesbitt to Professor Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway), the world's foremost paleontologist, and his beautiful assistant, Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond). Elson is initially skeptical, while Hunter is more prone to credit Nesbitt's story. But when both Nesbitt and a surviving seaman pick out the same sketch of a dinosaur—a "rhedosaurus"—Elson comes onboard. His theory postulates that the beast is heading for its ancestral breeding grounds, the Hudson Submarine Canyons, off the East Coast of the United States.
An expedition is quickly mounted, as the military, persuaded by Col. Evans, signs on to the quest. Descending in a diving bell, Elson finds the beast, which he manages to describe to the crew above just before the monster causes the bell's destruction and Elson's death. Returning to New York, Nesbitt is swiftly followed by the beast, which comes onshore at the Fulton Fish Market. Rampaging through lower Manhattan, the beast proves invulnerable to small-arms fire. A bazooka does wound it, but a new complication ensues. Its leaking blood carries an ancient pathogen which can kill. The only safe way to destroy the beast is to send a "radioactive isotope" into its veins.
Now the beast has taken refuge in Coney Island, inexplicably penning itself inside the framework of a roller coaster. Nesbitt and a sharpshooter, Corp. Stone (Lee Van Cleef), must ascend with a grenade rifle loaded with the isotope to the top of the roller coaster for a shot. They succeed in planting the killer nuclides in the beast's wound, but its death throes set the wooden trestles on fire, necessitating a precarious descent.
Less than the sum of its parts
Take Ray Bradbury's melancholy, poetic story "The Foghorn," about an aquatic antediluvian survivor responding to a technological mating call; add a talented film director who was a vital assistant to the famed French genius Jean Renoir; factor in the youthful vision and groundbreaking Dynamation techniques of SFX whiz Ray Harryhausen; and you might suspect that some kind of heart-tugging, insightful, allegorical masterpiece would result. Alas, such is not the case. The result of stirring all these talents together is less than the sum of their skills. A pedestrian exercise in giant-monsterdom, this film—green-lighted in response to the success of King Kong in its 1952 re-release—has a few fine moments but fails to convey any larger substance.
Among the outstanding visual features are the eerie descent of the diving bell into submarine coral architecture and the beast's destructive rampage through Manhattan, which of course resonates strongly in a post-9/11 world. Harryhausen's novel technology allowed his stop-motion creature to maneuver in a middleground between pre-filmed foreground and background, thus lending it more substantiality and reality. Shooting on location in a weekend-deserted city, Lourié marshaled his large number of extras with the precise choreography that must have stemmed from his early work in the ballet. The scenes of mass terror and confusion are truly authentic. And the beast's ingestion of a hapless cop is nicely gruesome, as it clamps its jaws around the man's head, then tosses its own head back to gulp him down.
The acting is not bad either. The handsome Swiss-born Hubschmid has an odd accent which lends him the patina of a poor man's Cary Grant. As love interest, Raymond is tolerable, mixing a bit of feistiness with not too much simperingness. Kellaway makes a jolly, believable savant, and when the three of them embark on their quest, they achieve a group dynamic that's charming, albeit short-lived. But the star of the film—the beast itself—acquires no personality whatsoever. The sympathy-inducing search for companionship that formed the core of Bradbury's story is missing altogether. (Bradbury's story was optioned and incorporated into publicity only after the film's completion, and the circumstances surrounding its perhaps-forced late adoption are cloudy.)
As for any sociological message, the film offers little footing. True, the monster is both released and killed by atomic technology, but little is made of either instance, except for a comment about A-bombs causing a "new Genesis." The original plan to capture the beast instead of killing it is precipitously abandoned without a look backward, and there's no closing fadeout that even expresses a shred of regret.
