The Proto-Honey?
I’ve maintained for a while now that Ian Fleming seems to use 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a blueprint for Dr. No (See Bond Sings, Squid Attacks). If the idea leaves readers puzzled it may be because they’re familiar with the Verne novel, not the Disney film from 1954.
The chief difference between the two is that the film has a plot while the novel doesn’t. The relationship of either one to Dr. No can still seem problematic, because no popular version of the story features a mysterious nature-girl living alone on a tropical island. However, that wasn’t always the case.
When the scribes at Disney began the task of adapting Verne’s novel for a film their boss had always dreamed of making, they were horrified to discover that the book is one long undersea travelogue with an indefinite conclusion. At the end of the journey the submarine’s three male passengers seize a chance to disembark, just when the Nautilus is poised to plunge into the ominous Maelstrom and disappear from view.
In the book, the Nautilus does not ram the Abraham Lincoln, hurling Professor Aronnax, his companion Conseil, and harpooner Ned Land into the drink, as a result of Nemo’s longstanding vendetta against warships. Nor does the enigmatic genius give much evidence of brooding until late into the two-year sightseeing voyage recounted by Verne.
The Disney team wisely decided to turn their film into the story of a jail-break from an underwater prison, presided over by a cruel madman with a thirst for vengeance. Verne might have been startled by this condensation of his work, but Fleming saw it as a perfect template for a Bond thriller. All the outline lacked was a love-interest for Bond, since roles for comely young actresses tend to be in short supply in the works of Jules Verne.
I’ve known since the early 1960’s that a silent film of 20,000 Leagues was produced in 1916 with groundbreaking underwater photography made possible by an ingenious camera snorkel and lighting rig developed by the Williamson brothers. I first saw photographic plates from the production reproduced in a Boy Scout Edition of the novel pulled from my grandmother's bookcase for perusal when I was ten years old. Happily, the movie itself is now freely available for viewing, and it is a wild ride.
A woman was even smuggled into the teleplay by having Professor Aronnax’s daughter tag along (a standard solution repeated in modern adaptations for television). The problem of essentially plotless source material was solved in this version by grafting together Verne’s submarine narrative with its sequel, Mysterious Island, written a few years after the original novel, and by adding entirely new characters. One such cast member was someone presumed to have perished many years earlier: the lost daughter of Captain Nemo.
Around fifteen minutes into the production, after refugees from the Abraham Lincoln have been brought aboard the Nautilus, a title card announces:
On “Mysterious Island” lives a child of nature.
We then watch a young woman clad in a leopard skin awaken on her leafy hammock atop a small bush, jump to the ground and hop about with giddy abandon.
I wonder if the first inkling of Honeychile Rider might have been born at that moment in the mind of a certain matinee attendee who would have been eight or nine years old when the movie was released. It’s a long-shot, I know, but I can’t help wondering.
The teleplay soon goes off the rails with furious cross-cutting, extended flashbacks and confusing subplots. There are attempted rapes, a melodramatic suicide, acts of merciless slaughter, an armed rebellion, and I forget quite how it all ends, even though I just finished watching it.
Remember that the 8-reel film would have competed for ticket sales with Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, so it had to be epic.
The 1916 extravaganza has been brilliantly restored in HD, synchronized to an impressive orchestral score and uploaded to YouTube. It resides there alongside a different restored version which, in addition, has been judiciously colorized. For comparison, a thorough search will uncover a few other candidates which have benefitted from only cursory tinkering.