Two films can be separated by only a few years, but, when compared, look as if they are separated by decades. One of the earliest examples can be provided by the 1933 Franco-German science fiction film The Tunnel, which was in 1935 remade as an eponymous British film directed by Maurice Elvey, also known under the title Transatlantic Tunnel. The film is based on the popular 1913 novel by German author Bernhard Kellermann, which was first adapted as a 1915 silent film in Germany and in 1933 in two language versions (starring Paul Hartmann and Jean Gabin, respectively).
The British version has a plot that starts in New York City in a relatively near and somewhat unspecified future in the mid-20th century. Richard “Mack” MacAllan (played by Richard Dix) is a brilliant engineer who became famous in 1940 by successfully building the Channel Tunnel and later did the same by connecting Miami with the Bahamas. He now has to convince a group of wealthy and powerful business tycoons to invest billions of dollars into an even more ambitious project – an undersea tunnel that would connect Britain with the United States and, by bringing two mighty English-speaking nations together, guarantee a new era of world peace. The project is approved and Mac goes to work, but it takes a terrible toll on his family life. Years pass and he is hardly at home and, when public interest dries up, funding has to be secured with Mac reluctantly taking part in a PR campaign with Varlia Lloyd (played by Helen Vinson), the glamorous daughter of his main financier, Lloyd (played by C. Aubrey Smith). This makes his wife Ruth (played by Madge Evans) jealous and, in order to become closer to her husband, she secretly takes a job as a nurse in the tunnels. She is exposed to tunnel gases, becomes sick and goes blind. Mac later has to deal with corporate intrigues involving his friend Mostyn (played by Basil Sydney), the tunnel project colliding with an unknown undersea volcano that might cause horrible delays due to rerouting and, finally, a disaster forcing him to make difficult decisions involving his now adult son Geoffrey (played by Jimmy Hanley) who works in the tunnel.
Unlike the 1933 film, which still had to deal with the growing pains of sound technology, the British version looks and sounds like a more polished product. It is directed adequately by Maurice Elvey, an extremely prolific British director who worked both during the silent and sound eras and whose experience shows in the film. What ultimately makes the 1935 film better than the Franco-German version is much more creativity and a bigger effort to convincingly portray what was supposed to be the near future. Kellermann’s novel was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s because it gave something of an alternative reality in which the horrors of the Great War never happened. This film could do the same by providing glimpses of a world spared from the Second World War. The most noticeable (and, to a degree, correct) prediction about the future is the widespread use of television and video, technologies that were still in their very early stages in the mid-1930s. Production design tries to balance Art Deco with futurism, while the Tatra 77, a Czechoslovakian motor car known for its streamlined design and advertised as the “car of the future”, features prominently in the film. Special effects in the film are quite satisfactory for 1930s standards and do their part in an exciting finale.
Those efforts, however, can’t compensate for a major problem in the script. The Tunnel is basically a story about someone spending years making a tunnel under the ocean and it doesn’t have much of a plot. The script tries to compensate for that with rather predictable melodrama and love triangles – neglected Ruth is comforted by Mac’s best friend Frederick “Robbie” Robbins (played by Leslie Banks), while Varlia, who loves Mac, is coveted by the treacherous Mostyn. There is a subplot involving the dumping and buying of Tunnel shares that actually goes nowhere. An interesting detail, brought probably more for publicity's sake, is the appearance of two actors playing the British Prime Minister and President of the USA, both having played similar characters in the recent past - George Arliss, who won an Oscar for the title role in Disraeli and Walter Huston who played the title role in Abraham Lincoln (and Gabriel Over the White House).
The film praises Anglo-American friendship and an alliance that would later be known as the “special relationship”, and even mentions their rivals in some sort of “Eastern Federation”, making the future in that particular detail disturbingly similar to our times. But those details aren’t enough to make this film more than a curiosity that could be appreciated only by the most hardcore among science fiction cinema fans.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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