Brine Be the Glory: Captain Nemo
Lording over the oceans in a self-built palatial submarine, Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo is the archetypal bad-guy aesthete with a vindicating backstory.
Ian McKellen as Gandalf is a fine example. Others include Diane Keaton as Annie Hall, Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, and Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, respectively, as Jeeves and Wooster.
But perhaps there’s no greater example of an actor being a shoo-in for their role than James Mason’s turn as the enigmatic anti-hero Captain Nemo in Disney’s 1954 adaptation of Jules Verne’s sci-fi novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. For viewers who know Nemo’s backstory, the late British actor’s purring inflection and saturnine gravitas offer, via the lens, tantalising nods to the hidden depths of a character whose name — drawing inevitable comparisons with Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name — in Latin means ‘nobody’.
We first encounter Captain Nemo — in both novel and movie — when the book’s narrator, the renowned oceanographer Professor Pierre Aronnax, is shipwrecked along with his servant, Conseil, and the harpooner Ned Land, then picked up from the waters by the prey-turned-predator submarine that the group’s own vessel, the sunk American frigate, was pursuing, mistaking it for a marauding sea creature.
The rakish credentials of their host — and captor — now unfold quickly with Aronnax’s description of his tour of Captain Nemo’s lavishly appointed Noahidic haven, one replete with “high oaken sideboards, inlaid with ebony”, “exquisite paintings” (including “a Madonna of Raphael, a Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph of Correggio”), and a well-stocked cigar room (“This tobacco comes neither from Havana nor from the east — it is a kind of seaweed, rich in nicotine, with which the sea provides me, but somewhat sparingly,” explains Nemo).
For all his refined flourishes, though — and this is a man who can make conchyliology seem cool — there’s always a danger that Captain Nemo could be a shallow entity: a kind of Bond villain, spurred by misanthropy to bring Ringo Starr’s aquatic yearnings in the Beatles’ Octopus’s Garden to heavily bankrolled fruition. The cultured villain, let’s be honest, is a stock character, one we’ve seen emerging not just from the imagination of Ian Fleming but in the form of Hannibal Lecter, Lex Luthor and Breaking Bad’s Gustavo Fring.
Verne’s contemporaries had to wait another five years, and the 1874 publication of The Mysterious Island, to find out the backstory that offers layering and depth to a character whose misanthropy has a weight of intellectual heft behind it, as depicted with such guile by Mason’s acting smarts in the 1954 movie. In that sequel, Captain Nemo is revealed to be Prince Dakkar, the son of a raja whose furious reclusiveness was brought on by the brutal British quelling of the Sepoy Rebellion in India in 1857 — hence his secret building of an underwater palace-cum-war machine and his penchant for taking down British military vessels and slave ships between flicking through scientific literature in a library soundtracked by Von Weber, Rossini and Mozart.
Intriguingly, we now know (from correspondence between Verne and his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel) that the author intended Nemo to be a Polish noble, wreaking his revenge for atrocities committed during the January Uprising of 1863 on Russian warships. His publisher, the story goes — noting that Alexandre Dumas’ The Fencing Master had been banned under Tsar Nicholas I for sympathising with the rebels in his depiction of the Decembrist uprising — feared being censored out of the lucrative Russian market, and Les Rosbifs north of the channel took the propaganda hit instead.
Whichever Captain Nemo we put under the microscope, though, the origin story in question — damaged individual engages in elaborate but stealthy vengeance — is one that puts our beleaguered captain alongside Count Dracula, Iago, and two of Dickens’ more developed characters, Uriah Heep to Miss Havisham. And, of course, a litany of the more nuanced Bond villains whose antics his predate by almost a century.
In movie adaptations, origin stories must be told either in a spin- off project or alluded to subtly in fragments of script, their intricate details conveyed here and there via intonation, gait, demeanour or the most subtle of facial contortions. Mason’s name was on the poster before a single hand was shaken.
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