The octopus crawls over sleeping women and out of open windows. It lurks in trees. At the bottom of the sea, it plays with the skulls of dead men. Brrr! Painlevé's first movie may have been made for the lecture class, but this was made for general release by a man who had appeared in Bunuel's UN CHIEN ANDALOU as "Chief Ant Handler."
After that rather sinister beginning, the audience gets a more scientific view of the creatures, but it's certainly a heck of a beginning. It remains an interesting, even admirable creature, but certainly not a sympathetic one.
I had never heard of Jean Painlevé before poking around the France section of Filmstruck. Born in 1902, he was the son of the mathematician and French Prime Minister Paul Painlevé. He entered film with Michel Simon and made the first of his films, mostly about undersea life, in the 1920s. Wikipedia claims he directed over 200 films. The IMDb just over 40. Twenty-three were released in dvd by Criterion in 2009 as SCIENCE IS FICTION.
