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Many actors who never achieved major star status in movies eventually found fame (if not status) via television in the 1950s and beyond. Among the more genuinely talented performers was Richard Basehart, who finally achieved national fame as Admiral Nelson in the series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a TV spin-off of the 1961 20th Century Fox/Irwin Allen CinemaScope film of the same name,

Basehart began his acting career on stage and moved into film in the late 1940s. Though he was never in a major blockbuster his film work was varied. He started in a number of film noir features, including a leading role in a lesser-known MGM noir, Tension, in 1949. Ironically this was the closest Basehart was to come to achieving leading man status, and his shift from a nerdy, nervous, glasses-wearing drug store clerk who transforms himself into a sharp tough guy to trail his cheating wife is a varied and fully developed performance.

In the 1950s Basehart appeared in a variety of films, including the tense WW II Decision Before Dawn, and John Huston's Moby Dick (in the key supporting role of Ishmael, the narrator of the novel.) He even appeared in two Fellini films, Il Bidone, and the celebrated La Strada. But by1962 he was starring in the title role of The Private Life of Hitler, from the poverty row studio, Allied Artists.

Basehart finally achieved national fame in the TV Voyage which ran from 1964 to 1968, in the lead role of Admiral Nelson, (Walter Pidgeon in the film.) Captain Crane is played by David Hedison. The TV crew bypasses the movie's women (Barbara Eden, Joan Fontaine) but includes a few guys from the film, mainly Del Monroe as Kowalski, and a few new (male) characters, among them the amusing Terry Becker as Chief Sharkey. Essentially the series is an all-male cast, though a few women do show up as guest stars.

The scripts themselves are a mixed bag. As the show ran in an hour slot they often resort to padding and predictable endings, especially after season one. There's little of the film's tension between Nelson and Crane and the TV crew are a mutually supportive lot who run a pretty tight ship. The first season also credits a "guest star" for some episodes. Many are now in the "who?" category, and this practice was abandoned as the series ran on.

On DVD the show certainly looks great, as it should having been shot at 20th Century-Fox. The production values are obviously not as varied as in the film but what's there looks (and sounds) like a movie, even the first season which was shot in luminous black x white. The music, mainly by the film's composer, Paul Sawtell, and an amazing assortment of Hollywood "guest" composers, is profuse, atmospheric, and fully orchestrated. Music supervision is by Lionel Newman, the celebrated Alfred's brother.

Special efx are mainly limited to the models apparently used in the film but they work adequately, though the same cannot be said of the somewhat tacky monsters and aliens. The giant squid and octopus from the movie also make encore appearances. In Turn Back the Clock the rather repulsive live reptiles and a good deal of actual footage from Allen's 1960 The Lost World are recycled.

One of the all-round best episodes is also from season one, The Sky Is Falling, which uses the flying saucer and some opening footage from Fox's classic The Day The Earth Stood Still. The shots of the sunken saucer though the huge underwater windows of the Seaview are among the most impressive in the series.

But as a whole, as critic Stuart Galbraith IV notes ".... Allen just couldn't tell a good script from a bad one, and had no talent at all to nurture promising material into something good," but IMHO the series remains one of the better and still mostly entertaining examples of semi-high end '60s genre TV.

The prolific (and persistent) Allen went on produce two blockbusters in the '70s, The Poseidon Adventure ('71) and The Towering Inferno ('74). Two other 60s' series, The Time Tunnel, and Lost In Space, had preceded Voyage.

Ross Care