Cinema: Study in Depth

World Without Sun. Like a giant mollusk, the two-man diving saucer glides toward its parking garage on the floor of the Red Sea. Near by lies a five-room underwater house looking like a huge plumbing joint made of chubby cylinders. Here seven pioneer oceanauts lived and worked 35 ft. below the surface for a month during the summer of 1963. Life in and around their pelagic tank town is the subject of this eerie, colorful documentary by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, a successor to his awesome epic, The Silent World.

Oddly enough, the film is most absorbing when Cousteau lets his camera or his commentary dwell on the extraordinary detail of his men’s day-to-day existence. In the heavy air, laden with double the normal amount of oxygen, cuts and abrasions heal overnight. Beards almost stop growing. In the 86-ft. Deep Cabin, the male larynx, in reaction to helium, produces shrill chipmunk sounds. The men listen to music, keep house, play chess, pamper a parrot, and begin to feel strangely detached from events in the surface world. Jewel-bright sea creatures hover outside the glass windows, coolly observing behavior in the manfish bowl. When divers venture into the abysmal blue depths to explore, they come upon sharks, barracuda, and marine life hitherto unheard of—all recorded in skillful underwater photography that magnifies even minute plankton into glittering monstrosities.

“Alone in the sea at night, I am always afraid,” one veteran diver confesses. The audience shares his fear and fascination, and occasionally even his lethargy becomes swimmingly real. It is hypnotic and hilarious to watch a school of scallops, threatened by a starfish, go snapping across the ocean bottom like a herd of stampeding dentures. The film has its faults: it grows repetitious and tries to provide variety with music full of scubadoo cuteness. Thus, by the time the saucer plunges down for a climactic survey of the queer fish and mating crabs found at the 1,000-ft. level, most viewers will be more than ready to surface, having had all the submarine miracles a landlubber can tolerate at one sitting.