Jules Verne was the hottest 130-year-old writer in Hollywood in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With the success of Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Michael Todd's Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), everybody was looking to capture his combination of science fiction and 19th-century whimsy. Nor did it hurt that his books were mostly in the public domain. That's how Nathan Juran, who had scored a hit with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, got the funding to produce, direct and write this adaptation of Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon. He even beat Irwin Allen's bigger budget version to the screen by a year. Oddly, when AIP released this fanciful tale of a British scientist (Marshall Thompson) piloting a balloon to rescue an explorer who has discovered the lost treasure of Cleopatra, they removed all reference to Verne's original, only keeping the name of the balloon, the Victoria. Juran shot location scenes in Puerto Rico, combining Caribbean foliage with some not-very-convincing matte shots for the flying scenes. The results did well on the kiddie matinee circuit, though today the images of African natives seem hopelessly outdated.

By Frank Miller