Underwater Hero

In 1927 the writer Alexander Belyayev wrote a story about a young man who was able to live under water, thanks to a childhood transplant operation that had given him gills. From that day forward, Ichthyander (literally "fish man," the name he was given by his adoptive father, a scientist named Salvador) became a human amphibian, forced to divide his time between water and land.

When Belyayev wrote this book, which became one of his most popular novels, he had already been through a great deal. For many years he had been bedridden with tuberculosis, completely deprived of mobility. He eventually succeeded in overcoming this disease and returned to normal life. Little did he know what lay in store: his own starvation in Nazi-occupied territory and his family's subsequent deportation to Germany. For the time being, however, Belyayev was able to enjoy his restored ability to move – and to write. We will never know exactly how his years of infirmity influenced his decision to produce fantastic works in which amazing, impossible things happened to people, but there seems to be a strong connection between his own experience and his fiction.

One of his first works was Professor Dowell's Head, a disturbing story about disembodied heads that retain the ability to live, to think, and to feel – but not to move. Amphibian Man was written in Moscow, but of course Belyayev remembered all the years he struggled with disease in Yalta, on the shores of the Black Sea. It must have been there that he was first struck by the thought of how marvelous it would be to swim freely under the sea, especially if it would still be possible to return to dry land, to people.

Belyayev was surely familiar with Jean de la Hire's 1909 novel, L'homme qui peut vivre dans l'eau (The Man Who Could Live Underwater), in which a Jesuit scholar performs an operation to give a child shark gills, raises him to despise his fellow humans, and forces him to blow up ships as part of a diabolical scheme to dominate the world. The hero of the French novel falls in love with a young woman who shows him that there is, after all, good in the world, and teaches him to truly love God. This leads to an operation to remove his gills, after which he and his beloved settle in Tahiti. No sooner was the French novel published than a Russian version appeared, but instead of a scheming Jesuit, the villain was a Jew who, naturally, was weaving a sinister web of international conspiracy.

Whatever Belyayev's books may have been, they were not mean-spirited. His variation on de la Hire's theme featured no villains bent on world domination, and anti-Semitism certainly was not his style. The Argentinean surgeon Salvador in Amphibian Man is a kind man whose only motivation in performing the gill transplant is saving the little boy's life. Salvador enjoys great respect because he helps the poor and the weak. Instead of a maritime saboteur, Belyayev's Ichthyander is a fine young man who lives in two worlds: the sheltered home of his adoptive father and the vast freedom of the sea. When evil people attempt to kidnap him and use him to hunt for treasure, he resists. When Salvador is arrested, Ichthyander manages to escape and sets off for a distant island to his father's friend, in hopes of regaining the ability to live on dry land, an ability he had almost completely lost due to his lengthy captivity underwater.

Fast forward more than 30 years. By the early 1960s, practically every child in the Soviet Union had read Amphibian Man and many a filmmaker had dreamed of bringing the story to the silver screen. But how? Back then, underwater cinematography was no simple matter, and no one in the Soviet film establishment was prepared to take on Belyayev's book. Enter documentary filmmaker Vladimir Chebotarev, recruited to work on the project by a marvelous team of scriptwriters, who had slightly revised the novel's plot, making it sadder but better suited to film. All they needed to do was overcome the technical challenges. Chebotarev contacted Jacques Cousteau and asked his advice on filming the underwater scenes. The renowned Frenchman immediately invited him to come to France for a consultation, but in those days the Soviet authorities were not about to fund such a trip. The team would have to come up with their own solutions.

The actors playing the main roles had to learn to scuba dive. In order to produce the underwater scenes, they dived down, took a deep breath, and were filmed for approximately one minute before they had to be given a scuba mouthpiece to take another breath. At one point Vladimir Korenev, who played the role of Ichthyander, was almost pulled to the bottom by a heavy chain that was supposed to keep his character from escaping. In another incident, his scuba gear failed to work at a depth of 20 meters and he was saved by his stunt double, who gave up his own gear. The stunt double suffered the bends after quickly surfacing, and the scene had to be reshot.

Soviet officialdom was not thrilled with the final product. While Amphibian Man pitted the oppressed of Buenos Aires against evil millionaires, a perfectly orthodox plot from the Soviet standpoint, the movie was suspiciously "foreign," visually beautiful, and simply too entertaining. The critics were scornful. The public, however, voted with its feet. The film Amphibian Man, which came out at the end of 1961, broke all box office records in the USSR.* In 1962 it was seen by 67 million people, a huge audience for the time. People stood in long lines and almost broke down the doors of movie theaters to get tickets.

Just what was it that made the film such a sensation? An engaging story without any heroes of socialist labor over-fulfilling plans? Of course. Beautiful footage of an amazing underwater world? Certainly. (It is no coincidence that soon after the film's release a dacha was built for top government officials on the shores of the same Crimean bay where the movie was shot, in the now-famous resort town of Foros.) Appealing actors? Sure. Ichthyander (Vladimir Kore­nev) looked truly Latin. And his love interest, Gutiere, was played by rising star Anastasiya Vertinskaya, daughter of a famous chansonnier. The main villain was played by the popular and talented heartthrob, Mikhail Kozakov. This trio alone was enough to pack the house.

But on top of that, the film soundtrack included two songs composed by still young and as yet unknown Andrei Petrov, who would later became very famous. One of Petrov's compositions was a doleful song about the fate of poor fishermen. And the second… The second was supposed to suggest the vitality of the urban tumult in which the timid Ichthyander finds himself. Andrei Petrov used electronic instruments, which was cutting-edge in 1961. All across the Soviet Union, instead of lamenting the fate of poor fishermen, audiences started singing along with the refrain of the "Buenos Aires" songstress.

Нам бы, нам бы, нам бы, нам бы всем на дно...
Там бы, там бы, там бы, там бы пить вино...
Там под океаном мы трезвы или пьяны не видно все равно...

We would, we would, we would, we'd all go to the bottom of the sea…
There we'd, there we'd, there we'd, there we'd drink wine freely…
There, under the ocean, sober or drunk, there's nothing one could see...

The whole country went wild over the song. People started singing it in restaurants and at parties. They set up reel-to-reel tape players next to their televisions to record it, and soon it was blaring from every apartment. When a film festival was held in Yalta to celebrate the movie's fortieth anniversary, the song was played every evening in the restaurant of the hotel where the director was staying. Apparently, the passage of time did nothing to dampen the public's enthusiasm.

By now, Amphibian Man may seem a bit dated. I, for one, am no objective judge. The film and its music are part of the soundtrack of my childhood. Even if it is a bit passé, Amphibian Man offered something that will never go out of fashion – fabulous actors, catchy songs, the dream of being able to live underwater, and a poignant lament for all the sad things that take place on dry land.

* A subtitled version of Amphibian Man can be obtained via Amazon and other vendors.