Opening Narrator Quotes in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

[first lines]

Opening Narrator: This is Operation Experiment, a secret base far north of the Arctic Circle. Experiment was the codename for a top priority scientific expedition. These men arrived here on X-day minus 60. It has taken them the full two months to get ready. Today is X-day.

Opening narrator: I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better.

[Scenes of black market goods changing hands]

Opening narrator: I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market. We'd run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs

[Dead body seen floating in the river]

Opening narrator: but, well, you know, they can't stay the course like a professional.

Opening narrator: Now the city is divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: the American, the British, the Russian and the French. But the centre of the city that's international policed by an international patrol. One member of each of the four powers. Wonderful! What a hope they had! All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language. Except a sort of smattering of German.

Opening narrator: Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know. Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities. Bombed about a bit.

Opening narrator: Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his. The name was Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him, some sort, I don't know, some sort of job.

Opening narrator: Anyway, there he was, poor chap. Happy as a lark and without a cent.

Opening Narrator: The Tower of London - a monument to the corruption of the soul, wherein the shadowed past a man gained the throne of England despite the insane ambition that drove him to evil and murder. He escaped the headsman's block but he could never escape the ghosts of his conscience. It is the night of April ninth in the year fourteen eighty three, the night that Edward IV, King of England, will die. Rumours that the King is on his deathbed have filled London and the people await the booming of the cannon on the battlements, for this will be the signal that Edward IV is no more.