20 Million Miles to Earth

20 Million Miles to Earth is an 82-minute American 1957 science fiction film scripted by Bob Williams and Christopher Knopf from an original treatment by Charlott Knight. It was produced by Charles H. Schneer's Morningside Productions for Columbia Pictures Corp. and directed by Nathan H. Juran. It was developed as a piece to showcase the stop-motion animation talents of Ray Harryhausen, as with several other Schneer-Columbia collaborations. This film starred William Hopper as a U.S. Army colonel, Joan Taylor as a scientist's granddaughter, Frank Puglia as her grandfather, and featured Thomas Brown Henry and John Zaremba as another military officer and scientist, respectively. The first manned spaceship to visit Venus, launched by the USA, returns to Earth and crash lands into the sea off a small Sicilian fishing village. The surviving crewmen are rescued by some fishermen and taken to the local hotel, where a visiting American scientist's daughter (played by Joan Taylor), a medical...