The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver

Lemuel Pegging

The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver
USA 1960
Directed by Jack Sher
Morningside Productions/
Impact Blu Ray Zone 2

Warning: Both small... then large spoilers.

I have to say that, every time I revisit The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver, I find myself wondering how much time Ray Harryhausen actually spent with this film. From what I can make out, it’s surely only the squirrel and crocodile sequences in the second half of the movie which he was needed for? I guess the process of using a travelling matte to make people appear on the same frame at different sizes would have kept him busy but, as far as the stop motion animation side of things go... I think those two scenes were basically it. 

The film is based, of course, on Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels aka Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships which was written in 1726... but the film is set in 1699, starting off in Wapping in England. One can only assume, since most of the worlds and peoples that Gulliver (played here by Kerwin Mathews) meets in his travels in the book are completely absent from this movie (and from many other adaptations, it has to be said), that Wapping, England itself is counted as one of the three worlds because, like many, this motion picture only deals with Gulliver’s time in Lilliput where he is a giant and is even pegged down on the beach (as in the classic imagery usually used to illustrate the tale in various manifestations) and his time in Brobdingnag, where the tables are turned and both he and his fiance Elisabeth (played by June Thorburn) are tiny compared to this land of the giants. Luckily, they have the help of a young girl in the second segment called Glumdalclitch (played by Sherry Alberoni... for some reason, the name Glumdalclitch always makes me think of the treasure buried in a woman’s ‘lady garden’ so it always makes me smile, at least).     

I won’t go too much into the plot because there isn’t much of one other than, in Lilliput, Gulliver attempts to stop a war and in Brobdingnag he tries to not die from being put under suspicion of being a witch by a magician who hates him. Some of the biting satire has managed to survive though, such as the war between the Lilliputians and their enemies being about which end of an egg you should smash to eat it from, the small end or the big end. Yeah, that sounds about as silly a reason for war as pretty much all wars started in the world, it seems to me. So... no reason at all. Also, a remark by the king of Lilliput that he hates justice but loves the law, certainly rings true of a lot of people in positions of authority these days, for sure. 

The film is... a pleasant enough watch. Kerwin Mathews is much less a block of wood than in his previous movie for Schneer and Harryhausen, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here) and, while not ground shaking, the effects hold up far better on this nice new (at time of writing) Blu Ray edition from Impact than I’d expected and it passes the time nicely. 

That being said, there are a few issues with some of the execution and logic of things which seem a bit less thought out than they could be. For instance, to help the Lilliputions when a rainstorm comes, Gulliver blows the clouds out of the way. Um... yeah, the clouds would still be normal size and a person really can’t be doing that, even if he is a giant, I suspect. Another example would be when Gulliver goes fishing with his hat. We see a shot of the hat full of fish but, alas, when he empties it onto the beach for his tiny acquaintances, the scale of the fishes has changed to what would almost be normal size to them. Don’t get me wrong... modern CGI effects are no better (Spider-Man often seems to change size swinging from shot to shot in various films, for instance) but it seems to me a little more thought might have gone into issues like this.

That being said, it’s a nice and colourful film and the one thing which always brings me back to it is the absolutely astonishing score by Bernard Herrmann. It’s one of his more unusual ones where he’s trying to sound more English (it seems to me) and although there are some key Herrmann moments where he uses his characteristic repeat cells, it’s a much fuller and melodic sounding score and not one the unwary listener might, at first, peg as being from the same compositional mind that gave us, in the very same year, the ‘strings only’ score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

And that’s me about done on The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver I think... I really don’t have too much to say about the movie and the ending, where Gulliver and Elizabeth are washed up on a beach and waxing poetic, isn’t exactly stunning either. It’s mostly about the music and the various character actors involved for me (keep and eagle eye out for the woman who gives Dr. Gulliver a chicken as payment at the start of the film, it’s a youngish Joan Hickson, who would go on to play Miss Marple on TV, some 24 years later). If you like films of this period with a nice cast, an okay script and some wonderful scoring, then certainly give it a go. As far as Harryhausen goes though... it’s not exactly his strongest.