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.

OSS117 - Panic In Bangkok

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bangkok

OSS117 - Panic In Bangkok
aka Shadow Of Evil
aka Banco à Bangkok 
pour OSS 117
France/Italy 1964
Directed by André Hunebelle
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

The year following the release of OSS117 Is Unleashed in cinemas (reviewed by me here), Kerwin Mathews once again starred as Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, code name OSS117 in his second and final go at the role, OSS117 - Panic In Bangkok, adapting one of Jean Bruce’s original novels. And, I have to say that although they’ve gone into colour for this second outing to be presented in Kino Lorber’s OSS117 - Five Film Collection Blu Ray set, it’s not a great film and still nowhere near a match for the Bond films it’s obviously trying to compete with. Although they’ve certainly trumped Bond by a year in terms of going for a full 2.35:1 aspect ratio (1965’s Thunderball would be the first Bond film to deploy this treatment... reviewed here) and, to be honest, the whole film looks really good... which I would expect from a director like André Hunebelle.

It’s fun and games in Bangkok this time around, as Hubert gets involved in trying to stop villain Dr. Sinn (played by Robert Hossein) from unleashing a master plague to destroy all the inferior races on the globe (apart from the chosen few with the vaccine, obviously). Hubert recruits, through means of his irresistible charms, Dr. Sinn’s beautiful sister Lila (played by Pier Angeli) and it’s the usual shenanigans with... a little more action than the first movie but in terms of pacing and punchiness, nowhere near the likes of Bond, or indeed, some of the American productions which would start spoofing the British franchise over the next few years. 

And there are some nice little quirky things about the project though, asides from Hunebelle’s wonderful use of verticals to split compositions. He’s definitely into the whole visual compartmentalisation thing and it all looks pretty spectacular, especially now it’s in colour and with a much wider canvas, so to speak. So one great moment is at the start of the picture where, a couple of decades before Lethal Weapon did a similar thing, OSS117 shoots eyes, nose and big smiley face on the target when he’s practicing his shooting skills near the start. 

And another nice thing is when Dr. Sinn presses the alarm bells in his Monastery Plague Lab... which, by the way, is not quite up to Ken Adams’ designs for the Bond films but it is pretty impressive. Each time the klaxon of the alarm sounds, the frame goes red until it stops sounding for a second, then goes red again. And it’s not done with lightning as it would be too difficult to get the actors running around various rooms on the set, the sound and the lights coordinated in editing, I think. That’s why they’ve gone for a full red tint on the print whenever the siren sounds... like an old silent film frame might be tinted. It’s obvious that’s what’s been done but that makes it no less effective and gives things an almost psychedelic feel. 

Okay, those are the positives. There are a heap loads of negatives too, other than it being a fairly dull film throughout (I think I preferred the first one, in some ways). For example... that old trope often associated with comic moments where a character says that they’re definitely not going to be getting talked into doing a thing... cut to them now doing that thing? Well Lila Sinn does this twice in the space of just a few minutes... it’s just not good writing to use that device twice in a row, I think. It makes the following shots quite predictable. You can always see that stuff coming a mile off. 

And the music isn’t great either. Well, okay, scratch that. The music is great, as a stand alone listen but, like the first movie, Michel Magne’s score is really not hitting the right notes of support for the piece. It’s doing its own thing and really not supporting the on screen visuals with the kind of dramatic emphasis needed, it seemed to me. At several points, a cute, stereo-typically orientalised, ‘this music denotes Asian people’ style instrumental rendition of Magne’s OSS117 song from the first movie kicks in and, yeah it sounds fine but somehow fairly racist to my ears. It doesn’t bother me in the least, this is just the norm for the time and even John Barry’s score and opening song for You Only Live Twice (reviewed here) had a degree of this in it... but this one does seem like a fairly ‘in your face’ use of this particular musical tool and, at a couple of points in the movie, I kept thinking to myself that they just couldn’t get away with this kind of thing on a score these days. 

And that’s me done on this one... Kerwin Mathews is fine in this but doesn’t really have the larger than life personality of actors like James Coburn and Dean Martin, who would use their presence to carry them through their own Bond parodies in a much more successful manner (reviews of all these coming to the blog at some point soon). OSS117 - Panic In Bangkok is a nice enough film but, it’s just not punchy or innovative enough to hold it’s own in the Bond/spy market, I think. Still, I’m hoping these things get better and, with Kino Lorber’s lovely Blu Ray set, I guess I’ll know soon enough. 

OSS117 Is Unleashed

Muffed Diving

OSS117 Is Unleashed
aka OSS 117 se déchaîne
France/Italy 1963
Directed by André Hunebelle
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Some spoilers.

The OSS117 novels comprise a vast array of stories about the French/American espionage agent, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath with the titular code number. Starting in 1949, the first 88 novels were written by Jean Bruce who died in a car accident in 1963 (the same year OSS117 Is Unleashed was released). Then his widow Josette took over and wrote another 143 before she apparently retired in 1985. And then, keeping the family business going, I guess, her daughter Martine with her husband François... wrote another 23 novels before the series was finally finished in 1992 (to date). And I can’t tell you what any of these 254 spy yarns are like because, it seems to me, they’ve never been translated into English? At least, not that I’ve found. If anyone wants to point me in the right direction for English translations I’d like to give them a go. 

OSS117 Is Unleashed is actually the second of the OSS117 films. The first big screen adaptation from the successful series of novels was in 1958. However, this is the first of the five films presented in Kino Lorber’s OSS117 - Five Film Collection, which gathers the adaptations from a very specific stance... look at the timing. The first big screen Bond film Dr. No (reviewed here) had just been a pretty big international hit and must have prompted the producers to start their own rival series... the first two of which, starting with this one, starred American actor Kerwin Mathews (who I’m sure readers will remember from such films as The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, which I reviewed here and The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver, review coming soon). These ones are directed by André Hunebelle, who would soon go on to direct the three 1960s Fantômas revival films (which I reviewed here, here and here) but, he hasn’t really quite caught that larger than life, tongue in cheek vibe with the series here... at least not yet (he directed a few of these... I’ll let you know). 

And, if this is the case that the cinematic revival of the character was one of many films jumping on the new Bond band wagon (such as Matt Helm and Derek Flint, reviews all coming soon), then I have to say this opening shot of a film, the only one of these five in black and white, doesn’t give the Bond franchise much in the way of competition. 

It’s a fine little spy film, for sure, starting off with an American agent who muffs his diving job looking for the location of a grotto harbouring a new atomic submarine spotting device, by getting shot dead in the water. Special agent OSS117 is sent to Bonifacio in France, to find out what happened to the agent, getting involved with the freelance diver who was helping the agent and his dubious girlfriend, who has been secretly acting against him to target the agent, blackmailed into the plot by the bad guys who are controlling the device. So, of course, when Hubert gets there, shenanigans ensue and the world is, fairly anticlimactically it must be said, saved from the atomic submarine spotting device (even the secret base blowing up at the end is the size of a small car explosion in an American film... I hope they upped the budget for these as they went on).

Kerwin Mathews is surprisingly at home in the role, pouring on the charm, sexism and action man heroics in equal parts. He actually looks like he could do some of the stuff asked of him, getting away with it fairly well on the close up shots... much more so than his stuntman in some of the fist fights who, quite honestly, looks nothing like him. There are some nice lines in the movie at certain moments too. For example, when Hubert steals a non-consensual snog from the car hire girl at the airport (who returns as a running gag later in the movie), she softens and compliments him on having a gift for the French tongue. 

The film kinda misses the feel of the first Bond outing by a long chalk, though. The dynamic editing and hard hitting score stings are notably absent and, while Michel Magne’s score is pretty good and makes for a nice stand alone listen on CD, it’s noticeably inappropriate in some sections of the movie. Technically it’s no match for the Bond films... although I hope that improves as the series goes on. The opening song is great, presented as credits animate across various shots of foaming white boat wake but, yeah, it’s not exactly a power ballad but then again, Dr. No didn’t have one of those either. And though there is one sequence where a friendly agent makes contact with Hubert by using a sequence of code phrases, there’s none of the excessive caution about staking out his surroundings that Bond was so meticulous about in his early cinemtic outings. 

However, OSS117 Is Unleashed is very nice and I’m kinda looking forward to the next ones, to see how much they up the ante with, I presume, various gadgetry and harder hitting (and more frequent) action scenes but... this one is probably going to disappoint anyone going in expecting a screen incarnation who can give us what the British and Americans were doing at the time. And I’ve seen much more interesting eurospy movies too (something I hope to be getting to see more of at some point soon). I can’t speak for the other movies in this set (yet) but it makes for a nice historical watch and I’m keen to see where they go with the series after this one. I’ll keep you informed right here, of course. 

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

Scoring The Psycho-lops

The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad
UK/USA 1958 Directed by Nathan Juran
Indicator/Powerhouse Films Blu Ray All Zones

Warning: Some story spoilers here.

Here we go then.

I’ve been wanting to take another look at all those old Harryhausen films I used to love as a kid for a while now and what better excuse than the new limited edition, numbered, Dual Format Blu Ray/DVD boxed set, The Sinbad Trilogy, on the Indicator label. This particular film I'm watching first is a 4K restoration of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and it’s looking pretty good. I’m not sure what all those K’s mean but the other two films in this loose trilogy are both 2K restorations. I don’t know if that means they’ve had to work harder restoring the older film or whether there’s a more sinister reason for the misplaced Ks but I do know that the films come with a host of extras, many of them previously unreleased (and there are some real gems here) and also, presumably for this limited edition of the release only, a nice booklet about the movies including information about the unmade fourth Sinbad adventure set on Mars.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is not the first Sinbad movie I saw... that would be my cinema trip to see the 1973 movie The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (where I first became aware of the lovely Caroline Munro) at the age of five but this is right up there with it and is probably my favourite, in some ways, because of the cracking score by the great composer Bernard Herrmann, who scored a diverse number of assignments in his career with memorable music for films like Citizen Kane, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, Mysterious Island, Obsession, Sisters and Taxi Driver, among many others.

After Herrmann’s rousing overture we join Captain Sinbad, played by Kerwin Mathews and his fiance Princess Parisa, played by the lovely Kathryn Grant. They are at the end of an adventure which kick starts the story. Landing on an island for food, Sinbad, Parisa and their brave crew are attacked by a giant Cyclops who is chasing after a ‘magician’ called Sokurah, played wonderfully villainously by Torin Thatcher. After rescuing Sokurah from the one eyed beast, it becomes clear that the magician dropped his magic lamp in the kerfuffle and he does his best to entice Sinbad and his crew back to the island to seek out his treasure. However, Sinbad is having none of it and they go back to Bagdad to prepare for Sinbad’s wedding... with a truly outstandingly orchestrated little piece by Herrmann accompanying the establishing shot of the town (one of three pieces from this movie which were also beautifully rearranged for one of Herrmann’s Phase 4 recordings, which are also worth giving a listen to sometime).

Of course, it’s not long before the evil wizard gets his way by covertly shrinking Parisa down to a very small size you could fit in the palm of your hand. Sinbad is suspicious of Sokurah's involvement in this but agrees to take the wizard back to the dangerous island so he can mix a potion to restore the Princess... a potion from which they will need a small portion of a shell from a Roc (a mythological giant bird). To get people for this suicide mission, Sinbad recruits a new crew from the Bagdadian equivalent of ‘death row’ but it’s not long before these brigands attempt a mutiny... yeah, that’s a pretty silly recruitment plan, if you ask me. Once Sinbad and his loyal friends (and Sokurah) have foiled the mutineers and sailed their way past the voices of sirens, the film does a strange jump in time and the men are once more loyal (to a degree) and ready to explore the island. Looking at the way this movie is edited now, I reckon there were some scenes either cut out or not shot at various points in this production because it is a little jumpy in places, it has to be said.

Of course, from here on in it’s Sinbad, his men and Princess Parisa against Sokurah and all manner of Harryhausen’s stop motion animated characters... including two of the aforementioned cyclops (one of which is obviously inspired by Homer, in the way it meets its final fate), a baby Roc, a full scale Roc, a dragon and, in one of the most impressive scenes in the film (and certainly one of the coolest pieces of scoring in Herrmann’s career)... a sword fight with a skeleton. Luckily, Sinbad and Parisa have the kind hearted Genie of the lamp, played here by Richard Eyer, to help lead them out of trouble when things get too overwhelming. What is quite puzzlingly magical, though, before the Genie even comes into the story, is the question which has never occurred to me before but which was worrying me all throughout the running time during this viewing... where the heck does the young, shrunken Princess keep getting her teeny, tiny costume changes from? She was shrunk in her pyjamas and a small manufactured set of garments would surely not flow the same way that these dashing threads... which threaten to liberate Kathryn Grant’s bosomy bosoms at any moment... seem to freely hang at regular intervals. This kinda makes no sense, people!

Now I’ve always defended Kerwin Mathews before, on the strength of both this movie and his performance in Harryhausen’s The Three Worlds Of Gulliver but, it has to be said, I really noticed how much of a wooden block of an actor he is in the movie this time around. To be fair, Torin Thatcher is always going to be a hard act to keep up with but Mathews seems to play every scene quite deadpan and one wonders if he was having a good time making this movie or not. He seems to be having a hard time emoting in this performance and it really shows when, for instance, in some of Grant’s reaction shots to the animated monstrosities, she really ‘goes for it’ in an almost over the top, exaggerated way. She’s great in this, though and... one wonders if her reaction shots would look a little calmer if she was standing next to anyone other than the unflinching rock that is Kerwin Mathews. To make matters worse when it comes to his portrayal of Sinbad, the writers have written it so that almost every other thing he says to his Parisa is some form of compliment and the pedestal he places her on reminded me of the constant enthusiasm of John Carter for his Barsoomian Princess Dejah Thoris, in the martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs... only a bit more intrusive as demonstrated through the running time here.

Other than this, though, it’s a pretty decent fantasy adventure yarn and, to be honest, with Ray Harryhausen’s beautiful stop motion work and even some nice colour schemes when it comes to the contrasting blue and orange lighting in the wizard’s castle, the last thing you’re going to be worrying about is the acting. Especially with Bernard Herrmann’s sumptuous score filling up yer ears. In fact, Herrmann’s score is so good, it might even distract you from the fact that the pulley system which makes the dragon safe to pass by is not in any way hidden and so it’s just an all round lousy security option to have a dragon guard the entrance to your castle if you’re just going to make the solution to getting past it so easily accessible. It’s another thing that makes no sense about this movie. However...

Indicator have put out an excellent blu ray of this as part of their box set and it really is the best version, to date, that you can get. In addition to various documentaries (including a 27 minute piece on Herrmann by Steven C. Smith, the writer of the composer’s biography A Fire At Heart’s Centre), you also get an isolated score track on all three movies in this collection and also the old Super 8 cut down versions too. A whole slew of extras, in fact, as Indicator do themselves proud by being as thorough and respectful of the material as some of the best boutique labels out there (such as Criterion and Arrow Films). My absolutely favourite extra, though, is a promotional single tie in song which cinemas were asked to play in the lobby called Sinbad May Have Been Bad But He’s Been Good To Me. This is a wonderfully cheesy song, certainly not composed by Herrmann and orchestrated and sung almost in the style of Peggy Lee’s Fever. I just live for the discovery of bizarre movie tie in songs like this and my one regret is that I am only discovering this truly shiny gem with this new boxed set... I just wish someone would put this song on a CD because it’s one of those tracks which would go on every compilation play list of songs that I do (along with the likes of Jerry Goldsmith’s Your Zowie Face from In Like Flint, Rio Conchos - unused in the film of the same name, Johnny Williams’ Two Lovers from How To Steal A Million and his title song from John Goldfarb, Please Come Home). Truly gorgeous and I wish this one was issued in a more malleable format than on here.

And that’s about it for this one. The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad is a truly quaint but astonishing film and it looks better than ever on this new restoration. I have to say that, even when I was a kid, the merging of the 'plasticine' monsters with the live action looked a little off because of the quality of the two stocks when you put them together but it somehow doesn’t seem to have that problem here and, rather than looking like the limitations of the effects are showing through on the Blu Ray transfer, it actually looks a hundred times better than I’ve seen it looking anytime before and could easily just be mistaken for an ‘in camera’ effect with the differential focus. I don’t know if it would have looked that good  in the cinema originally or if Indicator have maybe managed to do what the people working on the Blu Ray transfers of the Bond films did a few years ago and get them looking better and truer to the original negative than they did on their original release prints but... whatever they’ve done it really works here. If you’ve never seen any of the three Harryhausen Sinbad films then this new box from the label, The Sinbad Trilogy, with a front cover poster from The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, is well worth the time and the price of purchase. I’ll be sure to check the other two films in the set out soon and write them up here but, seriously, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad is a bit of a classic and, though it will look kind of primitive to young ‘uns of a certain age compared to films like Star Wars, you really can’t beat stuff like this for firing up the imagination. A truly captivating romp for the little ones and all us grown ups who are still young at heart. A fabulous film and a truly wonderful soundtrack too.