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.

Mighty Joe Young

Beautiful Dreamer

Mighty Joe Young
USA 1949 Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack
Argosy Pictures/HMV UK Exclusive 
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Complete story spoilers from early on in this review.

Just revisited this classic movie, the original Mighty Joe Young (I still can’t bring myself to watch the modern remake) which I suspect is out on US Blu Ray courtesy of Warner Archives, being that it’s an HMV exclusive Blu Ray here in the UK and they tend to cherry pick from the Warner Archive releases. This one is very much in the ‘Kong’ family, as it were. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack, who helped produce and direct (uncredited) the original 1933 spectacle that was King Kong (reviewed here), not to mention directing The Most Dangerous Game on the same sets and with some of the same actors in the evenings, as the original Kong. 

It also stars Robert Armstrong as Hollywood showman Max O’ Hara, pretty much the same way he played Carl Denham in both King Kong and Son Of Kong... he could pretty much be just a continuation of the same character if it weren’t for the name. Also along for the ride is the original special effects genius who brought Kong to life, Willis O’Brien but, he was more of an adviser and had a crew of stop motion technicians working on this one for him and, if you’re wondering why the animation still looks amazing on this, this is the first screen credited feature length effects work... about 80% of the film effects, apparently... of his enthusiastic apprentice (so to speak), one Ray Harryhausen. So, yeah, another future Hollywood legend was indeed learning his craft and also mastering it on this one. 

It’s a simple tale but Mighty Joe Young is an absolutely charming and emotionally heart warming movie which is kinda like King Kong but turned on its head. Young girl Jill Young, lives on a farm in the jungle and buys/trades things to buy baby Joe from two natives. 12 years later she’s grown up to be played by Terry Moore and she and Joe, who has grown to giant size (although, to be fair, the scale of him kinda changes up and down throughout the movie) are living a happy life until Max O Hara and his new cowboy wrangler Gregg (played by Ben Johnson), see how she and Joe have a rapport and how much Joe can be calmed by the song Beautiful Dreamer. Max signs her and Joe for a big Broadway style revue but, after a while the glamour wears off and, when a bunch of idiots ply the giant gorilla with wine and are cruel to him, he smashes the place up and the police are ordered to put Joe down. But he escapes with the aid of Jill, Gregg, Max and a few others and Jill, Gregg and Joe live happily ever after in Africa... stopping on the way during their escape to have Joe rescue children from a burning orphanage. 

This is such a great film and I don’t know why it wasn’t better received at the time. Indeed, there was to be a sequel teaming up Mighty Joe Young with Lex Barker as Tarzan but, due to the expense of animating the titular giant ape versus the disappointing box office receipts, this didn’t materialise. But it’s a truly great film with superb animated sequences and real emotional depth to the simple story. It’s also great for spotting way too many famous character actors to name. Indeed, I only spotted a handful myself but it was nice seeing Frank McHugh (who I remember best from The Roaring Twenties, reviewed here) as Max’s agent and also the great Nestor Paiva playing the drunken nightclub customer who gets Joe so riled up in one of the nightclub sequences. More eagle eyed watchers than me may also be able to spot, if they’re lucky, the presence of both Carol Hughes, the second incarnation of Dale Arden from Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here) and Donald Kerr, who played Happy Hapgood in Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (reviewed here) in the nightclub scenes... among many others. 

And I can’t say enough good things about Mighty Joe Young. Harryhausen’s talent at imbuing a stop motion mannequin with a real spirit of warmth and humanity shines throughout and it’s all backed up with a beautiful score by Roy Webb, which you can buy in a very authentic re-recording from those wondrous people at Monstrous Movie Music, at https://www.mmmrecordings.com/index.html packed onto a CD with the score for another Harryhausen classic, 20 Million Miles To Earth (reviewed here). 

The Blu Ray edition of this has the usual interesting extras about the film and also, I’m glad to say, keeps in the red and brown tint sections for the ‘fire at the orphanage’ sequence near the end of the picture. It also looks superb and, where you can sometimes see the joins and changeovers from the live action footage to the model work, it still looks better than it ever has before and this purchase was a no brainer for me (now if only they’d sort out a UK Blu Ray release for Son Of Kong, please). One of the all time great movies and something that should be on every cinephile’s radar, as far as I’m concerned. Such a great movie.

20 Million Miles To Earth

Ymir Today,
Gone Tomorrow

20 Million Miles To Earth
USA 1957 Directed by Nathan Juran
Columbia/Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

20 Million Miles To Earth is the second film featured in Indicator’s boxed edition, The Wonderful Worlds Of Ray Harryhausen Volume One: 1955 - 1960. It’s also a film I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. Alas, the Blu Ray does give the option of giving the viewing audience the choice between watching it in its correct black and white version and the regrettable ‘abomination against mankind’ option of watching it stupidly colourised by movie criminals who should know better. I obviously went for the monotone version and, of course, also chose to watch it with its original mono sound, not some stereophonic recreation as also optioned on the disc. Honestly, these stupid alternate versions that nobody even remotely interested in films would ever want should really stop now.

Again, a simple plot this one, after another narrative opening to set the scene and, as it often did, serve as a warning to mankind. We are then in Sicily where a fishing boat sees a rocket crash into the sea. The two fishermen and a boy, Pepe, go to help, pulling out the last two surviving crew members (although only one lives to tell the tale). The rocket has just returned from mankind’s first visit to the planet Venus and, as Marisa Leonardo (played by Joan Taylor) nurses the surviving Colonel Robert Calder (played by William Hopper) back to health, Pepe finds part of the contents of the now sunken rocket washed up on the beach and, finding a jellied egg in a container, sells it to the local zoologist for 200 pesetas (so he can buy himself a cowboy hat).  The zoologist also happens to be Marisa’s grandfather.

Anyway, as you would expect, while Marisa and Colonel Calder begin the first approaches to a romantic relationship, the egg hatches and the creature inside, known as Ymir, births and eventually breaks loose to go on a relatively peaceful rampage ending at the coliseum at Rome, hunted by the army after escaping captivity as a result of an earlier, much more successful attempt to keep the creature under control. And, as you might imagine, it all goes downhill from here so, yeah, not going to spell it out.

The film was pretty good, I’d have to say... and it was refreshing to see a giant monster, this one a specimen brought back from Venus, let loose in Italy (a location which stop motion wizard Ray Harryhausen, for this is one of his movies, chose since he’d never been able to afford to go there on holiday off his own back, so took a film crew instead), rather than in an American, English or Japanese setting, it has to be said. It’s a bit of a hit and miss affair though. One obvious miss being the completely wooden personality of leading man William Hopper, who really doesn’t seem to have much ‘on screen chemistry’ with anyone else in the picture. Another problem being the way some of the effects work, excellent as it is, is blended with the live action footage... it looks a bit ropey in some sequences, to be honest.

However, in spite of that, those stop motion effects are really well done in this one. I would go so far to say that this is the most lifelike animation Harryhausen ever did (of the many I’ve seen). Ymir, the beast in question, is so well animated and is also quite fast, with no real sign of jerkiness to him... I was very impressed. That being said, although Harryhausen (presumably) named the creature Ymir and it’s what it’s been known as ever since, there’s no mention of his name at all in the movie, for some reason. Nor, indeed, any mention as to how the Venusian beast has the name of a creature from Norse mythology either. Not sure what’s going on here then.

One thing which did make me do a double take, however, is the scene where a farmer and a few military are watching Ymir in the farmers barn. The farmer drops his rifle and rushes towards the Ymir with a pitchfork, stabbing him in the back as the two wrestle. We cut back to... a reaction shot of the military witnessing the fight, with the same farmer still standing with them clutching his rifle, before cutting back to him wrestling with Ymir again. Yeah... I guess they didn’t quite get all the scene coverage they needed on that day then.  

Included as one of Indicator’s many extras on the set (they always do a fantastic job) is a 20 minute featurette in which the great David Schecter talks about the use of 1950s B-movie science fiction score as needle dropped (or rather re-recorded and altered in many cases) cues in the film, as well as ‘music director’ Mischa Bakaleinikoff’s original contributions to the movie. This kind of musically oriented extra is like gold dust these days and they couldn’t get a better expert on the film’s music than Schecter. Indeed, he produced a very authentic rerecording of the score which you can buy doubled up with the score for Mighty Joe Young at Schecter’s record label Monstrous Movie Music, right here... https://www.mmmrecordings.com/index.html on the side index under MJY and, yeah, I’d recommend buying pretty much any of his label’s releases, to be honest. I don’t usually go for rerecordings myself but certain people like Schecter and, of course, those by the Morgan/Stromberg team, are definitely worth grabbing while they’re still available, for sure.

And that’s me done with 20 Million Miles To Earth for a while. I have to say I found this one a lot of fun and I was more impressed with Harryhausen’s animation on this one than I have been on certain others of his movies. For me, this is one of Harryhausen’s more interesting works and I expect to revisit it at least once more in the next ten years. A cracking movie.

It Came From Beneath The Sea

Depth Collector

It Came From
Beneath The Sea
USA 1955 Directed by Robert Gordon
Columbia/Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

“The mind of man had thought of everything... except that which was beyond his comprehension...”
From opening monologue from It Came From Beneath The Sea

It Came From Beneath The Sea is the first movie presented in Indicator’s excellent, three movie Blu Ray set, The Wonderful Worlds Of Ray Harryhausen Volume One: 1955 - 1960. I’m pretty sure, like the next film also presented in this set, that I’ve never seen this one... so I’m grateful to the people at Indicator (aka Powerhouse Films) releasing this bundle. That being said, I think this is going to be one of my shorter reviews because, having just watched it, I wasn’t too much taken with it, to be honest. It didn’t help matters when I came to the menu screen after I hit play and it gave me an option to watch a ‘colourised’ version if I wanted. Okay folks... people who try and colour up old films which are lit for and therefore meant to be watched in black and white... are evil. That kind of dumb attitude is a crime against filmanity and this way of watching really shouldn’t be encouraged. I wasn’t happy to see this option on the disc... and when I say wasn’t happy I mean horrified/disturbed/foaming at the mouth in anger. For the record, I watched this in its proper monotone format, thank you very much.

However, I was very interested in it. Let me get the very simple plot out of the way first. Kenneth Tobey, from The Thing From Another World (reviewed here) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (reviewed here) plays ‘atom powered submarine’ captain, Pete Mathews. He and his crew encounter something which grabs a hold of their submarine and, after lots of wobbling of the camera and actors appearing to stumble around, they get free but with a huge piece of organic matter in their propellors. The Navy call in top notch Marine biologists Dr. John Carter (played by Donald Curtis) and Dr. Lesley Joyce (played by Faith Domergue). After over a week of study, which sees Joyce falling for the charms of both men (before settling on rugged hero Captain Mathews), they realise they are dealing with a radiation emitting giant octopus which is moving nearer and nearer to its food source (culminating in it wrecking the Golden Gate bridge). It’s up to the three, aided by the military, to kill the creature via its new jet propelled missile Joyce has invented, which burrows into the skin and can then be detonated later when it reaches the brain. And that’s enough of the plot... I’m sure you can work out what happens from here.

It’s actually an important film in some ways... because it brought together stop-motion-giant-in-the-making Ray Harryhausen with producer Charles H. Schneer. It’s a partnership which would stick and see each man working together for film after film until their joint last movie together, Clash Of The Titans in the 1980s. Harryhausen’s animation is pretty good here on the titular giant octopus, managing to hide the budgetary problems of only being able to afford six legs for the octopus but, I have to say, there aren’t that many minutes of the creature in this film. It’s mostly a dry film apart from when Kenneth Tobey and Faith Domergue get together for the romantic scenes... Domergue is smoking hot as a somewhat ‘atypical of the time’, temptress of a scientist. Of course, only one month before the release of this movie, Domergue played in the role she will be forever remembered for in the hearts and minds of science fiction afficionados everywhere... as Dr. Ruth Adams in the sci-fi classic This Island Earth (review coming, relatively soon). The tension in that film as she awakes and is released from a suspended animation tube a few minutes before the others, then chased around the alien craft by an iconic Metalunan Mutant, is something I’m sure nobody forgets.

And, being as this is a Harryhausen movie... I can’t help but assume that the name of the other doctor in this film, Dr. John Carter, is a deliberate homage (in name only) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ much loved Barsoomian explorer of the early 20th century. Another homage, perhaps, is that the titular creature has been swimming down from Japan after being hit by H bombs so, yeah, perhaps a little sly reference to Toho studios successful kaiju eiga from the previous year, Godzilla (reviewed here)?

All in all though... it’s not a great film. There’s a constant voice over narrative filling in between the main scenes and I can only assume it was intended to add a documentary feel to the whole proceedings because, frankly, it’s pretty unnecessary and could, perhaps, have been done in better ways within the main storyline. There are some odd choices in the movie too... with a jeep going around a sign in the middle of the road with a quick swerve but, once it’s speeding away from the giant octopus, instead of doing exactly the same thing, it opts to go through the sign instead... for no apparent reason, as far as I could see.

And that’s me done already with It Came From Beneath The Sea, I think. A nice one to see lumped in with a load of similar movies in a marathon screening event, perhaps but, as a stand alone watch I mostly found it cold... although the chemistry between Tobey and Domergue is definitely warming up the scenes they share together, for sure. I’m glad I saw it though and will end by quoting William Hurt’s character when watching this exact same film on a television in the great movie The Big Chill... “Sometimes you have to let art wash over you.”

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms

Full Fathom Thrive

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
USA 1953 Directed by Eugène Lourié
Warner Brothers/HMV UK Exclusive
Blu Ray Zone B

I think I must have been four or five when I last watched The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms... which would have been a TV broadcast in the early 1970s. So it’s good to finally revisit this classic film on a nice Blu Ray edition because, frankly, I remembered absolutely nothing about it. At the time I first saw it, I certainly wouldn’t have been that aware of the pedigree of the movie. I may have associated the spectacular stop motion animation with the great Ray Harryhausen as something similar to what I might have seen in a Sinbad movie. This was only the second feature length film on which he’d worked, after his uncredited contributions to the great Mighty Joe Young. I’d certainly not yet quite heard of (I suspect) his friend on whose short story the film was cribbed as a starting point, the great writer Ray Bradbury. But I’m pretty sure I would have enjoyed it at the time, although I might well have gotten it mixed up with Gorgo in my head, to some extent... which I’ve just myself found out was directed by the same guy.

Okay, so the plot is simple... a giant dinosaur is awakened from hibernation due to a test nuclear explosion overseen by some scientists in the arctic. Two of the people who go out onto the snow to bring back some post explosion readings, see the dinosaur but, one is killed and the other injured. That other being the film’s main male protagonist, Professor Tom Nesbitt, played by Swiss actor Paul Hubschmid. Everyone thinks he’s crazy... even his friend Col. Jack Evans, played by Kenneth Tobey, the star of 1951’s sci-fi/horror classic, The Thing From Another World (reviewed by me here). However, after meeting a paleontologist played by Cecil Kellaway (who you may remember from The Mummy’s Hand, reviewed by me here) and his gorgeous assistant Lee Hunter, he finds the dinosaur in some sketches and gets corroboration from a witness who has also seen the ‘sea serpent’. Hunter is played by Paula Raymond, who eventually ended up in Al Adamson’s movies Blood Of Dracula’s Castle (reviewed here) and Five Bloody Graves (reviewed here)... not to mention playing Margot Lane in an unsuccessful 1954 TV pilot of The Shadow.

Eventually, the creature makes its way to New York but the army have trouble dealing with it because, in a detail which is not usual with these kinds of movies (at least it seems that way to me), exposure to the blood and general vicinity of the monster leads to catching a debilitating virus. Luckily, Nesbitt is a nuclear physicist and suggests shooting the creature with a radioactive isotope into an open wound caused by a bazooka earlier in the film. I’m not very scientific myself but I can only assume this is a good cure for destroying both the creature and the virus... which is what they eventually do, killing the creature as it demolishes a rollercoaster in Long Island, standing in for Coney Island.

So yeah, simple plot but an entertaining film... if not one you have to keep your brain turned on for. Other actors of note in the film are the wonderful King Vidor from such movies as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (reviewed here) and Singin’ In The Rain (turning up as the psychiatrist asked to diagnose Nesbitt after his crazy dinosaur sighting) and the youngish, unknown actor portraying the army sharpshooter who is none other than the legendary Lee Van Cleef, who would go on to ‘appear’ in such westerns as High Noon (reviewed here) before finding his star in a variety of classic spaghetti westerns (For A Few Dollars More, The Big Gundown, Days Of Anger and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly... among many such oaters) and, of course, in his wonderful turn in John Carpenter’s Escape From New York.

And while the film is simple, it does have some nice touches to it, such as a wonderful shot of a whirlpool on which the title card is superimposed and, some pretty good and thoughtful animation by Harryhausen of the titular beast, it has to be said. Okay, so maybe on occasion the lines where the live action footage is matched up to the stop motion animation footage can be a little blurry at times but, it’s mostly pretty good stuff with a lot of attention to detail, I would say. I mentioned the inclusion of Kenneth Tobey from The Thing From Another World in the cast but, it’s interesting to note that when they first bring in Nesbitt to the arctic camp infirmary, they are reusing a set from that film. 

And like I said, the movie has a few things which you wouldn’t expect from a relatively formulaic monster movie, such as the inclusion of a virus subplot... not explored in detail but it’s certainly there and relevant to the plot mechanics, for sure. But another unusual thing it does is keep up the bluff of people not believing various eye witness reports (including that of Nesbitt) for a good deal of the way through the movie, focussing on the professor going to great lengths to get people to believe him, with odd punctuations of the dinosaur attacking more people who won’t be believed until the dinosaur finally pitches up in New York city.

One last thing though. If you are a lover of 1930s Hollywood Screwball comedies (and frankly, why wouldn’t you be?), you might want to take note that the big fake, prop dinosaur skeleton seen in Cecil Kellaway’s work area is actually the same model used in the truly great 1938 Katherine Hepburn/Cary Grant movie Bringing Up Baby. So, yeah, now you know... a good prop not wasted.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was made in response to the massive success of a re-release of the 1933 version of King Kong (reviewed here) from the year before (that must have been the slightly censored version of the film) and this movie was also a runaway success at the box office. So much so that Toho studios in Japan turned their gaze westward to come up with their own beast, which would of course materialise the very next year in the form of Godzilla (which I reviewed here). That being said, although the film is vastly entertaining and probably better written than many of the other 1950s behemoth movies, this isn’t up near the top of them for me. I prefer a whole host of others before I get to this one but, regardless, I would still recommend it to anyone who likes their giant monster movies and it would certainly be a great one to include in a marathon viewing session of such creature features for sure. Worth having a look at if you’ve not seen this one before.

Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger

The Tiger Sanction

Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger
UK/USA 1977
Directed by Sam Wannamaker
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

A few days before I watched this for my review, Peter Mayhew, the actor who played Chewbacca in many of the Star Wars movies, passed away. So I decided to watch Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger in his memory as he plays the’ man in the suit’ for the less fantastical, non-model shots of the Minaton character in this film... literally an automaton of a Minotaur. Alas, when all is said and done, my revisit to this material confirms my remembrance that, despite its status as a classic modern film with many people of my age group (I was 9 when this was released at cinemas)... it’s a truly terrible and forgettable film. Not that there aren’t some nice things about it but, after the brilliance of the film’s predecessors, also by Harryhausen... The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here) and The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here)... it literally does pale in comparison and I was, I’m afraid not for the first time, siting through this movie waiting for it to end.

That being said there are some nice things in it too and at least it gave Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer a chance to recycle some of their unused ideas originally conceived for the previous films in this ‘loose series’. I say loose series because none of the Sinbad films follow on from the previous ones and, once again, the only recurring character is Sinbad himself, always played by a different actor and, in this case, played by one of John Wayne’s sons, Patrick Wayne.

So the plot of the film is the usual one of Sinbad and the princess he currently fancies, Farah, this time around, played by Jane Seymour (who you may remember as Solitaire in Live And Let Die, reviewed here), embarking on a ‘road movie’ as such, filled with fantasy adventures. Here they require the services of a wizard/philosopher, Patrick Troughton, to guide them to Hyperboria in order to restore Farah’s brother Kasim from the spell placed on him which has turned him into a baboon, preventing him from being crowned king. So... yeah... a similar plot to all the others... a villanous magician (this time a woman who hams it up pretty good, played by Margaret Whiting) and a quest for some kind of magical artefact which allows everybody to meet various creatures. Unlike the previous two films, the creatures here are, for the most part, based on real life fossil creatures as opposed to the mythical ones Harryhausen was perhaps better known for. So asides from the Minaton (which is a great but totally wasted character because he never really gets in on the action) and three ghouls... we have a troglodyte (possibly one of Harryhausen’s best animated creations), a giant wasp, a giant walrus, the chess playing baboon and a big sabre toothed tiger from which the film takes its title. And, it has to be said, the whole thing is a spectacularly dull affair and I don’t know why.

The performances are okay and former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton plays the ‘good sorcerer’, with Taryn Power, daughter of Tyrone Power Jr, playing his daughter... who falls in love with the baboon and, strangely enough, still seems to like him after he’s transformed back into a man at the end of the film.

The film is also lifted, somewhat, by the inclusion of a quite good score by Roy Budd. Now it’s not mixed in very clearly in some of the movie and, consequently, doesn’t seem that great when you hear it within the film itself but, as a stand alone listen on CD it’s really quite a good score and, although it’s obviously never going to be as good as Bernard Herrmann’s score for The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad or Dr. Miklos Rosza’s score for The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, it certainly holds up pretty well. There’s even a kind of mini homage (I’m being polite here) to Rosza when the Minaton rowing music, heard at several points in the film, sounds like it was almost lifted directly from Rozsa’s famous rowing music in Ben Hur (reviewed here). He even introduces a heavy, ponderous rhythm and arrangement for the equally ponderous giant walrus, in that specific scene. Roy Budd’s most well remembered musical piece would probably be his title music for the Michael Caine vehicle Get Carter and, I have to say, I usually don’t get along that well with this composer’s work but here he composed a really decent score in a more classical mode with some nice orchestration so, yeah, the music certainly doesn’t let the film down.

Several things do, though, it has to be said.

The whole thing seems strangely less epic, for starters. Although this had the largest budget of any of the Sinbad movies that Harryhausen and Schneer worked on, it looks like a TV movie to me, with cheap looking sets and props and just a general lack of the spectacle and grandeur that you need to live up to the previous ones. Even the matte painting shots are sometimes covered up with rising mist or snow in the hopes, one can only assume, that it will distract you from looking at them too much. And don’t get me started on the big, polystyrene blocks used to ‘resemble’ chunks of ice.

Another thing is that it’s a very dark film. And when I say dark I don’t mean the drama is downbeat and morose... it’s literally dark with at least half the movie, it seems to me, being shot ‘day for night’ with terrible filters muffling the light (but, in that tell-tale way, preserving the strong, daylight shadows of the actors regardless). It’s almost like they were looking to disguise how bad some of the sets are, maybe? Still, at least Indicator have had the good sense and taste to preserve this aspect of the movie on their beautiful new Blu Ray restoration (this is the third film in their truly gorgeous The Sinbad Trilogy set). Some companies, who shall remain nameless, try to fix these kinds of scenes by trying to brighten them up on the transfer and thus killing any sense of time established visually. Those kind of companies also forget that these things aren’t just entertaining films, they’re historical artefacts to preserve the original works of art so, you know, you have to get these things right.

Another inexcusable thing is the amount of rear projection shots used when none of the fantastic creatures are being filmed. There’s a certain set of locations where, whenever the main actors are seen from the front, they are standing in front of a screen of the location with terrible, shadowy lines created around their figures... something you may expect from scenes blending modes with the actors but not in scenes just using the main cast. And then, whenever the cast are seen in the actual location, you only see them from behind and Jane Seymour, or the actress standing in for her, has a different coloured dress from the close up shots. This really isn’t good people.

There’s a sequence in this film, though, which really sums up what the film-makers thought of the intelligence of the potential audience. That’s of a seagull wearing a stolen locket on set and then, when she (it’s the wizard in seagull form) flies off with the locket, the ‘seagull flying stock footage’ has absolutely no locket in sight. This is terrible stuff but then again, I guess the ‘home video’ revolution was still a few years away when this was released.

The box office on this wasn’t great although it made a good deal of profit on it’s original investment and a fourth Sinbad film set on Mars was planned but, alas, never made. In America, the film was released less than two months in the wake of another fantasy film called, you know it, Star Wars and so, by this point, the wonderful (for the most part) fantasy films of Ray Harryhausen were seeming a bit old fashioned already. This is the excuse given for its damp squib box office at the time compared to films like Lucas’ first opening shot of his ground breaking sci-fi opus and I think, certainly in America, where even the previous year’s Logan’s Run was seen to be somehow old fashioned once Star Wars had hit, this was probably true. In the UK, Star Wars didn’t open until quite a while after Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger but, even then, I remember being not much fussed as to whether I saw this one or not and I think I eventually saw it as part of a double bill with one of those 1970s Spider-Man movies they created out of sandwiching multiple episodes of the TV show together. I think I was more interested in Spider-Man at the time.

At the end of the day, if you are into Harryhausen’s fantasy films then this is still one you should see and the newish but very sold out ‘extras loaded’ set, The Sinbad Trilogy, from Indicator is the best way to do that (since writing the first draft of this review, the same company has released separate, stand alone versions of the Sinbad films on Blu Ray). Indicator have shown time and again that they care very much about the restorations they do and even if you don’t like this entry in the series, the other two films in the set are more than worth the price of admission, so to speak. Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger is one of my least favourite of Harryhausen’s films but it still is worth a watch and it has the distinction of being both the second Sinbad film to have a Bond girl in it, with Jane Seymour (the great Caroline Munro from The Spy Who Loved Me starred in The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, although she was a Bond girl after she filmed that one) and, with Patrick Troughton, also the second to feature one of the Doctor Who actors (again, Tom Baker starred in The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad). So don’t turn your back on this one... just don’t expect great things from it, would be my advice.

Harryhausen - The Lost Movies

Stopped Motion

Harryhausen -
The Lost Movies
by John Walsh
Titan Books ISBN: 978-1789091106

Many viewers of fantasy cinema love the stop motion worlds created for the screen by the late, great Ray Harryhausen in films such as The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here). However, do you remember Ray Harryhausen’s 1959 movie version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars... in Cinerama, no less? Or how about his 1969 version of Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian character?

If you’re scratching your head and thinking quizzically about that then don’t worry, you’re not losing your mind and tripping into some fantastic alternative reality. These are film projects that were planned at the time and never came to pass and, fascinating as they are, this is just scratching the surface of John Walsh’s new book Harryhausen - The Lost Movies.

Written by the current gatekeeper, so to speak, of the legacy of this remarkable stop motion animator and film maker extraordinaire, this book is a nicely illustrated look at the many different projects which are the fabulous “what if?” periods of Ray Harryhausen’s life... mostly but, not always, coupled with his producing partner Charles H. Schneer, of course. And as you can imagine, it’s a treasure trove of lost projects that, in some cases most regrettably, never came to pass. It’s also a source of some quite surprising things, when you look at some of the cinematic treasures which were possibly ‘in the mix’ for Harryhausen’s attention.

Starting off with quote testimonies about the frequency of lost projects the average film maker has to regrettably turn his back on by five famous movie directors... Guillermo Del Toro, John Landis, John Boorman, Mike Hodges and Nicholas Meyer... the book goes through the life’s work of missed or passed on opportunities of the great man chronologically and with chapters set into periods of his work.

The book takes the works of three categories of ‘lost film’(and occasional TV show or series of short films like the proposed 1950 Baron Munchausen shorts) as it goes along with the different types designated thusly:

Projects turned down by Ray - these are ones which, for some reason or another, Ray either wasn’t interested in or saw some huge problems which might scupper the project and so didn’t spend too much time on them. For the Conan movie, for example, Ray knew he wanted to do it ‘straight’ to the tone of the original pulps and was pushing to go for a violent, gory approach for the subject matter... something he didn’t usually entertain as a good route with his work but, for this project, he thought that would be the right choice. Regrettably, various producers didn’t think a fantasy film with that level of violence would be deemed commercial enough for the cinema on the expected release year of 1973 (once all the animated creature sequences were done) so the project didn’t go ahead.

And it’s an impressive and surprising list of projects that Ray turned down, many of them which you could see would have benefitted from Ray’s golden touch and would have made sense if he’d taken them on. They include among them, such famous titles as The Giant Claw, Night/Curse Of The Demon, King Kong Vs Frankenstein, When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, The Land That Time Forgot, The Hobbit (in 1974), Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (although that lovely shot of him standing next to the stop motion version of the Tauntaun at ILM is reproduced in this book), The Princess Bride, an early version of the X-Men and David Lynch’s version of Dune. An impressive list of projects to pass on to be sure but there are many others mentioned in this book and in some cases it also talks about who approached him for which project and the reasons why Ray turned them down.

Projects that Ray was developing - these were propositions to make into a film project but which didn’t get finished for one reason or another and they run the gamut from the book being able to show just a single surviving sketch such as a proposed 1948 version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall Of The House Of Usher to having a load of surviving artwork plus assembled models ready to be animated and, in the case of some of the projects (and I guess you’ll need to scour YouTube to see some of these), actual test footage of the models in preparation for filming.

Alas, for some of these projects such as a proposed 1954 version of H. G Wells’ The Time Machine, no preliminary sketches have survived.For others of these though, you can get a real glimpse, sometimes more than a glimpse, of what might have been. For instance, Ray’s version of War Of The Worlds would have included the proper tripods from the book and not what George Pal ended up doing with his movie version. Or the much mooted Sinbad Goes To Mars project.

And then there’s a third category of films, where the movie was made by Ray and is another jewel in his filmography but sequences were either developed but not shot for these or just left on the cutting room floor. So a sequence where two Cyclopses fight each other in The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad was storyboarded out (the book is full of Harryhausen’s illustrations and models of these kinds of things, by the way) but never made it into the final version. Also, scenes with snakes (and also in the case of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad... rats) were cut out from most of the films where they were originally to be included, purely because Charles H. Schneer had a phobia about them and so he always eliminated those scenes first. One has to wonder how the Medusa in Clash Of The Titans got past him. Interestingly, a decade after the film came out, a young 17 year old fan sent a homemade mask of the Cyclops from that film to Harryhausen and Ray responded with an encouraging letter. Ladies and gentlemen, that young fan grew up to be the famous Hollywood creature creator Rick Baker.

And some of the commentary on these existing films contain their own surprises...

So sure, the scene in The Three Worlds of Gulliver where the title character fights a devil homunculus never made it to the cameras but, apparently neither did Danny Kaye, who was wanted for Gulliver but couldn’t get Sam Goldwyn to release him from his contract to shoot the movie.

Or the fact that for The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, Christopher Lee was originally wanted for the main villain of the movie, a part that went to the then unknown Tom Baker (and which brought him to the attention of the producers of the show that shot him to international fame).  Also from this movie, Orson Welles was apparently wanted for the role of The Oracle but an uncredited and completely unrecognisable Robert Shaw plays the role in the final film. As for the Valley Of The Vipers scene originally slated for the movie... well, you can bet Schneer got rid of that one too.

Also, I have to say that, judging from the storyboards in this book, the unused Shadow Men who created the Minoton from Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger would have been a really scary thing for children to view and, perhaps, should have stayed in the movie.

Fans of Hammer movies will also find much of interest in here with the unmade projects like When The Earth Cracked Open (one of the famous 'pre-posters' for that film is reprinted in this tome) and their attempt to make their own King Kong movie.

As for Clash Of The Titans, one of my least favourites of Harryhausen’s ouevre, it explains why the death of Medusa in the film is so different from the one in the Look-In graphic novel sold at the time of the film’s release. However, regarding this motion picture, the most interesting but, also, the most frustrating revelation of this book is the discovery made by the writer when researching this. That is the discovery of a TDK blank cassette on which is recorded John Barry’s rejected demo score for the film. I would love to hear this... as would a lot of people but, I’ve no idea what condition the tape is in or if it could be preserved for a commercial release. It must be a fascinating listening experience though. 

And that’s me done with this book for now. There are a heck of a lot of dead movies covered here and there’s many more you can read about in Harryhausen - The Lost movies. John Walsh has conceived and written a really fascinating book which gives a real insight into what some of these productions might have had going for them, with plenty of the original illustrations and models reproduced here too. A real dream of a book for certain readers, I’m sure and something most cinephiles of a certain kind will want to immerse themselves in. Definitely worth a read.

The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad

Super Kali, Fragile Mystic

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
UK/USA 1973 Directed by Gordon Hessler
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

I would have been five years old when I first saw The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad at a cinema in London. It was 1973 and I can’t remember exactly which cinema it was for certain that I saw this at but, a quick scan through of the supplementary marketing material included in the excellent new dual Blu Ray/DVD Sinbad boxed set from Indicator allows me to say that I’m pretty sure it was at the ODEON in Marble Arch, as it was then. It was the first Sinbad film I’d ever seen at the time... possibly even my first Ray Harryhausen although, I might have possibly already seen Jason And The Argonauts on the little black and white television set we had back then in the 1970s. It was also the same year that my parents took me to see my first James Bond film at the cinema, Live And Let Die, so... yeah, that was a pretty good year for introducing me to these wonderful characters.

I still remember getting on the tube train at Marble Arch after the film, clutching a copy of Issue 8 of the Marvel Comic Worlds Unknown in my hand as I waited for the train to come and take me home after seeing a film filled with wonder. This particular comic book contained the second of Marvel’s two issue adaptation of the movie and it had a beautiful cover depicting the battle with the big statue of Kali from near the end of the film. Alas, I never got around to tracing the first part in Issue 7 but one of these days I'll find the thing so I can read the whole adaptation.

As I stood there in the tube with my parents, gazing up in wonder at the giant wall length poster for Lamb’s Navy Rum on the other side of the tunnel, I didn’t make the connection that the alluring Lamb’s Navy Rum girl (alluring to me even at the age of 5) was the same girl who I had just seen as the leading lady of The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, the very likeness of whom I was holding between the covers of the comic I was clutching so tightly in my hand.

It took me literally decades to figure that out but you can pinpoint the beginning of my admiration/adoration of that particular model turned actress, Caroline Munro, right there. Even when I saw her in other much loved movies from my childhood, it took me a while to put a name to the face or even, truth be told, match up that face to different roles, to be fair. So when I saw her in other much loved films as I was growing up, such as At The Earth’s Core and another Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, I took notice of her even though I was unfamiliar with her name or the fact that she was the sexy girl in the half undone red jump suit, balancing a checquered helmet in her hand for Lambs.

This was my first Sinbad film though and, while I’ve watched it a fair few times over the years, the new Blu Ray transfer from Indicator is a great way to see this thing.

Now this film stars John Philip Law as Sinbad and absolutely no reference is made throughout the film to the previous Sinbad adventure, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (which I reviewed here), with Kerwin Mathews in the title role... nor to any of the other characters in that film, which seems to contradict the happy ending found in that last movie. So, like that film before it and the next Harryhausen Sinbad adventure, Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger, this one pretty much functions as a stand alone film. And quite a nice one still, at that.

The film starts off with a flying homunculus, shot at by one of the crew of Sinbad’s ship which causes it to drop a metal symbol on deck. Sinbad picks it up and wears it as an amulet. He does this after first seeing a vision of the film’s evil mystic played by Tom Baker and, also, a vision of a girl belly dancing with an eyeball tattooed onto her hand. This is our first sight of Caroline in this film but her face is in shade so the character can be revealed later via the eye symbol. After the ship goes through a very effectively shot storm, which looks and feels particularly hellish and after some shenanigans where Sinbad deprives Tom Baker’s villanous Koura of his metal symbol, he finds himself in league with a masked Visier who has another part of the symbol, played by Douglas Wilmer. They set off in a race to find the third part of the symbol which, when placed in a fountain, grants the person with these pieces special powers and riches. Aided with some new crew members such as Caroline Munro as former slave girl Margiana and his own trusty crew, headed up with right hand man Rachid, played by Martin Shaw who would find fame as one of The Professionals on TV a number of years later... the quest then takes the form, as most Sinbad movies seem to, of a road movie but with ships and sandals rather than using any actual roads.

Of course, various incidents and perils are thrown at Sinbad and his crew, mostly inflicted upon them by Tom Baker’s dark mystic, who gets a little more fragile and aged each time he uses his black magic to try and defeat Sinbad. He is aided throughout some of the film by Spanish actor Aldo Sambrell, who I believe also worked again with Caroline Munro again many decades later. For some reason, though, he kinda just drops out of the film about three quarters of the way through and I often wonder if this was the result of action that wasn’t included in the final cut of the movie.

John Philip Law is... perhaps a little wooden and naive in the role of Sinbad but he does look the part more so than the other actors who have played the character and it’s interesting because his stylised form of performance seems to play in direct contrast to Martin Shaw. Shaw, somehow, has a more naturalistic way of acting through the film and, although you’d think this would be at complete odds with Law’s approach to the movie, it actually makes for an interesting on screen chemistry between the two. It shouldn’t work but... yeah, it kinda really does, actually. Also keep an eye on Tom Baker because he makes this role his own and this is apparently the part which helped secure him the role with which he’s most identified with, the fourth incarnation of The Doctor in BBCs long running series Doctor Who.

And then there’s Caroline Munro, of course. She’s really great here but doesn’t have a lot of lines and so, similar to her role in Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter, if memory serves, she performs a lot of it a little like a silent movie star might. And she’s brilliant at it. If you want to watch a film where Caroline really has an unbelievable amount of screen presence, even when she’s not the main focus of a scene, then look no further than The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. I mean, yes, she obviously looks beautiful here... as she always does... but there’s a certain way she has about her that means it’s very hard to take your eyes off her when she’s on screen. More so here than in many of her similarly outstanding roles, I think it would be true to say.

Now the film is beautifully shot with some nice compositions scattered throughout and some truly amazing, Mario Bava-like lighting in some of the cavern sequences, where bright reds, greens and purples play against one another in the shot to truly give a visual feast for the audience. And as well as being a wonderful, artistic environment for the actors to perform against, we also have a load of the typically outstanding creatures animated and dropped into the sets and brought to life with the photo trickery of Dynarama (or whatever they were labelling the stop-motion process this time around... I believe it was called SuperDynamation in the previous Sinbad movie). So we have a wonderful sequence where Sinbad’s ship’s figurehead come to life to attack the crew... don’t know how many other ships kept their figureheads just inside the ship rather than outside but, I guess they needed to make this work somehow rather than just have it come to life and immediately fall in the water. There’s also a sequence where a cyclopean centaur has a fight with a gryphon... for no conceivable reason that I could see but, it seems to be integral to the finale of the movie somehow and it certainly looks okay.

And, of course, we also have the wonderful part of the film which made the five year old me really sit up to pay attention and... it probably has a similar effect on me to this day, to be honest. The wonderful sequence where the giant, six limbed statue of Kali is conjured to life and fights Sinbad and his crew with her six swords. It must have been an absolute nightmare for Harryhausen to choreograph this on set and then somehow animate it, frame by frame later but... well, the results are more than worth it as far as I’m concerned. Decades later, when I was playing Tomb Raider 3 on my Playstation, I came across a scene which was obviously more than just a little influenced by this movie, where Lara Croft has to fight more or less the same statue in a very similarly lit setting, by pumping it full of as many bullets as she can before taking enough damage to kill her. It certainly brought those childhood memories flooding back.

And added to all this, of course, the film has a standout score by Dr. Miklos Rosza. Now Rosza had a thing for epic pictures set in ancient times and he’s a good choice here... although the score is not nearly as good as Bernard Herrmann’s contribution to The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, for sure. Now, I always find late Rosza scoring beautiful but very dated. It’s like, however modern the film was, he would always be writing something like an old fashioned, 1940s Hollywood score and that can often overpower the visual images for films he scored which were made after the 1950s or mid-1960s, I reckon. And it’s very much the case here too, it has to be said but, I would also say that the years have been very kind to this film and now that we look back at it from a fair distance in time, the score seems to work better in context with the images, it seems to me, than they once seemed to. So I don’t know how that works but, either way, it’s still a lovely score and also a very good listen away from the film itself.

So there you have it... the story is not great but The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad does have some good one liners in it, such as “My heart is full of bravery but I have very cowardly legs.” and, combined with some good performances by the actors, good lighting and some stand out Harryhausen effects work, we have a truly fun picture which really holds up well now and will certainly keep the family entertained whenever it goes on. And it has Caroline Munro giving a truly remarkable, almost silent era performance which really draws you in. Indicator’s new set is filled with some pretty cool extras including a new interview with Caroline herself and it even has the old Super 8 cut down versions of the film as an option (which is a nice inclusion from a historical perspective). If you have the opportunity to grab one then the Indicator Sinbad box set is definitely the way to go with this one... you don’t want to miss out on this if you are a fan of cinema, for sure.

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.

Clasherific! Moves along at a Krakening pace...

Clash of the Titans 2010 remake US

Directed by Louis Leterrier

Screening at Cineworld

You know... I always liked the movies of Ray Harryhausen. Sinbad fighting the cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Jason fighting the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. Sinbad fighting the statue of Kali while Caroline Munro looked on in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. All these were great memories for me so, when the time came to go and see Harryhausen’s new venture Clash of the Titans back in 1981, this teenage boy was ready to rock. Unfortunately, when I came out of the cinema 29 years ago...  I left feeling disappointed at having seen what was probably Harryhausen’s least interesting movie. The only consolation was the robot owl standing in as a kind of ancient Greek R2D2 and that cheeky shot of Judy Bowker rising up from the bathtub... which left a definite impression in the mind of this 13 year old at the time.

So frankly... when I heard that Hollywood were doing a modern remake of this my first thoughts were... a) You can’t remake a Harryhausen movie with any of the charm that the great man himself would have brought to the formula and b) it seriously wasn’t worth trying to revive the corpse of this lifeless movie anyway.

When I heard it was going to have some post-production 3D added, I was even less impressed (3D is the BluRay of cinema right now... they’re just looking for more ways to charge you more money).

And so now, I’m going to make a total fool of myself in the wake of some exceptionally negative criticism of the film and say to you right here and now that the new version of Clash of the Titans isn’t just faithful to the original movie in many ways... it is so much better than the original and everything I would have wanted to see in that darkened cinema back in 1981!

This film is old time 50s and 60s Hollywood epic with masses of action thrown in for good measure. The small, cliched character sketches of the men accompanying Perseus actually work really well and the movie runs along at a Krakening... sorry... cracking pace with some great special effects and creature design. Well okay, so I didn’t like the design of the Kraken much... and I didn’t like the fact that Pegasus is black... but everything else from Charon to the Djinn and the giant scorpions is aces. There’s even a brilliant cameo appearance by the Bubo the R2D2 owl I mentioned earlier... looking exactly as he did in the original movie.... only better animated. And as for Medusa the Gorgon... well she’s really beautiful and looks like she’s just stepped out of one of the works of Alphonse Mucha. I’d hang out with her anytime.

And it’s got Gemma Arterton in it! Yum.

All in all a great movie for kids and adult fans of “high adventure”. Don’t miss out on this one. It’s clasheriffic!