Double Feature: Jaws (1975)/Jaws 2 (1978)

To call Jaws (1975) a landmark is an understatement. There is a cultural dividing line of Before Jaws and After Jaws. After Jaws, sharks were the undisputed monsters of the ocean, the prominent shark fin slipping out of the waters now a symbol of terror. It’s a meticulously researched and detailed film that also launched a thousand myths, a whopper of a nautical tale inspired in equal parts by horror movies and Moby-Dick; and it instilled new, largely unjustified fears about swimming in the ocean. After Jaws, everyone knew who Steven Spielberg was. He had one previous feature film under his belt, The Sugarland Express (1974), but anyone who had caught his tense-as-hell TV-movie Duel (1971) knew he had this film in him; Jaws kicked him into the big leagues. After Jaws, Hollywood changed direction following an extended period of uncertainty and risk-taking that happened to birth some fantastic films. Though Jaws arose from New Hollywood and bears hallmarks of the American auteurs of the early 70’s, its tremendous commercial success heralded the arrival of the American summer blockbuster. After Jaws, Hollywood would take less chances in the interest of giving audiences more movies like Jaws. (A couple years later, Star Wars cemented the new model for the modern blockbuster.)

Publicity still.

Spielberg’s film was based (liberally) on the bestseller by Peter Benchley and written by Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. Gottlieb was an interesting choice, because he had a background in improv comedy, and his previous writing credits were for TV comedies and variety shows. Jaws made him the Jaws writer for a while – he wrote the first three films in the series – though he also penned scripts for The Jerk (1979), Caveman (1981), and Doctor Detroit (1983). Other than the “bigger boat” line (which was improvised), people tend to overlook that Jaws is a very witty film. Throughout Spielberg carefully balances suspense, shocks, warmth, and character-based humor. Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider, The French Connection), everyman and audience stand-in, can’t swim and has a fear of water, but he’s chosen to relocate his family from the tough New York City beat to the island of Amity. “It’s only an island if you look at it from the water,” he tells oceanographer and shark expert Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss, American Graffiti). “That makes a lot of sense,” Hooper says. The perfectly-cast Dreyfuss provides the film’s sarcastic edge, rolling his eyes at the gung-ho Amity fishermen (“They’re all gonna die,” he announces to nobody in particular), dismissive of Brody’s hesitations toward autopsying a shark in secret or taking a boat out into the hunting grounds in the middle of the night – Hooper provides the wine (red and white) and the reckless reassurance. Brody’s and Hooper’s third act interactions with enigmatic shark killer Quint (Robert Shaw, The Sting) are both funny and flinty – a master class for screenwriters on how to build drama and interest solely on characterization. Just as we think we understand Quint – with the famous monologue about surviving the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis – he regains his menace, destroying the radio Brody intends to use to call for help.

Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) on the Orca.

What sets Quint off is the shark’s impossibility. With his harpoon gun he lashes one drogue barrel after another to the racing shark, but even three won’t keep it afloat; it’s strong enough to drag them all below and slip into hiding once more. Brody asks Quint if he’s seen a shark do that, and Quint doesn’t answer. “That’s a twenty footer,” Hooper gasps when they first see the full bulk of their prey swimming past. “Twenty-five,” Quint corrects him, pushing the size into the record-setting category. Like Moby-Dick, the great white they’re pursuing is elusive enough, hidden and overwhelming in size, to exist on an almost metaphysical plane; it’s a symbol, an existential threat as much as it is a physical one. Spielberg keeps it mostly unseen in the film, shooting from the shark’s point of view or just showing the telltale fin, a necessity given the mechanical difficulties with Bruce the Shark, but it serves the suspense. In the world of Jaws, everyone is in danger of sinking into the shark’s domain – the place where the teeth are waiting. Spielberg subtly emphasizes this by shooting the water at just above the surface, as though you’re treading water, too. The climax, in which Quint’s boat the Orca (Orcas being shark-hunters) sinks quickly and Brody scrambles onto the mast while the shark circles, like all good horror movies is the inevitable conclusion of its nightmare. Brody, who is still learning his sailor’s knots, will confront his fear of water and his nemesis simultaneously in a hellish scenario, his companions gone (Quint eaten, Hooper apparently dead too).

Robert Shaw as Quint.

Grounding the suspense is the film’s authenticity, shark behavior aside. Amity looks like a real vacation town in New England because it was; the film was shot on location in Martha’s Vineyard, not in a Hollywood studio like seafaring films of the past. You really feel like you’re on the Orca thanks to select shots such as a close-up of one of the actors losing his footing as he scurries along the side of the boat. Footage on the beach nods to cinéma vérité with many shots of suntanning, sandcastle building, a couple making out in the shallows, and so on. Scheider is the prototypical lead of a 70’s film from New Hollywood: middle-aged, not conventionally attractive, cynical and lived-in. He looks like the fish-out-of-water New Yorker that Brody’s supposed to be, not a Cary Grant. He’s also willing to look vulnerable and naïve as he juggles the demands of the Amity locals and the self-interested mayor (Murray Hamilton, The Graduate). Dreyfuss, reportedly modeled after Spielberg himself, is the most likable character in the cast, but also smug and a know-it-all. As for Shaw, his Quint is so astonishingly well realized that the actor completely disappears. If you have ever lived near the coast or gone out on a boat, you’ve encountered a Quint or two; there is nothing exaggerated or mannered in his performance. I still get a shiver during his Indianapolis speech when he says “sometimes the shark would go away – sometimes he wouldn’t go away.” It’s tough to deliver a monologue without it seeming scripted. Shaw acts like each word is occurring to him one at a time while the memories come barreling back.

Brody takes his shot.

John Williams helps Spielberg balance the film’s many tones, which in its third act are often changing abruptly, veering between dread and jauntiness. I’m often struck by the “fun nautical adventure” theme which Williams goes to again and again during the battle with the shark – so at odds with his more famous two-note theme for the shark itself. It is part and parcel with the warmth with which Spielberg is so associated. (For example, Brody’s sometimes tender interactions with his wife and two sons echo later family-centered films of Spielberg’s.) But as we approach the finale and Williams reminds us that we’re having an adventure at sea, he offers the audience a chance to see Jaws not as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre-on-water but as entertainment. This is, after all, the dawn of the modern blockbuster, and Jaws is a film that appeals to everyone. It’s a horror film that ends with catharsis and triumph: “Smile, you son of a bitch!” and a proto-Death Star explosion. Even the dead can be brought back to life and help you paddle your way back to the mainland. And perhaps with his varied themes, dark and light, Williams is tapping into the spirit of Quint, a man battling grim memories – blood in the waters, friends bitten in half – by singing sea shanties. “Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies…” After all, you may gather scars, but you can always take pleasure in displaying them to your comrades with a leg draped over the table. Williams captures this bipolar spirit in his multi-faceted score, and following Jaws he would be the film composer for tentpole movies, linking his name to Star Wars (1977) and Superman (1978) in rapid succession.

A new shark is on the hunt in “Jaws 2.”

Jaws‘ perfect cast is reflected in its contractually-negotiated arrangement of the three names above the title, Robert Shaw’s name lifted slightly above Scheider’s and Dreyfuss’ and vaguely mirroring the pointed shape of the shark head bursting from the water. (In the poster, the shark head is right above their names, as though following the arrow they form – up to the innocent swimmer dwarfed by the great white.) For the sequel, Shaw’s character was dead and Dreyfuss was taking starring roles in movies like The Goodbye Girl (1977), so the replacement names on the poster and in the credits are Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, and Murray Hamilton. (Yes, Murray Hamilton. As if audiences were demanding, “Murray Hamilton had better be in this!”) Now Scheider’s name is lifted upward like Shaw’s – deservedly so. Spielberg had a miserable time filming the disaster-laden first film, so he was certainly not returning. Producers David Brown and Richard D. Zanuck chose as his replacement French director Jeannot Szwarc, whose experience was largely in TV, apart from his fire-breathing cockroach movie Bug (1975) for William Castle, a movie that was released a few weeks before Jaws and was quickly swallowed by it. Szwarc would go onto Somewhere in Time (1980), a time travel romance with Christopher Reeve that has gathered a loyal following; as well as the less-fondly-recalled Supergirl (1984) and Santa Claus: The Movie (1985) before gradually drifting back into television, where he’s still in demand today.

Brody loses control on the beach.

With Gottleib called back to write Jaws 2, one can’t envy his task; his answer to the obvious question of “Why another shark?” is simply a shrug and “There’s another shark.” (The idea of a shark taking the death of the first shark personally is an idea that the dialogue raises and then jokingly dismisses – even though this would become the plot of 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge.) A more logical sequel would take place somewhere other than Amity and with a completely different cast of characters, but never mind – money was to be made and Universal made sure to provide as much familiarity for audiences as possible. Also returning was John Williams, which was a big “get” in retrospect. On the soundtrack, alas, you can almost hear the composer growing bored. Although it’s still a fine score on the whole, the uninspired direction forces Williams to get more conventional with some of his cues. But you can also detect some exploration, with new themes to accompany the mostly teenage cast (Brody’s oldest son and his friends) which foreshadows some of his more playful themes for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequels. With Quint and Hooper gone (Hooper is off on an expedition, we learn), the story focuses on Brody and his family, and the presence of another shark offers the opportunity for more conflict with the mayor and the city council, who believe that Brody has lost his mind. But contrast the big beach scene in Jaws 2 with the original (and its iconic dolly zoom) and the shortcomings of the sequel are apparent. Scheider thinks he’s seen a shark, and he runs toward the water firing his gun, behaving like a lunatic while people panic. There is nothing here with the artistry and composition of, say, that chilling shot in Jaws of the family venturing out into the water on the mayor’s urging while the rest of the people on the beach stare at them from the shore. Later in the film, another shot, meant to be impactful, tracks from the stranded teens on their boat to a girl whispering a prayer, but it’s clumsily handled and overwrought in tone – a parody of Spielberg, unfortunately.

Brody requests that another son of a bitch shark smile for him.

Jaws 2 overcompensates for how little the original used its mechanical shark by giving us many, many looks at the shark. It only proves how effective it was to keep Bruce hidden in the first place. The lunging mechanical behemoth looks more fake with each successive appearance, though the abuse it takes provides for some unintentional laughs, beginning with its attack on a woman in a raft which ends with her fiery demise and the shark’s head ablaze, and culminating with the scarred shark electrocuting itself on a cable with some fire, sparks, and animated electric bolts. It should be pointed out that this is the film in which the shark eats a helicopter. The subplot focusing on Brody’s son Mike (Mark Gruner) and his teen friends puts Jaws 2 more in line with slasher movie formula, and their dialogue would fit right into a Friday the 13th sequel. If they don’t quite line up with the typical teen archetypes, it’s because there’s not a lot to distinguish them at all. (One plays the guitar. Another likes to read.) For a good while, Scheider and Lorraine Gary feel sidelined by the story of the teens, which is a shame given how well Jaws put their talents to use. They still make a believable married couple, but their humanity barely gets a chance to shine. Most dearly missed is Dreyfuss, but it’s obvious the actor made the right decision. Scheider would walk away from the remaining sequels and find strong roles in All That Jazz (1979) and 2010 (1984). Jaws 2 isn’t a bad film (particularly in light of what was to come), but it does demonstrate just what Jaws might have been without an energized director and cast determined to make the most of every scene they shot. Not every movie can change the world.

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24 Hours of Stop Motion Creatures

The recent arrival of Indicator’s Sinbad Trilogy box set, collecting the three Sinbad films with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, and Indicator’s subsequent announcement of the forthcoming The Wonderful Worlds of Ray Harryhausen Volume 1 (It Came from Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth, and The 3 Worlds of Gulliver will be included), make this a very good year for fans of stop motion. And with no better excuse I’m proposing another of my 24 Hours of Film marathons: the theme this time is creatures brought to life through the art of stop motion animation.

The medium of animating three-dimensional models one frame at a time evolved from the early years of cinema, with examples dating back as far as 1897. In Russia, animator Ladislas Starevich earned praise with films like The Grasshopper and the Ant (1911) and The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912); after moving to Paris he made a full-length stop motion feature, the very amusing The Tale of the Fox (Le Roman de Renard, 1937). In America, Willis O’Brien commenced his career with experimental short films including the proto-Flintstones comedies The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (aka The Dinosaur and the Baboon, 1915) and R.F.D. 10,000 B.C. (1917), then contentiously collaborated with Herbert M. Dawley on The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918). Dawley followed this up with another prehistoric-themed film, Along the Moonbeam Trail (1920).

But using stop motion as a special effect had its mainstream breakthrough with the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation The Lost World (1925), directed by Harry O. Hoyt and featuring O’Brien-manipulated dinosaurs. This hit set the stage for O’Brien’s involvement in the seminal King Kong (1933) after an attempt at a film called Creation fell apart following a long development process. The colossal success of King Kong ought to have triggered a wave of stop motion imitators, but the only clear successor was an immediate, rushed sequel, Son of Kong (1933), released mere months after the original and pretty weak tea by comparison. One of the young viewers deeply impressed by King Kong was Harryhausen, who began his own at-home experiments with stop motion animation before presenting his work to O’Brien. After working with George Pal on the Puppetoons series, Harryhausen finally had an opportunity to work with O’Brien on another giant ape movie, Mighty Joe Young (1949), and developed as an FX artist through his monsters-on-the-rampage films of the 1950’s before maturing with the full color fantasy spectacle of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). The rest of his work up through his swan song, Clash of the Titans (1981), is distinctive, sophisticated, and fun. On his heels came other stop motion animation artists including Jim Danforth (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) and Phil Tippett, who refined a “go motion” process to create motion blur in the model animation, notably in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Dragonslayer (1981). While the technique as a special effect began to fade in popularity with the advent of CG in the late 80’s and early 90’s, fully stop motion features in the tradition of Starevich continued up through Will Vinton’s Claymation specials and his feature The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985) through the work of Henry Selick (Coraline, The Nightmare Before Christmas) and others.

But for this proposed film marathon, we’re going to be focusing on stop motion creatures and monsters in the mold of O’Brien and Harryhausen’s essential contributions to fantastic cinema.

6am: King Kong (1933) D: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

Kick off the marathon with the high water mark of the giant monster romp. Although O’Brien’s animation is not flawless – you can see the hair ripple where the animator’s fingers moved the model; his dinosaurs seem crude in comparison to Harryhausen’s later work; and the sense of scale is frequently out of whack – the handmade touch is obvious, charming, and doesn’t get in the way of the film’s palpable sense of awe. The build-up to Skull Island (which looks like it was drawn by Doré), the exploration of the jungle and the discovery of its wonders, and the white-knuckle encounters with Kong himself are all irresistible and engrossing. Fay Wray is sexy and sympathetic, and Robert Armstrong – as Carl Denham – gives a performance just as outsized as the ape he’s pursuing.

8am: It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) D: Robert Gordon

Everything about this giant-octopus-on-the-rampage B-movie is typical of the genre for the 1950’s (square-jawed hero, pretty female scientist, scattered attacks from an overgrown creature followed by a hunt and a climactic encounter), with one exception: the excellent special effects are fully animated by Ray Harryhausen. This lends a sense of excitement to the expected scenes of vast tentacles uncoiling from beneath the waves and smashing ships or knocking sailors into the sea. The finale of course required a recognizable monument to be destroyed, and here it’s the Golden Gate Bridge. The fact that the cephalopod is never seen in full allows Harryhausen to hide the fact that he only built six tentacles for his armature, not eight. And though the script is strictly the basics, the leads – Kenneth Tobey (The Thing from Another World) and Faith Domergue (This Island Earth) – are very appealingly cast.

9:30am: The Black Scorpion (1957) D: Edward Ludwig

The Black Scorpion has a poor reputation thanks to its inclusion in the first season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it’s actually slightly above average for its genre – again, it’s thanks to the high quality of the special effects. Willis O’Brien had seen one proposed project after another crash and burn following Mighty Joe Young, and so it’s a joy to see him at work again in The Black Scorpion, a film that’s about, of course, giant scorpions stirring mayhem. The human characters are of secondary concern – and barely so (Richard Denning, who appeared in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, is the lead here). Of particular interest is a scene set in the scorpions’ lair inside a volcano, which seems to be O’Brien’s opportunity to revisit the concept of the Spider Pit, the infamous scene cut from King Kong and subsequently lost to history. While monster kids dream of one day discovering the Spider Pit scene, they’d do well to revisit The Black Scorpion for a glimpse of what it might have looked like.

11am: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) D: Nathan Juran

Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer launched the promo gimmick “Dynamation” (still just stop motion animation) with this Technicolor widescreen Arabian Nights fantasy. As with King Kong, there is not just one monster, but a whole bestiary worthy of a fantasy spectacle: a one-eyed cyclops with cloven feet; a dragon; the dancing snake-woman; the two-headed Roc and its vengeful mother; and, perhaps most impressive of all, a reanimated skeleton which lifts a sword and shield to duel with Kerwin Mathews’ Sinbad the Sailor. This raised the bar for the art form, and only Harryhausen would be the one to top himself. It formed a template for later spectacles like Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans.

12:30pm: Mysterious Island (1961) D: Cy Endfield

Harryhausen took on Jules Verne with this very liberal adaptation of the novel Mysterious Island, adding a subplot with the isolated Captain Nemo (Herbert Lom, A Shot in the Dark) experimenting and creating oversized creatures, like a giant crab, giant bees, and a prehistoric bird (the Phorusrhacos). Battling these beasts is a group of castaways – Union soldiers fleeing a Confederate prison with a hot air balloon, and a pair of British women (Joan Greenwood and Beth Rogan) washed up following a shipwreck. Add pirates to this mix and this is the perfect matinee adventure.

2:30pm: Jason and the Argonauts (1963) D: Don Chaffey

Harryhausen’s supreme masterpiece captures the sense of awe present in King Kong and expands that feeling to encompass an entire imagined world drenched in Greek mythology. Jason (Todd Armstrong) guides his Argonauts from one dangerous island to another in search of the Golden Fleece, encountering harpies, the bronze giant Talos, crashing rocks, the deadly multi-headed Hydra, and – most impressive of all – a squad of sword-wielding skeletons, perfectly choreographed with the live action footage to easily top the duel in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. As with 7th Voyage, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, and Mysterious Island, the imaginative score is by Bernard Herrmann at the top of his game. It would be his final collaboration with Harryhausen.

4:30pm: Laserblast (1978) D: Charles Band

After a heaping helping of Harryhausen, it’s time for something a little…different. I remember renting the Charles Band-directed Laserblast as a kid and not knowing what to make of it, other than I liked the stop motion aliens. Those, by the way, are by Dave Allen, who would later receive an Academy Award nomination for his work on the special effects of Young Sherlock Holmes (1985). Allen’s turtle-like aliens are pretty much the high point of Laserblast, which, like The Black Scorpion, also appeared on MST3K (except this time it was well deserved). Kim Milford plays a disaffected, frequently shirtless teen who discovers a laser gun of extraterrestrial origin and uses it to destroy his enemies, losing his soul in the process. Of note to cult movie buffs is the welcome presence of Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith (Caged Heat, Lemora, Revenge of the Cheerleaders) as his girlfriend – and, yes, there’s also Eddie Deezen.

6pm: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) D: Val Guest

Technically Hammer’s follow-up to One Million Years BC (1966) – well, one of them – this prehistoric survivalist adventure substitutes Jim Danforth for the original’s Harryhausen. It’s a good swap. Danforth is a talented stop motion wizard, and he would collaborate with Harryhausen on Clash of the Titans. But the 70’s were an odd and unstable period for Hammer, as the studio gradually entered a decline. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is one of their last films to feel like an epic, the animated dinosaurs giving the film a bigger budget look than it actually had. It also features – in its uncut international version – surprising, exploitative nudity for what would otherwise be a family picture (this is the version now available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive). Playboy model Victoria Vetri gets the Raquel Welch treatment here. The creatures are exceptionally well done.

8pm: Dragonslayer (1981) D: Matthew Robbins

George R.R. Martin just named this uncharacteristically grim and gritty Disney film #5 on his top 10 fantasy films of all time. “Vermithrax Pejorative is the best dragon ever put on film,” Martin writes, and I agree completely. What is especially remarkable is that the dragon is brought to life through stop motion animation that is almost entirely seamless. This is “go motion,” a process to conjure realistically blurred movements for the animated model. Phil Tippett, a stop motion animator who would later successfully transition to CG when Spielberg wanted to test it for Jurassic Park, created his own go motion technique (moving the model during each film frame exposure with the aid of computer-programmed movements) which was put to good use on The Empire Strikes Back (1980) for the Tauntauns and AT-AT Walkers. Although Vermithrax Pejorative does not fully appear on-screen until well into the movie – only parts of him are glimpsed, building anticipation for the big reveal – once he does, the effect of blending go motion with a life-size animatronic head creates a very convincing mythical beast.

10pm: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) D: Gordon Hessler

Many Harryhausen fans consider this the best of the Sinbad trilogy, and while I disagree, I can understand the logic. Not one but three cult icons figure prominently: curvaceous Caroline Munro (Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, The Spy Who Loved Me) as a slave girl; Tom Baker (Doctor Who) as the villainous sorcerer Koura; and John Phillip Law (Barbarella, Diabolik) taking over the Kerwin Mathews role as Sinbad – even attempting an accent. Harryhausen’s work is exceptional as always, creating a variety of monsters as Sinbad travels to Lemuria to retrieve a piece of a magical medallion, but the highlight is the animation of the six-armed statue of Kali, which does an impressive Indian dance (Harryhausen had a model from which to work) before it sprouts six swords from its hands and duels with Sinbad and his men – an interesting variant on the Jason and the Argonauts skeleton fight. The grand score is by Miklós Rózsa (The Thief of Bagdad). My only complaint about the film is that it’s a little slow to get going.

11:45pm: Caveman (1981) D: Carl Gottlieb

Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach (his wife and former Bond girl), Dennis Quaid, and Shelley Long star in this parody of films like One Million Years B.C. and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth – pretty much in the style of the prehistoric opening segment of Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part I (also 1981). The tagline is: “Back when you had to beat it before you could eat it,” which sums up the film’s level of humor. The stop motion dinosaurs are by Dave Allen. This is the part of the evening where you might want to pour yourself a drink or three.

1:15am: Flesh Gordon (1974) D: Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm

At the height of porno chic comes this X-rated take on old Flash Gordon serials, featuring the likes of Dale Ardor, Dr. Flexi Jerkoff, and Emperor Wang the Perverted from the planet Porno…just in case you found the humor in Caveman too sophisticated. It was shot as a hardcore film, but the explicit footage was seized by Los Angeles police. After Wang’s Sex Ray turns Earth into an orgy, Flesh Gordon leaps into action to stop him. Stop motion comes into play with the arrival of the Penisauruses and the Great God Porno (named by the SFX team “Nesuahyrrah,” or “Harryhausen” spelled backwards). Dave Allen, Jim Danforth, Rick Baker, and Dennis Muren all worked on the film, giving this silly softcore parody a higher level of prestige than most.

2:45am: Planet of Dinosaurs (1977) D: James K. Shea

This micro-budgeted SF adventure has a paper-thin story that’s a throwback to films like Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966) and King Dinosaur (1955), with a spaceship crashing on a primordial world lousy with dinosaurs. While the acting doesn’t rise to the level of community theater, and the dialogue is frequently atrocious, it’s clearly a labor of love. The stop motion animation – including a host of dinos and a giant spider – is very well done, with credit to lead animator Doug Beswick, who would go on to work on The Empire Strikes Back, The Terminator (1984), and Aliens (1986). He had also contributed to Flesh Gordon (naturally). Jim Danforth is credited as the matte artist.

4:15am: Clash of the Titans (1981) D: Desmond Davis

Let’s go out on a high note. Clash of the Titans was the last great fantasy film to lean heavily on stop motion effects, and appropriately it was the final feature film by Harryhausen. The stalking by Perseus (Harry Hamlin) of the rattlesnake-tailed gorgon Medusa by flickering torchlight and shifting shadows introduced a new dimension to Harryhausen’s art: pure claustrophobic tension. Aided by Jim Danforth and Steven Archer, Harryhausen also brings us winged Pegasus, a colossal vulture who carries away the Princess Andromeda (Judi Bowker), a host of giant scorpions, Bubo the mechanical owl, and the four-armed Kraken. It’s infinitely better than its remake – because you can admire the craftsmanship of its handmade special effects.

* * *

An alternate 24 hour marathon (actually 26 hours) can take you through Harryhausen’s entire body of work:

6am: Fairy Tales (Mother Goose Stories, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, King Midas, The Tortoise and the Hare)
7am: Mighty Joe Young (1949)
8:45am: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
10:15am: It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)
11:45am: Dinosaur Excerpt from The Animal World (1956)
12pm: Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)
1:30pm: 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
3pm: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
4:30pm: The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960)
6:15pm: Mysterious Island (1961)
8pm: Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
9:45pm: First Men in the Moon (1964)
11:30pm: One Million Years B.C. (1966)
1:15am: The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
2:50am: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)
4:30am: Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977)
6:30am: Clash of the Titans (1981)

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The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

As fantasy films go, they don’t get much better than this. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) was also the seventh big-screen voyage of Ray Harryhausen, whose magical stop motion creatures populated Mighty Joe Young (1949, alongside mentor Willis O’Brien), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), The Animal World (1956 – a brief dinosaur sequence for Irwin Allen’s documentary), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957). The chief difference was that Harryhausen was now shooting in full color widescreen, which presented the artist with new technical challenges, and which allowed producer Charles H. Schneer to rebrand the process as “Dynamation” as a marketing hook. It was a low budget film for Columbia Pictures that had a first-class sheen. With location shooting in Spain and a score by Hitchcock favorite Bernard Herrmann at the peak of his career (this was the year of Vertigo), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad became a landmark fantasy film, every bit as influential – if not more so – than the film which inspired Harryhausen, Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad (1940). It was the film that launched a thousand monster kids, and now it’s finally received the treatment it deserves in a U.K. Blu-ray/DVD limited edition box set that can also be called landmark, Indicator’s The Sinbad Trilogy, which bundles 7th Voyage with its belated but very fun sequels The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). Sourced from a new 4K restoration, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is the jewel of the set, but the whole box is as fan-friendly as imaginable: finally the movies are stuffed with extras, including new and vintage interviews, promo clips and documentaries, the Super 8 versions, and a thick booklet with detailed production notes on each film. Best of all, it’s region free, so American fans should jump on this box set while they have the chance.

Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and the miniature Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant).

Harryhausen had been trying to get 7th Voyage off the ground for years, but was unable to convince studios that audiences would be interested in his brand of Arabian Nights spectacle, the genre having been run into the ground. He was stuck instead in the 50’s giant-monster rut (admittedly producing some of the best examples of its kind). A talented draftsman, he had produced a number of detailed drawings of key sequences from the film to help sell it: the cyclops roasting a sailor on a spit and crushing another with a tree; a giant baby Roc being dragged from its egg; Sinbad battling a living skeleton on a spiral staircase; a confrontation with a dragon. He didn’t have a story, though, and when Schneer was able to convince Columbia to finance the film at last, TV writer Kenneth Kolb was hired to tie those drawings together into a coherent Arabian Nights pastiche. You might think that story should come first, but this approach became key to the film’s indelible appeal. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is chock full of wondrous set pieces which originated in those imaginative drawings. Whereas a fan of SF and fantasy in the 50’s was accustomed to suffering through long, tedious dialogue scenes for brief glimpses of a disappointing-looking monster, 7th Voyage puts its bestiary front and center. Its iconic creature, the giant cyclops with a satyr’s body, appears mere minutes into the film, striding onto a beach on the isle of Colossa in pursuit of the evil sorcerer Sokurah (Torin Thatcher, The Robe) and his magic lamp. This approach significantly separates Harryhausen’s picture from the film which he cited as his career inspiration, King Kong, which slowly built up to its Skull Island revelations.

The two-headed baby Roc.

7th Voyage thus has a completely different feel than his Kong-inspired monster movies of the 50’s. It’s a family friendly Orientalist romp, actually delivering on those false promises that appeared on so many 50’s B-movie posters. Even watching the film today, you can feel Harryhausen relishing the opportunity to make the kind of monster movie that fans wanted but which stingy studios were so reluctant to provide (it’s tragic to follow O’Brien’s post-Kong career and the number of missed opportunities, and Harryhausen is eager to put the art of stop-motion animation front and center in fantasy filmmaking once again). This is the film that would launch Harryhausen’s golden age, which crested with the technical achievements and pure joy of Jason and the Argonauts (1963), a movie that was also structured around its special effect set pieces – Sinbad in ancient Greece. In fact, 7th Voyage seems to draw more from Greek mythology than the original Sinbad stories, with its cyclops battle closely mirroring Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus. The genie is borrowed from the tale of Aladdin, though Harryhausen and Schneer decided to make him a young boy (Richard Eyer), cleverly giving little boys in the audience their own wish-fulfillment stand-in. The casting also draws parallels between the genie’s enslavement to the owner of the lamp and any child’s chafing against parental authority. (At the end of the film, he’s thrilled to become a cabin boy, and overjoyed when Sinbad lets him take the wheel of his ship like handing a teenager the keys to the car.)

The famous skeleton duel.

The cast is uniformly appealing, with Kerwin Mathews – young, athletic, and full of conviction – making the best of the series’ three Sinbads, and well paired with Kathryn Grant (soon to be Mrs. Bing Crosby) as a most beautiful Princess Parisa. Grant is so irrepressible that she’s not even put out to find herself shrunken to doll-size by the scheming Sokurah, who’s looking for an excuse for Sinbad to mount an expedition back to Colossa (where Sokurah was forced to abandon his magic lamp). In retrospect the miniaturization effects feel like a dry run for the next Harryhausen/Schneer film, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), which would also star Mathews. Thatcher’s performance as Sokurah strikes the right balance between false humility and sinister plotting, his true nature coming to the fore when his eyes glow with blue light as he brings a skeleton to life, his hands miming like a puppeteer’s as he draws the undead creature forward. The Spanish location shooting provides striking backgrounds – steep cliffs and thick forests – that match Harryhausen’s original Doré-style sketches. It’s the sort of setting that seems natural for the lair of a cloven-hoofed cyclops or a fire-breathing dragon. Miniature sets are optically matted in to enhance the environments, most notably for Sokurah’s castle constructed inside a mountain. Scenes at sea were shot on an anchored ship, and during the storm sequence, the contents of the filthy harbor were blasted at the poor cast with hoses.

Barani the genie (Richard Eyer) and Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant) inside the magic lamp.

Nathan Juran, who had directed 20 Million Miles to Earth, was an Oscar-winning art director who had no issue accommodating Harryhausen’s unusual technical demands (Harryhausen had to be on location to help the actors interact with his invisible creations). Juran would go on to direct the 7th Voyage clone Jack the Giant Killer (1962), which also starred Mathews and Thatcher and which featured stop motion effects by future Clash of the Titans animator Jim Danforth. Herrmann’s score for 7th Voyage is one of his very best, which is saying something, considering that this is the man who scored The Day the Earth Stood Still, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Taxi Driver. A fan of fantasy eager to embrace the subject, his music invokes the exotic world of the Nights in much the style of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. But it is also lively and changeable, providing different cues for the various characters and creatures, most notably in the propulsive duel with the skeleton. Herrmann enjoyed the collaboration so much that he reunited with Harryhausen and Schneer for The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, Mysterious Island (1961), and Jason and the Argonauts. So in many ways The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was the start of something – a new chapter in Harryhausen’s career and for fantasy film in general. It was also a reminder that the genre should not be afraid to embrace the elements that make it fantasy. The new Indicator Sinbad set belongs on the shelf of every fan of imaginative cinema.

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