Worth Mentioning - Forged of Splendor and Magic

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

More mythological adventures!

THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958)

Inspired by the Middle Eastern folktales about Sinbad the Sailor that were featured in the story collection One Thousand and One Nights, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad – directed by Nathan Juran from a script by Kenneth Kolb – gets right to the action. Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews), the heir of the Caliph of Baghdad, is at sea with his crew and his wife-to-be, Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant) of Chandra, when they come across an island called Colossa. When Sinbad and his crew venture onto land, they’re quickly chased off by a giant cyclops, who thwarts an attempt made by another visitor – Sokurah the magician (Torin Thatcher) – to steal a magic lamp. Sinbad saves Sokurah’s life by bringing him on board his ship, but Sokurah is determined to return to Colossa and get that lamp.

While Sinbad and Parisa focus on the wedding that is meant to unite their lands in peace, Sokurah is scheming, figuring out how to get someone to take him back to Colossa as soon as possible. He gets his way when he shrinks Parisa, causing her enraged father to declare war on Baghdad. To get Parisa back to size and stop the war before it starts, he’ll need to retrieve the eggshell of a legendary bird of prey that can only be found on Colossa.

Sinbad recruits a crew that includes convicts and sets sail on what may be a suicide mission to Colossa – and we get a lot more action from there. There’s a mutiny on the ship (no surprise) that has to be dealt with before the crew reaches Colossa, the sounds of demons emerge from the darkness at night, and once they’re on Colossa they have to face the cyclops and giant birds of prey. Of course, this is all building up to a confrontation with this unscrupulous magician – and even that confrontation includes a skeleton warrior (a precursor to that famous sequence in Jason and the Argonauts), a cyclops, and a dragon!

Along the way, we also get confirmation that the magic lamp Sokurah is desperate to have is home to a wish-granting genie.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is a really fun movie, and the best thing about it are the special effects that were used to bring the creatures to the screen. This movie – like some other popular mythological adventure movies, including Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans – features stop-motion animated creatures that were brought to life by Ray Harryhausen. In fact, this was the first movie that was said to use Dynamation, the full color widescreen stop motion animation technique that Harryhausen created. It took him eleven months to complete the effects sequences in this movie.

Harryhausen’s work instantly makes any movie timeless and worth going back to again and again, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is no exception. It was a great success when it was released in 1958 and spawned two follow-ups – although, surprisingly, it took Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer fifteen years to get around to making their second Sinbad movie.

EXCALIBUR (1981)

The fantasy film Excalibur was a passion project for director John Boorman, who crafted the screenplay with Rospo Pallenberg, drawing inspiration from Arthurian legends, particularly Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory. It took Boorman more than a decade to get the project into production (and, for part of that time, a studio tried to distract him with an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings) – and when he finally got it made, there was no holding back. Not only does this film take an R-rated, very adult-minded approach to the legends, but it also covers them exhaustively.

This isn’t a simple, straightforward hero’s journey. The story spans decades and includes many different characters. An attempt at giving a plot synopsis would span multiple paragraphs, so I’ll just try to break down what’s covered in this film’s 141 minute running time: the sorcerer Merlin retrieving the magical sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake; King Uther Pendragon duping the Duke of Cornwall’s wife into bearing his child; the child growing up to be Arthur, who becomes King when he pulls Excalibur from the stone it has been embedded in; Arthur falling for Guenevere, who in turn falls for the knight Lancelot; Arthur’s half-sister Morgana becoming a sorceress and causing trouble, trapping Merlin and then duping her half-brother into conceiving a son named Mordred with her; the land being stricken with famine and sickness; Arthur sending his knights to find the Holy Grail; Mordred growing up and challenging Arthur while wearing a golden suit of armor that can’t be pierced by man-made weapons; and multiple battles.

Although the $11 million budget kept Boorman from casting some of the actors he had in mind (like the possibility of Sean Connery playing Merlin), but he assembled an impressive cast nonetheless: Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, early appearances by Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, and Gabriel Byrne. Boorman’s own daughter, Katrine Boorman, plays Arthur’s mother – and the fact that Katrine has a nude sex scene in her father’s movie has creeped out many a viewer over the decades. Nigel Terry plays Arthur, with Nicholas Clay as Lancelot and Cherie Lunghi as Guenevere.

If you’ve ever been curious about the Arthurian legends, Boorman’s adaptation is the ideal version to seek out because it doesn’t shy away from the magical twists and turns, but it also never softens the edge of these stories for younger viewers. This is a magical tale for adults.

CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981)

Legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen lived to be 92 years old, passing away in 2013, but he retired thirty years earlier – and he went out with an epic. Returning to the stories of Greek mythology a couple of decades after their collaboration Jason and the Argonauts was a box office disappointment (on its way to becoming revered as a classic), Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer – along with Jason screenwriter Beverley Cross – teamed with director Desmond Davis to make Clash of the Titans, a film that fully embraces the larger-than-life storytelling of Greek legend, never shying away from the gods, monsters, prophecies, and magical artifacts. This thing is packed with gods and monsters for the entirety of its two hour running time.

The story begins with King Acrisius of Argos, who was so jealous his daughter’s beauty that he kept her locked away. That didn’t stop the god Zeus (Laurence Olivier) from visiting her, though. Or from impregnating her. Enraged, the King places his daughter and her newborn son in a wooden chest and toss them into the sea. The chest floats to the island of Seriphos, where Perseus grows to adulthood and ends up being played by Harry Hamlin.

When Zeus transforms Calibos (Neil McCarthy), the son of the sea goddess Thetis (Maggie Smith), into a monster for destroying his flying horses, except for Pegasus, Thetis retaliates by transporting Perseus to a cursed city... but this just sets him off on an epic adventure. He falls for Princess Andromeda (Judi Bowker), who is betrothed to Calibos and can’t be freed from him unless someone is able to solve a riddle. Perseus intends to solve that riddle, even if it means catching a ride on Pegasus and fighting Calibos. This leads to more trouble, as Thetis and Calibos plan to get revenge by unleashing a titan, a sea creature called the Kraken.

To save Andromeda’s land from the Kraken, Perseus sets out on a journey that brings him into contact with witche and involves confronting the Gorgon Medusa on an island in the River Styx at the edge of the Underworld. There’s also a two-headed dog and giant scorpions. 

Perseus gets some help from the gods along the way, receiving a mechanical owl and a helmet of invisibility from Athena (Susan Fleetwood), a magical sword from Aphrodite (Ursula Andress), and a shield from Hera (Claire Bloom).

Clash of the Titans goes so far with its gods, monsters, and mythological dialogue that details may fly over the heads of some viewers, but that’s okay: even if you can’t keep track of all the supernatural talk, just stick around for the stop-motion creatures created by Harryhausen. They make the whole journey worthwhile.

Harryhausen and Schneer hoped to make a sequel to this movie, which would have been called Force of the Trojans. Even though Clash of the Titans was a major box office success, they found it difficult to get the follow-up off the ground, since computer effects were starting to change how movies were made. As far as some executives were concerned, the age of stop-motion effects were coming to an end. So Harryhausen retired to spend more time with his family and to enjoy leisure time. It’s a shame he didn’t get to make the sequel he wanted to make, but he absolutely deserved a relaxing retirement after giving us so many amazing effects to marvel at.