The
Film: 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) BUY IT
The Principals: Ray Harryhausen.
The Premise:
Sinbad the sailor is about to get married but his bride gets shrunken
to a miniscule size. He must travel to the island of Collosia along with
a wicked wizard and a crew of criminals to get the ingredients to bring
her back. Which makes no sense, because at that size she makes his dick
look really, really big.
Is It Good: It’s
everything
a nine year old wants in a movie. The film doesn’t really ‘work’ in the
traditional sense – there’s no urgency to the plot, and the evil
wizard’s plan makes no sense whatsoever – but it’s really just an excuse
to trot out a series of awesome Ray Harryhausen stop motion scenes. 7th Voyage of Sinbad has some of Harryhausen’s most famous work, including the furry-legged cyclops and an awesome horned dragon.
I
like these movies because they have almost no bullshit in them.
Sinbad’s crew exists mostly to just be killed (usually while being
portrayed by tiny, wiggling dolls) and the plot – such as it is – exists
only to get the camera from one monster to another. I’ve always been
impatient with kaiju films because I feel like they spend way too much
time on people doing people things. Harryhausen’s films don’t make that
mistake. You’re rarely more than four minutes from a group of men
shaking sticks at giant monsters.
They
also look great. While shooting in Spain was mostly done for budgetary
reasons, the film gets a magical, Mediterranean look it couldn’t have
achieved in Burbank. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is
from that candy colored Technicolor era, when every hue popped off the
screen. Watching something as bright as this makes you very sad for the
modern day of green and blue movies.
Is It Worth A Look: Why don’t you already own it? The new Blu-Ray, should you have that technology, is great.
Random Anecdotes: This Sinbad, Kerwin Mathews, would go on to star in the next Harryhausen film, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver. He would team up with 7th Voyage of Sinbad director Nathan Juran (who also directed Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) in The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, which
I’ve never seen but from the title alone sounds incredible. While
Harryhausen’s films had other writers and directors on them, the effects
man really shaped the stories. He would create the structure of the
tale to fit the creatures he wanted to animate, and then leave the rest
of the live action work to other people, only coming to set to supervise
the shooting of background plates (those scenes where guys shake sticks
at monsters).