Sony Pictures
Let’s face it, nobody remembers 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as a Nathan Juran film.
It’s a Ray Harryhausen picture.
Ray Harryhausen was the absolute master of the mostly lost art of stop-motion animation. He’s credited only for “Special Visual Effects” but if viewers back then didn’t know he was the heart of the picture, viewers today most certainly do.
While this may have been Sinbad’s seventh voyage, it was the first of three Sinbad films created over the course of two decades by Ray.
Earlier and in-between, there were Sinbad films by others as well. Some, like Guy Williams’ exuberant Captain Sindbad, even had fun special effects, but this one has remained THE classic Sinbad picture.
We get right into the action with a stirring opening theme from Oscar-winning master composer Bernard Hermann, probably best remembered for his work with Alfred Hitchcock. There were, of course, no earlier numbered films in this particular Sinbad series. It was expected that the fictional Arab sailor was already well-known to the public via the legends, books, and earlier films (and cartoons) of his adventures.
The acting right out of the gate is bland, with terrible line readings from everyone except bald Torin Thatcher, who chews the scenery with wild abandon every all through the film.
If there’s another complaint it’s that Kerwin Matthews’ Sinbad looks like a typical short-haired white movie hunk of the period. John Phillip Law in Golden Voyage, with his turban and beard, is more my idea of a Sinbad.
The movie would have been made right around the time that co-star Kathryn Grant was getting a lot of publicity for marrying iconic crooner Bing Crosby, some 30 years her senior. The publicity couldn’t have hurt. She was in the news constantly and people wanted to see the young, beautiful girl who stole Der Bingle’s heart.
Mrs. Crosby is charming, but comes across as very modern. She plays a princess being transported to Bagdad on a diplomatic mission by our hero, who intends to marry her when they arrive. Sinbad and his crew set shore on an island where they find food but also discover and fight a giant horned cyclops, and rescue a wizard with a genie in a bottle.
The cyclops is one of Harryhausen’s genius creations and packs no less a punch now than he did when the film was originally released. He looks real, he moves like he’s real, he sounds real, and yet he was all done with stop-motion animation, a lost art in these days of CGI. The wizard helps the crew escape, but in the process, the creature ends up with the lamp, and the wizard will do anything to get it back.
He shrinks the princess, leading Sinbad to assemble a crew of disloyal prisoners to return the manipulative magician to his island in order to retrieve a potion to cure her. Along the way, there are swordfights and some impressive shipboard stunt work, and when they arrive, the Cyclops is hungry.
There’s a blue, four-armed serpent woman, giant two-headed birds, a fierce dragon, and, best of all, a sword-fighting skeleton! The costumes and sets are elaborate and colorful, and the adventures exciting, even the parts between the stop motion effects. Hermann’s rousing music aids the excitement immensely.
Harryhausen would double down on the effects—especially with skeletons—in his later Jason and the Argonauts but what’s here is just enough. The stop motion in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad doesn’t overwhelm the actors or the story but rather augments them, creating a unique style of entertainment that holds up even in these days of The Odyssey.
Extras include The Harryhausen Chronicles documentary, featurettes, photo gallery, music video, Harryhausen interview conducted by John Landis, and trailers.
Booksteve recommends.
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