"THE 7^TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD" (1958)

Starring

Kerwin Mathews

Kathryn Grant

Richard Eyer

Torin Thatcher

Directed by Nathan Juran

84 minutes

I quite like the films of Ray Harryhausen. I doubt you’re at all surprised by that.

They’re a distinct part of my childhood. In my home, the annual ITV or Channel 4 showing of Jason and the Argonauts around Christmas time was a match-see event and the film never lost its magic. I’ve got it on DVD now and it still hasn’t. It’s not an original observation to make that Ray’s model work (yes, he posed for saucy photos) was fantastic and the giant statues and ogres the he constructed for his series of mythical yarns were all terrifying in the eyes of a five-year-old child. I still feel a shiver in my spine and a sense of awe when I watch Jason’s Talos, the great bronze statue, slowly coming to life, complete with unearthly metallic screeching and thunderous "incidental" music. The giant monsters of Ray’s films really do play on the imagination. You might just be watching a big latex Cyclops stomping around some sand attacking assorted blacked-up extras but when you mentally teleport yourself into the film - when you imagine rushing about being pursued by a gigantic roaring monster intent on catching and killing you - it’s damn scary. It’s probably what Doctor Who meant to many generations of youngsters but I was too old to appreciate it at the time I got into the program. But I always had Ray Harryhausen’s films. They don’t scare me any more but they can sure as Hell unnerve me.

The three I particularly remember watching over and over were Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (which every Who fan has seen, I’ll be bound) and Clash of the Titans and I loved every minute of all of them. I haven’t actually seen Titans for years and the memory is fading a little – so I was delighted to see that it was released on DVD a few weeks ago and promptly got my mum to make it a top priority Christmas present alongside the new Eccleston series. Though I can’t remember most of it – certainly not Maggie Smith and ol’ Larry Olivier – the image of Medusa, with fiery shadows flickering across her face, is etched on my memory. I’ll enjoy watching it again, curled up on the sofa with a box of Celebrations chocolates with the lights turned off. Interestingly, I only really get a yearning to watch the films around December time. Last Christmas I asked for almost the entire back catalogue of Harryhausen’s films but only actually got around to watching them toward the end of January. By then I just couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for them and when I finally watched them I got bored quickly. To be fair, the majority of them were from his black-and-white sci-fi movie period, the likes of which don’t really compare to the colour myths and legends adventures made later; they’re a lot sillier, full of stern army guys chewing cigars and patronising the capable female scientists on hand when they ought to be stopping a dinosaur or an octopus from wrecking a city. They are fun but in a campy "this is a farcical bit of nonsense" way. But I also got The 7th Voyage of Sinbad at the same time and watched it at the end of the following month when I was doing the Sunday ironing. I just couldn’t get into it. It was probably the wrong time and the wrong atmosphere but it just didn’t engage me at all. Monsters and magicians and genies and all – and I wasn’t enthralled one iota. In fact I decided it was probably a bit rubbish, stuck it on the shelf and left it to gather dust.

I don’t know what made me pull the box back out earlier this afternoon. Perhaps because I was in the mood for that sort of film at last and I wanted one I wasn’t too familiar with (there’s only so many times you can watch Tom Baker jumping about in a turban shouting "Now you cannot see me at all!"). But watch it I did, this afternoon, in a darkened room lit only by a couple of lamps. And despite my relatives buzzing about me and trying to cut in with questions about how I was doing at college and whether Edinburgh had got back to me yet (the devils) I actually enjoyed it. I could transfer myself happily into the world presented to me at long last. And, bugger me (actually, don’t), the Cyclops is terrifying! Yes! It is! I found myself actually fascinated as it roared and stomped about and started crushing people with trees. I was a bloodthirsty five-year-old again!

It’s quite surprising that there’s an entire trilogy of Sinbad films given that they all have the same ingredients and more or less the same plot – it’s one movie three times over. Take Sinbad, a vapid and strongly American action hero; give him a beautiful young woman to spout cod-romantic gibberish at; conjure up an evil magician for everybody to do battle with; throw in some mysterious islands and sandy locales; and finally sprinkle lots of monsters and giant animals quite liberally about the story (bonus points if you use a Cyclops or a giant – there’s at least one in each film) and voila! You have yourself a Sinbad movie. Extra nostalgia if you’ve cast a Doctor Who in it. I’d challenge anybody to watch all three of them in a row and not begin to get restless about twenty minutes from the end of the second one, but taken one at a time they’re damned fine entertainment.

To be fair, the films are never faultless. It’s telling that we refer to "Ray Harryhausen films" even though he didn’t direct any of them (to my knowledge) – just made the models. Go on, try to name three directors who worked on his films. I bet you can’t. It’s because the direction is frequently of the "point-and-shoot" method and seems to do its best to destroy any sense of excitement and exhilaration, which is extra kudos to Ray’s monsters who always manage to get the adrenaline running. In fact, sometimes they’re too good: the only reason we really watch these films is to see the monsters and when they’re not onscreen we’re simply given some cardboard actors yelling absolutely horrid lines of dialogue at each other. The scripts are always rubbish and the actors usually are too. For every Tom Baker or Lionel Jeffries or (gosh) Laurence Olivier we get in supporting roles, we have a John Pillip Law or, as here, a Kerwin Mathews to suck the charisma from the screen and beat it to death under a big rock.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad probably surpasses the typical problems best by giving us a bit of monster action about four minutes in so we don’t start drumming our fingers waiting for the excitement to begin. Sinbad and his gallant young chaps are sailing in a big boat across the oceans nearby the Island of Colossus. Quite why they’re there I don’t know but I suppose Cyclopes don’t congregate at Brighton. Probably. Sinbad is also accompanied by his beautiful fiancée who he spends time assaulting with dialogue like:

PRINCESS: "I think you invented the island for just this purpose [of marriage]."

SINBAD: "For another such kiss I’d invent a whole continent."

Fortunately we are wrested from this domestic chicanery when they all land on the island, walk about and get attacked by a Cyclops. Yes, it is that sudden. A ranting magician runs out of a rocky crevice clutching a lamp and the Cyclops chases him, roaring and waving its arms about like nobody’s business before noticing Sinbad’s band of miscreants and deciding to have a go at them instead. The Cyclops is a recurring foe throughout the film and, fortunately, it’s a wonderful creation. It looks absolutely massive and you honestly begin to feel that the actors are in actual danger from the thing, despite it actually being a model about two-foot high. Some people criticise the jerkiness of stop-motion animation and say that it prevents the models from looking real. Myself: I think it adds to the weird, ethereal quality of them. They seem scarier to me than if they were fluid CGI creations. Please don’t take this as a slight against CGI – I’m not one of those who sets about automatically condemning all computer effects as soulless and the like; remember, I love the Star Wars prequels where barely a second goes by without a CGI Ithorian or Twi’lek leaping in to wave and gargle a bit. CGI can look really realistic if enough care goes into it – Yoda from Episodes 2 and 3 is a case in point – but often CGI creations look too clean and shiny to really convince. On the other side of the show, models can look incredibly detailed and realistic when static but look horrid and cumbersome when they’re required to actually move. The best CGI looks wonderful but so are Harryhausen’s monsters, which constitute the best of stop-motion animation. Again, I think the slightly jerky nature of their movements actually adds to, rather than detracts from, the feel of it all; CGI monsters look good but rarely come close to being scary because they rarely look solid enough.

I’ll probably forget to mention it later so I’ll do it now: the music in these films always contributes to the general splendour of the proceedings, managing to underpin the action when required (a rickety xylophone for any living-skeleton scene, for instance, or low sinister stirrings for general island exploration bits) or simply boost the dramatic potential of whatever’s happening by a hundredfold. The opening tune to this film is particularly class, really putting you in the mood for some gung-ho adventuring with Kerwin Mathews. Erm, quite.

The magician, Sokurah, manages to put up a forcefield between the Cyclops and everybody else using the power of the Genie that dwells within the lamp, and the party escapes by rowing boat. Yet they only narrowly evade death when the Cyclops throws a rock at them and overturns the vessel, causing the magician to lose the lamp which drifts back into the claws of the monster who decides to sod off with it back to the valley. Sokurah tries to coerce everybody into going back to the island but is told to get stuffed and the boat travels back to… somewhere. Somewhere with a big palace and a Sultan, who says that Sinbad "is like a son". And given that logically Sinbad must be somebody’s son, that isn’t much of an endorsement for his special skills. Whatever they may be. Running and jumping, mainly. Baghdad, that’s the place. Well we’ll call it Baghdad anyway. Does it matter?

Things stop for a while as we get the plot dished out to us, though, frankly, there’s very little of it. In fact I’ll save you the trouble of lots of speeches and boil it down to two sentences: Sokurah wants to go back to the island to get the lamp. He shrinks the princess and convinces everybody that the only cure is on the island. And there we go. That’s it, really. Fortunately there’s a classy bit where the magician turns a handmaiden into a dancing snake woman who ends up nearly throttling herself with her own tale. Cracking stuff. In fact this entire sequence throws up one particularly glaring plothole as it’s never really explained why he’s so desperate to get the lamp, given that he seems to possess pretty formidable powers anyway (he brings a skeleton to life later on as well – a scene which serves as a taster for the fully blown skeleton army sequence in Jason and the Argonauts a few years down the line).

Anyway, Sinbad is told to lead an expedition back to the island, having managed to replenish his crew with various cut-throats from the nearby prison, who, unsurprisingly, organise a coup halfway across the waters. The leader, a badly blacked-up Danny Green (One-Round from The Ladykillers, and who was 55 when he made this film though you wouldn’t know it to look at him) mocks the fairly miffed Sokurah (so obviously nobody’s told him about the snake-woman stunt earlier on) and laughs off the magician’s vows that they will all doom themselves by their naughty actions. This turns out to be the case as pretty soon the ship is sailing in dangerous stormy waters that lie nearby the island of the Sirens, and their cursed wailing drives the mutineers mad (cue lots of wildly histrionic screaming and stage hands chucking buckets of water at the actors). Fortunately, Sinbad, Sokurah and a few other decent types have plugged up their ears to block out the wailing and, rather easily, manage to take back control of the ship. So the entire revolt was just a bit of padding, really, as nothing has changed by the end of the sequence bar the drowning of Danny Green (who, incidentally, gives us some very odd line readings, e.g. "This vessel could be ours." Pause. "For the taking.")

Actually, mention of Danny Green brings me to one amusing point about this film, and in fact the Ray Harryhausen mythology films in general; only half the actors appear to be attempting to put on accents reflecting the location in which the film is supposedly set, whilst the others (the leads, mainly) retain their broad American accents. It makes for a decidedly odd experience, especially when Danny Green, with his extremely New Yawkian accent ("They’ll feed us to the one-eyed munstah! Whaht shall we do wiv ‘um?"), speaks opposite, say, Torin Thatcher’s Sokurah who desperately attempts to maintain an elaborate Eastern accent throughout the proceedings. It’s also strange that whilst there are only a few black actors (kept as extras) and a lot of blacked-up ones, Kerwin Mathews isn’t given so much as a light tan. It’s difficult to believe that he even ventures outside his own home, never mind dashing about exotic locations and mysterious islands fighting off monsters.

Still, on with the story. Sort of. Actually I don’t think I’ll bother – it’s just a collection of set pieces anyway and I’d only spoil them all if I discussed each one. 7^th Voyage scores quite highly on the monster quotient, with a total of six different beasts opposing our foes at various turns, and things end with what would become the classic Sinbad staple – a climactic battle between a humanoid ogre and a giant quadruped animal (this time the Cyclops and a dragon). One thing that always marks Harryhausen’s work as being a cut above the rest is that his model creations always seem to have a personality of their own, with real feelings and emotions. When the Cyclops gets stabbed you can tell it hurts. It’s not just a clay model with a stick in its belly, it’s a creature wailing and crying out and it just works. Some of Ray’s earlier sci-fi B movie efforts featured monsters with which the audience could actively sympathise in true King Kong fashion, and it was an ability that Ray never really lost. Here it’s fairly muted as most of the strange beasts discovered on the voyage are all meant to be evil and bloodthirsty but a large and flightless newly-hatched Roc managed to make me hate Sinbad’s crew when they killed and ate it. I was firmly on the Cyclopes side by that point. To be honest you’re usually rooting for the monsters in these films anyway purely because most of the human characters are a bunch of berks (see also the likes of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and 20 Million Miles to Earth).

I’ve slagged off the acting throughout the film, though to be fair by Harryhausen movie standards its not the worst I’ve ever seen. Kerwin Mathews is as wooden as oak but the watered down Sinbad of these films doesn’t really have a personality anyway so Mathews does what he’s asked to do pretty competently. Kathryn Grant’s princess equally does what the part says on the tin and Torin Thatcher’s evil villain is to all intents and purposes a real life version of the Hood from Thunderbirds. Only young Richard Eyer as the Genie manages to impress by virtue of the fact he’s a kid who actually isn’t at all annoying – a rarity as you’re probably aware. The direction is functional and sets are fine. I doubt anybody noticed at the time anyway. They just gawped at the monsters.

And why not? Nobody who sits down to watch one of these movies is expecting cinematic brilliance, just a fun rollicking time with fantastic model work. It’s a typical mystical journey story, with goodies versus baddies, with lots of action and grizzly deaths (it’s surprisingly violent for a U certificate film – though I suspect much of the squeamish stuff is merely inferred and my mind filled in the blanks, which in many ways is more effective). In this way The 7th Voyage of Sinbad doesn’t disappoint at all and is probably one of Harryhausen’s best, ranking only a short distance below Jason and Clash of the Titans. To sum it up in five words - passes an afternoon very nicely.

Still, I bet I won’t watch it again for twelve months.

Score out of Ten