Greetings gentle readers and welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s a classic “sandals and swords” fantasy: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. It’s suffused with the incredible stop-motion animation of the master Ray Harryhausen. Perfect fare for a lazy Sunday afternoon!
Next week’s film (Warning: sexually explicit scenes):
Reviews of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad:
Film Music Central says:
All of these creations are amazing to watch, but my favorite out of all of them is Harryhausen’s work on “Kali” a six-armed statue that Koura brings to life in a Lemurian temple. While named Kali, the statue bears more resemblance to the Hindu god Shiva (particularly in its initial pose before it comes to life). There is a beautiful scene where Koura orders Kali to dance and the statue obeys, all six arms moving throughout. Given how much care needs to be taken in stop-motion animation, I always find myself wondering just how long it took to animate the statue.
Medium says:
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen ‘The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’ (1973) since I first saw it decades ago as a five year old kid. In fact, there’re very few movies I must’ve watched as often as ‘Golden Voyage’ to the point where I can’t really imagine my life without it. It’s easily one of my favourite Harryhausen films so watching it on the big screen yesterday for its fiftieth anniversary I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to find it’s lost none of its charm, magic and delightful appeal. But why does it work so well? In my opinion it comes down to one thing and it’s not just the monsters, the imagination or the stunning stop-motion work (amazing though all those things are), and it’s this — ‘Golden Voyage’ is an incredibly breezy watch.
Letterboxd says:
One thing I love about these films is that they don’t fuck around. From the opening seconds we are off on adventure; a mystery is presented, a foe is introduced and a quest is established, all within the first 10 minutes. This leaves Harryhausen as much time as possible to get in his creatures, friend and foe alike, and let them cook. Here we get a small goblin homunculus creature, a ships animated figurehead, a killer Kali, a minotaur and a late to the party griffin. The creature count isn’t quite as high as the others but they all make a memorable impact.
My take:
I absolutely love this film. I don’t care about the quality of the acting or the plot holes, it’s all about the fantasy world for me. I remember watching it in the eighties and as a Dungeons and Dragons nerd I couldn’t get enough of it. The stop-motion action is so immersive and lends an atmosphere that you simply cannot find with the CGI slop we are inundated with today. A bonus is the presence of Tom Baker as the evil wizard. His screen presence here landed him his job as the most popular Dr. Who in history. Bond girl Caroline Munro’s outfit wasn’t lost on the adolescent semper loquitur either.
Director:
Director: Gordon Hessler
Writer: Brian Clemmens
Notable Actors: John Phillip Law, Tom Baker, Caroline Munro
Plot (Spoilers!):
Sinbad (Law) and his crew are happily sailing along one beautiful day when a small flying figure is seen overhead carrying a golden object. One of the crew shoots at it with an arrow. The crew wants to dispose of the golden tablet that is dropped but Sinbad has a vision and decides to keep it.
Driven to shore by a sudden storm, Sinbad encounters a man who had appeared in his vision. The man is Koura (Baker), an evil magician who demands his tablet back. Sinbad demurs and escapes to a local city. There he encounters the Grand Vizier who tells him the tablet is part of a larger piece that he has been seeking for a long time. The piece promises wealth, youth, and protection to the owner. The Vizier has a second piece and when the two are fitted together, Sinbad realizes they form a nautical map. They decide to embark on a journey to travel to the island the map reveals.
Along the way, Sinbad encounters a flying homunculus, a ravishing slave girl (Munro), and the return of Koura who is now pursuing Sinbad’s ship. They all arrive at Lemuria, a fabled lost island where magic and monstrosities abound. High adventure ensues, including fights with a magical statue and a Cyclops-centaur hybrid. Koura is almost successful in his scheme but a last minute bad decision on his part leads to him being skewered by Sinbad. The remaining gift of the tablet, a crown and untold riches, is willingly given to the Vizier by a triumphant Sinbad who instead claims his freedom and the lady for his own.
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Yesterday I reconciled with American filming while watching 2023 “Memory” by Michel Franco with Jessica Chastain (superb) and Peter Sasgaard (excellent).
Well do I remember seeing this at a Saturday morning kids’ matinee at the local film palace. Rowdy kids screaming, throwing things, and, indeed, lusting in their adolescent way after the almost demure Munro. Ray Harryhausen was a film category all his own. You knew at the back of your mind that this was some sort of trickery. Somehow, you willingly, as Coleridge put it, “suspended disbelief” and went along for the ride.
I often pair this type of film with something more modern in a similar vein such as Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
The essence of these types of film is that they are morality tales wrapped up in spectacle. The evil vizir is defeated, the captain deaded, while the heroes are left to carry on their lives a bit better off. The monsters, mythical creatures serve to demonstrate the effects of the mysterious divine on mere mortals. The world is often inexplicable, cruel, capricious; we do the best we can with what we have. These films sow the seeds of hope for fallen humanity. That’s good enough.
Stay safe.
I don’t think that I have seen this film since the 60s but Harryhausen’s special effects still hold up well after all this time-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROssbvtE41U (4:50 mins)
Come to think of it, I think George Lucas pinched the idea behind the Kali attack but swapping it for light sabers and gimmicks-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaBiygfkudk (5:02 mins)
I saw this several times at the weekend matinee showtimes. I was working as assistant manager of a theater that summer and fall, and the main things we showed while I was there were The Sting (22 weeks, good grief), Zardoz, and this movie.
Your comment about “stop-motion” made me think of a movie I saw as child, Jack the Giant Slayer (1962), which was heavily influenced (some say “ripped off”) by Harryhausen’s 1958 Sinbad movie. I really loved that action-packed movie, seeing it at the Saturday matinee for 50 cents.
About 7-8 years ago, I made my step-children watch it (all young teens), and it was going just swell until near the end of the film when the “special effects” got noticeably cheezy. I read somewhere that they basically ran out of money and, for some of those effects, it definitely shows.
Of course the most famous of all stop motion animation was in the original King Kong. More recently Tim Burton (once a Disney animator) and a few others have revived it.
You can’t revive something that was never dead. Pat & Mat are top notch, and so are Wallace & Gromit.
The whole thing is unpleasant to watch, because of the accuracy of representation of the societal rot. Would recommend.
It’s a grim movie indeed. And that’s back in 2007. If that’s what Europe is looking like these days, it’s in a lot of trouble.
Lilya 4-ever was already showing that kind of social rot, and the film came out in 2002.
Thanks, it’s on the list.
For a completion of this impromptu depression inducing triptych,
here’s The Tribe (2014).
I saw this movie at the Whitwood theater in Whittier-not too far from the Whitwood Mall-an open air affair, where mom would go shopping while we watched a steady diet of mostly Disney flicks (I must have seen the 18 iterations of Love Bug movies, couldn’t tell you a thing about any of them) in the theater with a balcony, only a few hundred feet away from Farrell’s ice cream parlor where I shared a Troft (imagine 8 scoops of ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate sauce and more) with my friends before or after the movie.
I look forward to rekindling the memory, thanks!
No problem!
Here’s a line: “She is curvaceous, not deliciously fat as I prefer them.”
A blu-ray was released in 2013 by Twilight Time. 1080P with 5.1 DTS-HDMA English sound track. The video aspect is 1.66:1. 5 extras included on the disc.
Harryhausen fans may also enjoy 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason & the Argonauts, One Million Years BC, and The Valley of Gwangi.
The last is pretty bad scriptwise, but features cowboys ropin’ dinosaurs, a tyrannosaurus in a burning cathedral, and an eohippus!
The skeleton fight in Jason & the Argonauts is iconic stop motion action