The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
Directed by Nathan H. Juran
Produced by Charles H. Schneer
Ray Harryhausen
Written by Kenneth Kolb
Based on Sinbad the Sailor from One Thousand and One Nights
Starring Kerwin Mathews
Torin Thatcher
Kathryn Grant
Richard Eyer
Alec Mango
Music by Bernard Herrmann
Cinematography Wilkie Cooper
Edited by Roy Watts
Jerome Thoms
Production
company
Morningside Productions
Distributed by Columbia Pictures
Release date
  • December 23, 1958 (1958-12-23)
Running time
 88 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $650,000[1]
Box office $3.2 million (est. US/ Canada rentals)[2]

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is a 1958 Technicolor heroic fantasy adventure film from Columbia Pictures, produced by Charles H. Schneer, directed by Nathan H. Juran, that stars Kerwin Mathews, Torin Thatcher, Kathryn Grant, Richard Eyer, and Alec Mango. [3]

This was the first of three Sinbad feature films from Columbia, the much later two being The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). All three Sinbad films were conceptualized by Ray Harryhausen who used a full color widescreen stop-motion animation technique he created called Dynamation.

While similarly named, the film does not follow the storyline of the tale "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor" but instead has more in common with the Third and Fifth voyages of Sinbad.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was selected in 2008 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[4]

Plot

Sinbad the Sailor (Kerwin Mathews) and his crew land their ship on the island of Colossa, where they encounter Sokurah the magician (Torin Thatcher) fleeing from a giant cyclops. Though he escapes, Sokurah loses a magic lamp to the creature. Sinbad refuses his desperate pleas to return to the island because Parisa, Princess of Chandra (Kathryn Grant), is aboard. Sinbad has fallen in love with her, and their coming marriage is meant to secure peace between her father's realm and Sinbad's homeland, Baghdad.

Sinbad and his men confront the Roc.

After reaching Baghdad, Sokurah performs magic at the pre-wedding festivities, temporarily turning Parisa's handmaiden into a serpent woman. Despite his prowess and a dark prophecy about war between Baghdad and Chandra, the Caliph of Baghdad (Alec Mango) refuses to help the magician return to Colossa. Later that night, Sokurah secretly shrinks the princess, enraging her father, the Sultan of Chandra (Harold Kasket), who declares war on Baghdad. Sinbad and the Caliph give in to Sokurah, who explains that the eggshell of a Roc is needed for the potion to restore Parisa, and it can be found only on Colossa. Sokurah provides Sinbad with the plans for a giant crossbow for protection against the island's giant creatures.

Sinbad recruits additional crewmen from among the convicts in the Caliph's prisons. Before they reach Colossa, the cutthroats mutiny and capture Sokurah, Sinbad, and his men. During a violent storm, the sounds of keening demons from an island south of Colossa drives the crew nearly mad, endangering the ship. One of the men releases Sinbad so he can save the ship, while the mutineers' leader falls to his death from the crow's nest.

On Colossa, Sinbad, Sokurah, and six others enter the Valley of the Cyclopses, followed by Sinbad's loyal aide Harufa (Alfred Brown). Sinbad and Sokurah split their forces. Sinbad and his men find the Cyclopes' treasure cave, but are captured by one of the creatures and locked in a wooden cage. In the meantime, Sokurah retrieves the magic lamp, but is chased by the cyclops, who kills three of the men. With Parisa's aid, Sinbad manages to escape, then blinds the one-eyed creature and lures it off the edge of a cliff to its death. Sinbad decides to keep the lamp until Parisa is returned to normal size.

Sokurah leads Sinbad and his starving men to the nesting place of the giant Rocs. Sinbad's men, out of hunger, try to break open a Roc egg, causing it to hatch, but the newborn chick is killed by the men and roasted for food. While the men are eating, Parisa enters the magic lamp and befriends the childlike Genie inside, Barani (Richard Eyer), who tells her how to summon him in exchange for her promise of his freedom. The parent Roc returns and slays the remaining men. Sinbad tries to summon the genie, but he is grabbed by the Roc, who drops him unconscious into its nest. Sokurah kills Harufa and abducts the princess, taking her to his underground fortress.

Sinbad awakes and rubs the magic lamp, summoning Barani, who takes Sinbad to Sokurah's fortress and helps him evade the chained dragon that stands guard. Sinbad reaches Sokurah, who restores the princess to normal. When Sinbad refuses to hand over the lamp, the magician animates a skeleton warrior, which Sinbad fights and destroys. With the help of the genie, Sinbad and Parisa make their way out of the cave, stopping to destroy the lamp by throwing it into a pool of lava, thus freeing Barani.

Leaving the cave, they encounter another cyclops. Sinbad releases the dragon, which fights and kills the cyclops. Sinbad and Parisa make their escape, but Sokurah orders the dragon to hunt them down. Sinbad heads to the beach, where his men have readied the giant crossbow, and they use it to kill the dragon. The dying dragon collapses on Sokurah, crushing him to death. Sinbad, Parisa, and the remaining crew depart for Baghdad. They are joined by Barani, now human, who appoints himself as Sinbad's cabin boy and, in a final act of magic, presents Sinbad and Parisa with the treasure from the cyclops' cave as a wedding gift.

Cast

Production

It took Ray Harryhausen 11 months to complete the full color, widescreen stop-motion animation sequences for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Harryhausen's "Dynamation" label was used for the first time on this film.[5]

Harryhausen gave the Cyclops a horn, furry goat legs, and cloven hooves, an idea based upon the concept of the Greek god Pan. He lifted much of the creature's design (for example the torso, chest, arms, poise and style of movement) from his concept of the Ymir (the Venusian creature from his earlier 20 Million Miles to Earth). He used the same armature for both figures; to do this, he had to cannibalize the Ymir, removing the latter's latex body.[6]

Harryhausen researched the Cobra-woman sequence (when Sakourah entertains the Caliph and the Sultan) by watching a belly dancer in Beirut, Lebanon. During the performance, Harryhausen says, "smoke was coming up my jacket. I thought I was on fire! It turned out the gentleman behind me was smoking a hookah!" The Cyclops is the film's most popular character, but Harryhausen's personal favorite was the Cobra-woman, a combination of Princess Parisa's maid, Sadi, and a cobra.[7]

The film's original script had a climax that involved two Cyclops fighting. In the final version, however, the climactic battle featured a single Cyclops versus a Dragon. The model of the Dragon was more than three feet long and was very difficult to animate; the fight sequence took nearly three weeks for Harryhausen to complete. Originally, it was planned to have the Dragon breathing fire from its mouth during the entire sequence, but the cost was deemed too high. So the scenes where it does breathe fire, Harryhausen used a flamethrower, shooting out flames 30 to 40 feet against a night sky, then superimposeing the filmed fire very near the Dragon's mouth.[8]

The sword fight scene between Sinbad and the skeleton proved so popular with audiences that Harryhausen recreated and expanded the scene five years later, this time having a group of seven armed skeletons fight the Greek hero Jason and his men in 1963's Jason and the Argonauts.[9]

The stop-motion Cobra-woman figure used for the film was cannibalized 20 years later in order to make the Medusa figure in Harryhausen's final film, Clash of the Titans.

Film score

The music score for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was composed by Bernard Herrmann, better known at the time for his collaboration with the director Alfred Hitchcock. Herrmann went on to write the scores for three other Harryhausen films: Mysterious Island, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, and Jason and the Argonauts. Of the four, Harryhausen regarded the score for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as being the finest, due to the empathy Herrmann's main title composition evoked for the subject matter.

The soundtrack producer Robert Townson, who re-recorded the score in 1998 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, described the music as rich and vibrant, commenting "I would cite The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as one of the scores which most validates film music as an art form and a forum where a great composer can write a great piece of music. As pure composition, I would place Sinbad beside anything else written this century and not worry about it being able to stand on its own".[10]

Reception

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad continues to be well-reviewed by critics, with many holding the opinion that it is the best film of the "Sinbad" trilogy. The film carries a 100% approval rating at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes,[11] with several reviewers citing its nostalgic value. Mountain Xpress critic Ken Hanke calls it "Childhood memory stuff of the most compelling kind."[11]

American Film Institute Lists

Producer Edward Small, impressed with the film's success, produced a fantasy film on his own in 1962, titled Jack the Giant Killer, using the principal cast members of The 7th Voyage, Kerwin Mathews as Jack and Torin Thatcher as the evil wizard Pendragon, reuniting as the starring characters.

Comic book adaptions

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ The 7th Voyage Box office / business from the Internet Movie Database
  2. ↑ "1959: Probable Domestic Take", Variety, 6 January 1960 p 34
  3. ↑ Swires, Steve (April 1989). "Nathan Juran: The Fantasy Voyages of Jerry the Giant Killer Part One". Starlog Magazine. No. 141. p. 61.
  4. ↑ "Cinematic Classics, Legendary Stars, Comedic Legends and Novice Filmmakers Showcase the 2008 Film Registry". Library of Congress. Retrieved 23 January 2017.
  5. ↑ "The name Dynamation". The Official Ray Harryhausen Website. Retrieved 23 January 2017.
  6. ↑ Johnson, John (1996). Cheap Tricks and Class Acts: Special Effects, Makeup and Stunts from the Fantastic Fifties. McFarland and Company, Inc. p. 75. ISBN 0-7864-0093-5. Retrieved 23 January 2017.
  7. ↑ Dalton 2003, p. 112.
  8. ↑ Dalton 2005, pp. 160–166.
  9. ↑ "'Jason and the Argonauts'." Monstervision, 2000. Retrieved: January 29, 2015.
  10. ↑ Luchs, Kurt. "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad: An Interview with Robert Townson, part 1." The Bernard Herrrmann Society, October 1998. Retrieved: January 29, 2015.
  11. 1 2 The 7th Voyage of Sinbad at Rotten Tomatoes
  12. ↑ "AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills." AFI. Retrieved: January 29, 2015.
  13. ↑ "AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains Nominees." AFI. Retrieved: January 29, 2015.
  14. ↑ "AFI's 10 Top 10 Ballot." AFI. Retrieved: January 29, 2015.
  15. ↑ "Dell Four Color #944". Grand Comics Database.
  16. ↑ Dell Four Color #944 at the Comic Book DB
  17. ↑ Buttery, Jarrod (April 2014). "Ready for the Spotlight". Back Issue!. Raleigh, North Carolina: TwoMorrows Publishing (71): 8.

Bibliography

  • Dalton, Tony. The Art of Ray Harryhausen. London: Aurum, 2005. ISBN 978-1-8451-3114-2.
  • Dalton, Tony. Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life. London: Aurum, 2003. ISBN 978-1-8541-0940-8.
  • Warren, Bill. Keep Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Films of the Fifties, 21st Century Edition. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009, (First edition 1982). ISBN 0-89950-032-3.
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