The 7th Voyage of Sinbad Film Review

Director: Nathan Juran
Year: 1958
Rating: 7.5

There is an evil magician in the film who performs all sorts of fantastic bits of sorcery, but of course the real magician is Ray Harryhausen. Using his stop-motion technology which he called Dynamation, he was able to brilliantly meld his creatures with live action. We watch it now and think that is cool but the amount of precision work to do so is remarkable. It took him three months to film the swordfight with the skeleton. This was his first color film and his creatures look fabulous. It took him eleven months to complete his work. Longer I expect than it took for the rest of the film. It all looks like what a mythical exotic adventure film should look - beautiful sets, a sailing ship, giant caves and castles, a lovely Princess and costumes in glorious Technicolor. Harryhausen and Sinbad were meant for each other and he was to go on to later work on two other Sinbad film - The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Sinbad was a mythical character whose tales first began in the Abbasid Caliphate in the 8th century with his seven fantastical voyages. These tales were later added to the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Perfect fodder for Harryhausen and special effects.

Sinbad is played by Kerwin Mathews who makes for a handsome hero and was to appear soon in two other fantastical films - The 3 Worlds of Gulliver and Jack the Giant Killer - the first one animated by Harryhausen, the second by Project Unlimited. The Princess is played by Kathryn Grant - soon to be Mrs. Bing Crosby. She doesn't have much to do other than smile and look pretty. Which she does well. Sinbad is taking her to Baghdad on his ship in order to strike a peace between her homeland and Baghdad when they are blown off course and end up on an unknown island. As they go look for water and food, a giant hairy hooved Cyclops comes out of its cave chasing after a bald man carrying a lamp. This is Sokurah the Magician (Torin Thather), the villain of this tale.

In the fight against the Cyclops, he loses the lamp but escapes with his life on the ship and heads to Baghdad. The lamp of course houses the genie - a boy genie (Richard Eyer). Once in Baghdad Sokurah tries to persuade the Sultan to send a sailing ship to the island for all the precious jewels - and he for the lamp - but the Sultan refuses. As entertainment the Magician turns a woman into a snake woman - one of Harryhausen's loveliest pieces of work. Then Sokurah reduces the Princess to about two inches high and says the potion to undo it is on the island. So back they go to face the Cyclops again, but also a giant two-headed bird and its baby, a dragon and a sword-wielding skeleton which is a smaller version of what Harryhausen did in Jason and the Argonauts. Then the dinosaur and the Cylops go after one another. It is great stuff.

This was a surprise hit. Audiences had never seen anything quite like it and it gave Harryhausen the ability to keep making more films. The film is directed by Nathan Juran who seems to get short shrift from fans of the fantastic - his films tend to be overshadowed by the special effects but he has some solid fantasy titles on his resume - The Deadly Mantis, 20 Million Miles to Earth (with Harryhausen), The Brain from Planet Arous, Attack of the 50-foot Woman, Jack the Giant Killer and again with Harryhausen, The First Men in the Moon. Composing the music is the great Bernard Herrmann, who was to compose for three other Harryhausen films - The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, Mysterious Island and Jason and the Argonauts.