Posts Tagged ‘Charles H. Schneer’


The FX Magic of Ray Harryhausen at the Trylon Microcinema – this weekend, ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ and ‘Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers’

March 5th, 2010 | article by | 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , ,

The Trylon Microcinema, an intimate 50-seat house located at 3258 Minnehaha Ave. S in Wtf-Film’s own Minneapolis, MN, is quickly becoming the most exciting film venue in the city for eclectic cinema aficionados.  This past Halloween brought a month-long tribute to the cinema of David Cronenberg, for instance.  Films are screened in either 35mm or HD (non-film screenings are denoted on the schedule).

Starting this weekend, as lead-up to the big-budget remake of Clash of the Titans, the Trylon is hosting a retrospective of the special effects films of Ray Harryhausen, from his early days toiling on low-budget science fiction programmers to his heyday in the mid-60s.  This weekend brings a classic double feature, the epic fantasy Jason and the Argonauts and the ultimate in 50s alien invasion cinema Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. Screening times are listed below:

Jason and the Argonauts
Friday, 05 March: 7:00pm, 9:00pm
Saturday, 06 March: 7:00pm, 9:00pm

Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (HD)
Sunday, 07 March: 7:00pm, 9:00pm

Cash is accepted at the door, or tickets can be purchased in advance online (see the link below).  Seating is limited, so I suggest planning ahead (and yes, I realize I posted this too late for anyone to act on the shows tonight – next week’s announcement will be more timely).

A full listing for Trylon and Take-up Productions’ Harryhausen celebration can be found here:  Titans.  Will.  Clash. – The FX Magic of Ray Harryhausen


The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

February 13th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,

rating:
company: Columbia and
Morningside Productions
year: 1958
runtime: 88′
country: United States
director: Nathan Juran
cast: Kerwin Mathews, Kathryn Grant,
Richard Eyer, Torin Thatcher,
Alec Mango, Danny Green,
Harold Kaskef, Alfred Brown,
Nana DeHerrera, Nino Falanga
writer: Ken Kolb and
Ray Harryhausen
cinematographer: Wilkie Cooper
special effects: Ray Harryhausen
and George Lofgren
disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
release date: October 7, 2008
retail price: $28.95 / $107.95
disc details: Region Free / dual layer BD50 / BD Live
video: 1080p / 1.66:1 / color
audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround (English, French),
Dolby Digital 5.1 surround (Thai),
Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (English)
subtitles: English, English SDH, French, Spanish,
Korean, Chinese, Indonesian, Thai (Spanish,
Korean, Thai, Chinese for supplements)
special features: Audio commentary (with Ray Harryhausen, Phil Tippet, Randal William Cook, Steven Smith and Arnold Kunert), Remembering The 7th Voyage of Sinbad featurette, The Harryhausen Legacy featurette, The Music of Bernard Herrmann featurette, A Look Behind the Voyage featurette, ”Sinbad May have been bad, but he’s been good to me” music video, Ray Harryhausen interviewed by director John Landis, This Is Dynamation vintage featurette, Photo Gallery, Previews (Casino Royale, Men In Black, CJ7, The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, Blu-ray Disc IS High Definition!)
order this film from Amazon.com
individual Blu-ray | 4-disc Ray Harryhausen Collection

Plot: Sinbad journeys to the mysterious and monster-infested island of Colossa with the untrustworthy magician Sokurah to find the ingredients for an elixer to restore his shrunken bride-to-be to her appropriate size.

I’ve used the word too many times in my past three reviews from the Ray Harryhausen Collection, but The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is the landmark Harryhausen picture.  A socko Technicolor fantasy not quite like anything else before it, the picture melds man, magic, and monsters to create a thrilling special effects spectacle that would be frequently imitated (as in Jack the Giant Killer, a flat-out rip-off with similar monsters several of the same cast) but never duplicated, not even in Harryhausen’s bigger budgeted ’70s Sinbad efforts.  52 years after the fact the rougher edges may stick out like sore thumbs, but the film is as magical as ever.

Kerwin Mathews (The 3 Worlds of Gulliver) is Sinbad, the legendary sailor with the eyes of an eagle and a penchant for getting into monumental trouble.  A wrong turn lands him on the island of Colossa, where he encounters sorcerer Sokurah (Torin Thatcher in a show-stealing, scenery-chewing performance), a man with a magic lamp and a serious disagreement with the local wildlife.  Sinbad’s crew narrowly escapes an attack by a grotesque cyclops, rescuing Sokurah from certain doom but loosing the lamp in the process.  The magician pleads with the captain, offering him prize jewels in return for his turning back for Colossa, but Sinbad refuses to risk his ship or crew again, opting to journey back to Baghdad instead.

While at home disaster strikes.  Sinbad’s bride-to-be Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant, Anatomy of a Murder) is found to be shrunken to only a few inches in height, an international incident that threatens to ignite a war between her temperamental father and the kindly Calif of Baghdad.  Their only hope is the scheming Sokurah, who contends that the only means to save the Princess is to return to Colossa and mix up some jumbo-grow from the egg shells of the Roc who nest there.  Sinbad agrees to the plan, but is forced to take on a crew of imprisoned thugs to account for his former sailors, most of whom were none too keen on returning to an island of man-eating cyclops . . .



This modest production was the most expensive of Harryhausen’s career up that point, totaling some $650,000 once all was said and done (a far cry from the $3.5 million of the underwhelming Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger or the $16 million of Clash of the Titans).  Still effectively a B-picture, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad has its fair share of cost-cutting maneuvers, the most obvious being the stock footage stand-ins for Sinbad’s ship which changes almost every time we see it.  A few moments aside, however, this is a grand production, full of colorful photography of Spanish locations and brimming with classic Harryhausen creatures.

The animator had his hands full this go around, with a pair of cyclops, a Roc and its chick, a fire-breathing dragon, a sword-wielding skeleton and a seductive snake-woman to contend with.  It was his most expansive menagerie of creatures to date, and makes for some of the most memorable effects setups of his entire career.  The action-packed introduction still makes an impression after all these years, the first cyclops bursting forth from an ominous cave in pursuit of Sokurah and his magic lamp.  The scene has all the impact producers had obviously intended for a similar sequence from the dull Italian Homer adaptation Ulysses 4 years earlier – that film’s man-in-suit cyclops is no match for Harryhausen’s fearsome rock-lobbing creation.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad never slows in its pace or its fantasy, and Sinbad’s brief stint in Baghdad is punctuated with the dance of the snake-woman and some excellent process photography of the shrinking Princess Parisa.  Ken Kolb’s quick-footed screenplay spends no more time in Baghdad than necessary, touching on the essential plot points (the threat of war, Sokurah’s scheming) and sending Sinbad back to sea in fifteen minutes flat.  Dialogue is hokey but sweet, the Mathews / Grant romance just sincere enough to give the action-packed second and third acts the emotional backing they require.  A bit of pond-side love talk is a welcome homage to The Thief of Baghdad, a major influence on a then young Harryhausen.

The second and third acts are dominated by the return to Colossa, an effects tour-de-force that pits Sinbad and his degenerate crew against a hungry cyclops (one of his unfortunate crew is tied to a spit and set to roasting) and a vengeful two-headed Roc, understandably angry after her chick is unceremoniously slaughtered for food stuffs.  A visit to Sokurah’s island lair reveals a classic fire-breathing dragon (later to do battle with Colossa’s second cyclops) and a skeleton with a taste for swordplay.  A battle between Sinbad and the latter is brilliantly choreographed, and was impressively reduxed for the epic conclusion of the later Jason and the Argonauts.



The 7th Voyage of Sinbad added three important elements to the Harryhausen / Schneer combo – money, color, and the inimitable talents of composer Bernard Herrmann, who would contribute scores for three of the team’s future films.  Perhaps more important than the vivid Technicolor photography and the higher budget is Herrman’s contribution, brooding and booming themes that elevate Harryhausen’s fantasy to a whole new level of awesomeness.  Nathan Juran takes another memorable turn as director while Wilkie Cooper keeps the photography interesting. All the while the fine cast (dominated by Torin Thatcher, who manages to overact without slipping into self-parody) keeps the us buying what the often goofy screenplay is selling.  Perhaps my favorite character of the entire piece is the dim-witted brute Golar, who answers with a brainless “That’s right!” every time his weasel of a sidekick says anything.

If it seems to you at this point that I can’t say a bad word against this film then you’re correct, as my opinion of the picture is anything but unbiased.  My first encounter with it some 20 years ago left my sketchbooks full of visages of Colossa’s monsters and my brain craving anything and everything Harryhausen.  These days I can recognize the real dogs of his filmography, The Valley of Gwangi and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and the like, but The 7th Voyage of Sinbad still rides high.  It’s a fantastically devised fantastic film that hasn’t lost an ounce of its entertainment value in the half-century since it premiered.

Sony has debuted their 50th Anniversary Edition of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as both a stand-alone Blu-ray (and SD release, for those who have yet to make the format jump) and as part of the Blu-ray exclusive 4-film Ray Harryhausen Collection on October 7, 2008.  The collection puts it alongside the three science fiction films Harryhausen produced at Columbia prior to this one, It Came From Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, and 20 Million Miles to Earth, the first two of which are presently only available on Blu-ray as part of the collection.

A lot of work went into preparing The 7th Voyage of Sinbad for its high definition debut, and with one minor exception (to be immediately explained) the effort has paid off magnificently.  Some digital post-processing has caused an odd blip in the presentation, neatly erasing the tip of the cyclops’ horn during one scene.  The blip seems to only occur during one set of shots, in which Sinbad’s drunken crew attacks the monster with spears (see the first capture below).  The oddity only effects a few frames of the film and wasn’t overly distracting to me personally (I only noticed during my fifth or sixth run through of the disc), though others touchier than myself will take more offense.  Consider it room for improvement on an inevitable future edition.



Otherwise Sony’s 1.66:1 aspect 1080p transfer is a winner all around, loaded with that film grain I have such an affinity for and finally presenting the film with the stunning color it deserves.  The earlier DVD edition of the film was more tightly cropped and quite washed out, and my still older VHS looks to have been mastered from a print in the midst of shifting to the red.  Detail is strong and the highly variable photography, from crisp location work to thick process shots and everywhere in between, is recreated beautifully.  I’ve certainly never seen the film looking this good before, and it only adds to the palpable excitement of it all.  The primary audio track is a great Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround mix in English, which presents Herrmann’s thrilling score in magnificent stereo.  An original Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic mix in English is included for posterity (and appreciated by this reviewer, who has listened to the film with each at least three times over now), as well as dubs in French (Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround) and Thai (Dolby Digital 5.1).  Subtitling options on this region-free disc are extensive, and include Spanish, Korean, Thai and Chinese translations for the supplements.

The supplements are in keeping with those on the other discs in the collection, and are plentiful but varied in value.  The two real winners are the packed commentary track (there really should have been two for this relatively short film, given how many people are crammed in) and a nice Remembering . . . featurette.  There’s some overlap of information, obviously, but both are welcome.  A piece on the music of Bernard Herrmann is informative but runs too long.  The Harryhausen Legacy does the same, comprised of testimonials from famous fans of Ray’s work.  The oddest extra is certainly the “Sinbad may have been bad, but he’s been good to me” music video, actually a collection of ad art for the film with the music playing over it.  The song is one of those hilariously out-of-touch studio promotional jobs, a jazzy and awkwardly written number made available as an EP to theater owners and advertisers.  As with the other discs in the series, the supplements (aside from some unrelated previews) all appear to be 480p SD.  The disc, like all others from the Ray Harryhausen Collection, is BD Live enabled.

While there’s certainly some room for improvement to be made in any future editions of this film (mostly relating to that odd glitch in the processing), Sony’s 50th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray package is an excellent way to experience the film all the same.  I find myself again highly recommending the Ray Harryhausen Collection, though I’ve linked to the individual release of the film as well.  I saw this one at an appreciably impressionable young age and it’s remained a favorite ever since – I can’t help but rate The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as highly recommended.

order this film from Amazon.com:
individual Blu-ray | 4-disc Ray Harryhausen Collection


20 Million Miles to Earth

February 11th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,

rating:
company: Columbia and
Morningside Productions
year: 1957
runtime: 82′
country: United States
director: Nathan Juran
cast: William Hopper, Joan Taylor,
Frank Puglia, John Zaremba,
Thomas Browne Henry, Tito Vudo,
Jan Arvan, Arthur Space
writers: Robert Creighton Williams,
Christopher Knopf and Charlotte Knight
cinematography: Irving Lippman
and Carlo Ventimiglia
music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff
special effects: Ray Harryhausen
disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
release date: December 4, 2007
retail price: $28.95 / $107.95
disc details: Region Free / dual layer BD50
video: 1080p / 1.85:1 / b/w + colorized
audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround (English)
and Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (Spanish)
subtitles: English, English SDH, Chinese,
Korean, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai
(Spanish, Portuguese for supplements)
special features: feature commentary with
Ray Harryhausen, Remembering 20 Million Miles
to Earth featurette, Tim Burton Sits Down with
Ray Harryhausen featurette, David Schecter on
Music’s Unsung Hero featurette, Interview with Joan
Taylor, image galleries, trailers (Close Encounters
of the Third Kind), The Colorization Process, BD-Live
order this disc from Amazon.com
single disc | 4-disc Ray Harryhausen Collection

Plot: A spaceship crashes in the sea off Sicily, unleashing an ever-growing specimen of Venusian life.  The creature is captured and taken to Rome, where it goes on a rampage culminating in a military battle at the famed Colosseum.

Ray Harryhausen’s third film project under the Columbia banner is another landmark in his feature film career, being his faithful producer Charles H. Schneer’s first solo effects effort (produced through his newly formed Morningside Productions) and the first for which Harryhausen himself was to be the source inspiration.  It was also the first teaming of the Harryhausen / Schneer duo with art director turned director Nathan Juran, who would direct a number of Schneer’s non-fantasy projects (Hellcats of the Navy, Good Day for a Hanging) as well as two future Harryhausen efforts (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, First Men in the Moon) and even the Harryhausen / Schneer knock-off Jack the Giant Killer.

20 Million Miles to Earth, Harryhausen’s final feature in black and white, is a minor classic of the genre, only bogged down by the unevenness of the scripting.  The tale begins with a Quatermass-style event – the crash-landing of an exploratory spaceship, most of whose crew has already succumbed to a strange disease contracted during their investigation of Venus.  The only survivor is Colonel Robert Calder (William Hopper), who makes it his mission to track down a very special part of their cargo: a specimen of Venusian life that may hold the key to surviving exposure to the planet’s lethal atmosphere (the cause of the mysterious disease, which never spreads beyond the dead crewmen).

Unfortunately for Calder, the creature has already been found by a young Sicilian boy, who wastes no time in selling it to a traveling zoologist from Rome (the show-stealing Frank Puglia) for a cowboy hat.  By the time Calder catches up to the zoologist and his soon-to-be-doctor granddaughter Marisa (Joan Taylor, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers) the beast, exponentially growing due to the composition of our atmosphere, has already escaped into the countryside.  After an unfortunate encounter between the monster and a farmer, it is captured and taken to Rome, where it continues to grow . . . and grow . . . and grow . . .  until an inevitable laboratory accident allows it to escape once more, this time into the heart of a modern city.



There’s a lot of King Kong and Mighty Joe Young in 20 Million Miles to Earth, with the ostensibly peaceful Venusian Ymir finding itself out of place and increasingly terrorized in an unfamiliar landscape.  Special note is made of the creature’s atypically non-combative disposition, and that it only becomes dangerous when provoked.  This, of course, leads the human cast to provoke it, and endlessly, prodding it with sticks, beating it with shovels, stabbing it with pitchforks, shooting it, and eventually sedating it with electrocution (!).  Any statement about the belligerence of the fearful and greedy mankind, who only want the Ymir so that they can find a way to plunder Venus of its resources, is lost in the shuffle, and by the time the maddened creature awakens in Rome the story has devolved into typical monster-on-the-loose mode.  The rampage of the Ymir in Rome, including a battle with an elephant and a military confrontation around, in, and atop the Colosseum, makes for wonderful action but is emotionally hollow, and a final contemplative line (“Why is it always, always so costly for Man to move from the present to the future?”) feels every bit as tacked on as it is.

The rest of the dramatics are relatively inert, with much of the human story eaten-up in pursuit of the Ymir – a needless romantic subplot between Hopper and Taylor leads nowhere at all.  The dialogue of the Sicilian fishermen who open the story is stunningly bad and downright demeaning at times, the characters themselves never amounting to anything more than hairy-backed simple-minded caricatures.  The professional cast does well with the material provided, with Hopper delivering his second solid monster-film performance of the year (the other from the awful The Deadly Mantis, also directed by Juran).  Taylor does her best with an underwritten role, which comes complete with a archetypal hate-him then love-him romantic arc and a fleeting moment of sympathy for the monster.  The monster itself is, effectively, the lead of the story, let down in the end by the unimaginative writing.

Direction from Nathan Juran is taught and effective, and his compositions (particularly in the mid-film barn confrontation) harken to his past-career as an art director.  This is certainly the best photographed of Harryhausen’s early effects pictures, and it’s good to see Juran working with above-par material (his other genre work at the time involved outright groaners like The Deadly Mantis and laughably ludicrous programmers like Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman and The Brain From Planet Arous).  Mischa Bakaleinikoff delivers some interesting original monster themes, though Columbia’s array of stock music cues are wearing more than a little thin by this point.  Harryhausen and Schneer would team with legendary composer Bernard Herrmann for their next two outings, leaving Columbia’s stock library in the dust for good.



While the storytelling may be problematic, Harryhausen’s effects methods had did nothing but improve with 20 Million Miles to Earth.  The film features some of his finest moments as an animator, the birth of the Ymir and the later shadowy confrontation in the barn.  One memorable moment has the Ymir cornered before the door of a cage, pushing against its door as John Zaremba (Earth vs. The Flying Saucers) tries to close him in – the illusion is seamless.  After wrangling with distinctly inhuman antagonists for two films (a giant octopus and a fleet of flying saucers respectively), the humanoid Ymir offered Harryhausen an opportunity to impart his creation with genuine emotion.  The creature is entirely sympathetic, afraid and lost in an unknown world with man’s military might steadily closing in around him.  The final moments atop the Colosseum, with the Ymir struggling for a last few moments of life, are evocative of King Kong. Even with lackluster drama dragging it down, 20 Million Miles to Earth still stands tall as one of Harryhausen’s shining accomplishments.

20 Million Miles to Earth is the most fondly remembered of Harryhausen’s black and white work at Columbia, and was the first of his films to see Blu-ray release through Sony.  The 50th Anniversary Edition premiered in December of 2007, and was later collected with It Came From Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad into the Blu-ray-exclusive Ray Harryhausen Collection (a collector’s set of the 2-disc SD DVDs is available, but excludes The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, released individually in 2008).

As with It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, Sony has included a colorized variant of 20 Million Miles to Earth as part of its special edition release.  While it has its effective moments (see the shot of the dying man in the hospital bed), the job is problematic overall.  The Ymir fares pretty poorly throughout, the colorization making the differences in contrast between foreground and background elements of the effects scenes all the more apparent.  Blips in the computerized colorization procedure are frequent (as they are on all of the colorized editions of Harryhausen’s films).  Colors often bleed outwards from where they’re intended to be (see the boy’s lower right cheek in the capture below, or Kenneth Tobey’s forehead and hairline in the night-time romantic shot from It Came From Beneath the Sea), and fade-ins are often outright ugly.  A prime example occurs at the very beginning of the picture, where the colors of the COLUMBIA logo pop in before the letters are there to support them.

Both variants of the film receive a fine 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer.  While a few moments are a tad iffy (a handful of the opening spaceship shots in particular), the transfers are fine overall.  Detail is strong throughout, and while grain is less prominent than in It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (a result of using different film stock) it’s still present and welcomed.  Damage is light and the source elements for the picture look to be in great condition for their age.  Primary audio is presented in another splendid Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track that sounds very good to these ears, though the original monophonic mix is sadly absent.  A Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic Spanish dub is included.  The feature is supported with a wide array of subtitles (see the details at the top of this article), with supplements receiving translations in Spanish and Portuguese.

The BD-Live enabled disc features a nice assortment of supplements, the main attractions of which will be the fine commentary track from Harryhausen and effects men Dennis Muren and Phil Tippet and the nice Remembering . . . featurette.  Other featurettes are repeated on the Blu-ray releases of It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers – the interview with Joan Taylor as well as the Tim Burton Sits Down With Ray Harryhausen and David Schecter On Film Music’s Unsung Hero featurettes.  The image galleries are fantastic, allowing one to see the Ymir’s many pre-film forms, though the included trailers – a Blu-ray ad and a spot for the Close Encounters of the Third Kind Ultimate Edition – are a disappointment.  There’s lots of talk about the colorized version of the film in the supplements, and that bothersome The Colorization Process advertisement, repeated on Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, makes its debut here.  All supplements appear to be 480p SD with the exception of the paltry previews.

Bland scripting can only bog a picture down so much with a Ymir about, and 20 Million Miles to Earth is still loads of fun.  This high definition package bests previous editions in the feature presentation department by a long shot, and Harryhausen’s effects still look stunning some 52 years after the fact.  I find myself highly recommending the Ray Harryhausen Collection again, though I’ve linked in to the individual Blu-ray list at the top of this article – I can’t imagine fans being truly disappointed with either.  20 Million Miles to Earth comes recommended.


order this disc from Amazon.com
single disc | 4-disc Ray Harryhausen Collection


Earth vs. The Flying Saucers

February 9th, 2010 | article by | 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

rating:
company: Columbia and
Clover Productions
year: 1956
runtime: 83′
country: United States
director: Fred F. Sears
cast: Hugh Marlowe, Joan Taylor,
Donald Curtis, Morris Ankrum,
John Zaremba, Thomas Browne Henry,
Grandon Rhodes, Larry J. Blake
writers: Bernad Gordan, Curt Siodmak
and George Worthing Yates
cinematography: Fred Jackman Jr.
music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff
visual effects: Ray Harryhausen
disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
release date: October 7th, 2008
retail price: $107.95
(Blu-ray only available as part of The
Ray Harryhausen Collection 4-film set)
disc details: region free / dual layer BD50
video: 1080p / 1.85:1 / b/w + colorized
audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround (English)
Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (French)
subtitles: English, English SDH, Spanish,
Portuguese, French, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese
(Portuguese, French, Spanish, Japanese
for supplemental content)
special features: audio commentary with
Ray Harryhausen, Remembering Earth vs. The
Flying Saucers featurette, The Hollywood Blacklist
and Bernard Gordon featurette, Original screenplay
credits, Interview with Joan Taylor, photo galleries,
Colorization demo, Sneak peak of Flying Saucers
vs. The Earth comic book, trailers (It Came From
Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth,
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad)
order this film from Amazon.com:
2-disc SD DVD | 4-disc Blu-ray Collection

Plot: Earth is attacked by a fleet of flying saucers from a disintegrated solar system.

The second collaborative effort between producer Charles H. Schneer, still under contract to Sam Katzman and here working under his Clover Productions banner, and visual effects artist Ray Harryhausen is another formulaic science fiction programmer elevated to near-classic status by its labor-intensive effects production.  The picture was another big success for Columbia and Sam Katzman, who released it on a double bill with the even cheaper The Werewolf (a memorably grim horror noir from director Fred F. Sears).  Earth vs. The Flying Saucers would be Schneer’s final film as a Katzman underling, and 1957 would see the release of his first two independently produced efforts – Hellcats of the Navy starring Arthur Franz and Ronald Reagan and the genre classic 20 Million Miles to Earth.

Earth vs. The Flying Saucers is well-paced if utterly derivative, and follows newlyweds Dr. Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe, the Judas of The Day the Earth Stood Still) and secretary Carol (Joan Taylor, 20 Million Miles to Earth).  Both are employed in the Air Force’s top-secret Operation Sky-hook satellite program, which has encountered an odd problem.  None of the satellites are staying in orbit as they should, all having mysteriously crashed back to Earth shortly after their launch.  A few strange encounters and a full-on ray gun attack later, the culprits in the odd disappearances are revealed: a civilization from a dead solar system has set its sights on the planet Earth, which they hope to conquer through the shear obviousness of their technological superiority alone.  Dr. Marvin and his fellow Earthlings are understandably displeased with the invader’s imperialist intentions, and rush to perfect a new anti-saucer weapon before time runs out.

The screenplay by Curt Siodmak, George Worthing Yates and blacklisted writer Bernard Gordon (Hellcats of the Navy, Day of the Triffids, Krakatoa: East of Java – the authors name, originally listed as Raymond T. Marcus, has been restored in the opening credits of Sony’s latest release of this film) is a mish-mash of original and judiciously absorbed ideas from previous efforts strung together with a little drama and a lot of military hearings and scientific exposition.  The notion of intellectually superior and physically frail extraterrestrials invading the less-advanced Earth dates back to Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, while several moments throughout – a General (Morris Ankrum, of course) commenting on the electronic screens protecting the invaders, an examination of some of their optical equipment – are culled from George Pal’s big-budget 1953 adaptation of the same.

A misunderstanding that leads to the death of the alien’s first Earth delegate harkens to Wise’s 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, as does a mid-picture show of force by the invaders, who cut all manner of Earthly communication in preparation for their final attack.  Then there are the interiors of the saucers themselves, the extraterrestrials’ pontifications of the vast speeds at which they travel, and even the closing lines (“. . . such a nice world.  I’m glad it’s still here.”), all of which are rather reminiscent of Universal’s color spectacle This Island Earth from the previous year.  Derivative as it may be, the film has proven to be quite inspirational as well.  Toho’s Monster Zero follows the same basic plot elements right down to the truck-mounted anti-saucer rays, and Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! makes too many direct homages to it for me to even begin to list them here.



Earth vs. The Flying Saucers bypasses the standard romantic arc that dominated so many of its predecessors, beginning with a married couple who have gotten that troublesome love-finding out of the way before the film has even begun.  Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor make a believable couple and solid enough foundation for the rest of the picture to rest upon, though precious little screen time is given to their relationship.  Most of the running time is devoted to military meetings (disbelieving Generals and all) and that 50s genre perspective of the scientific process, complete with the obligatory cost-cutting stock footage montages and a newsreel-style narration (perhaps It Came From Beneath the Sea‘s William Woodson again, though the IMDB lists his credit as “unconfirmed”).  Fred F. Sears does what he always did best, making the most of the meager finances and drama that was handed to him, and fills the screen with his trademark mis-en-scene, with actors stacked deep into shots and almost menacing shadows cast on the walls of mundane locations.  I’ve always been a fan of Sears’ work, visually if not substantively, but his position as one of Katzman’s most prolific work-horse would shuffle him off the mortal coil just a year later – dead of cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44.

The film certainly did nothing to hurt Harryhausen’s budding film career, and his carefully animated flying saucers would easily usurp those from The Day the Earth Stood Still and This Island Earth to become the most iconic of the decade.  The aliens themselves, stuffed in clunky rounded suits made of “solidified electricity”, may be anemic, but the saucers in which they fly are alive brimming with menace – he can’t seem to resist giving even these inanimate machines a distinct personality.  The animation is a fine example of the classic Harryhausen style, the saucers delicately weaving back and forth, each motion counterbalanced against another to give the illusion of suspended weight.  It all works amazingly well, and count me as one of those who is amazed, even today, at the actual size of the saucer models.  Imperfections are more obvious now some 20 years since I first saw the picture, imperfect matte lines or jitteriness of elements within the frame, but many of the tricks, like the model of the capitol dome inserted above a photo plate of the rest of the building, are seamless.

I continue to find immense satisfaction in Sony’s Blu-ray Ray Harryhausen Collection, which has given me a much-needed excuse to catch up on four of the films I was raised on.  Like the previously reviewed It Came From Beneath the Sea, Sony has opted to make their Blu-ray of Earth vs. The Flyings Saucers available only as a part of their 4-disc Blu-ray collection.  As with that film, a 2-disc special edition SD DVD with the same supplemental content is individually available and has been linked to at the top of this article.



Like the other two black and white features in the Ray Harryhausen Collection, a Harryhausen-endorsed colorized version of Earth vs. The Flying Saucers has been included along with the original black and white.  While technology has obviously improved since digital colorization was introduced in the 80s, the end product still looks very much like what it is.  Some hues still look bad, and reds are rendered particularly poorly here (an American flag looks dull and pastel, while a briefly glimpsed stop sign is nearly pink).  Skin tones continue to be an issue, with one character (the military man standing next to Morris Ankrum as they gaze out of the control tower at an approaching saucer) is cast in a ghastly yellow.  In spite of the Harryhausen endorsement and the preponderance for discussion of the topic in the commentary, the black and white original is clearly the way to see the film.

Transfer-wise, this is another strong effort.  The 1080p 1.85:1 image presents with tremendous detail and beautiful contrast (see the image of Morris Ankrum’s troubled face), with a healthy layer of grain present throughout.  Damage in the original footage of this popular attraction is limited to speckling here and there, with stock shots varying from pristine to battered – just as they were when the film was released.  Harryhausen’s extensive effects work looks fantastic, only improving with the increased scrutiny the HD transfer allows for.  Audio is presented in another excellent Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround track, and the recording sounds like it could have been made yesterday (from Columbia’s canned effects library, of course).  A Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic French dub is available as well.  Subtitling options are extensive on this region-free disc, with additional French, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese translations available for the supplements.

As with It Came From Beneath the Sea, supplements here are stacked.  The package begins with another fun commentary from Harryhausen, this time joined by fellow effects artists Jeffrey Okun and Ken Ralston.  Aside from the frequent “oohs” and “aahs” over how wonderful the colorization job looks, this is a great track – well worth a listen.  Next up are a series of featurettes totaling around 70 minutes, including a retrospective of the film, a piece dedicated to blacklisted writer Bernard Gordon, and an interview with co-star Joan Taylor, who seems positively delighted that she’ll be remembered for her performances in two of Harryhausen and Schneer’s effects pictures.  The original opening credits for the film, complete with the Raymond T. Marcus credit, are included here for posterity.  We get another Harryhausen inspired comic preview, this time for Flying Saucers vs. The Earth, as well as a collection of trailers and image galleries.  The trailer for this film is, again, strangely omitted, though it is available on other discs in the set.  A little bothersome is The Colorization Process, which plays a bit too much like a late-night infomercial for Legend Film’s services and is entirely skippable.

While probably the weakest of the four films available in the Ray Harryhausen Collection, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers was none-the-less influential and remains a fun, if dated, science fiction programmer.  Harryhausen’s meticulous one-man effects production makes the upgrade to HD a no-brainer, just one more reason to pick up the full collection.  Earth vs. The Flying Saucers comes recommended.


order this film from Amazon.com:
2-disc SD DVD | 4-disc Blu-ray Collection


It Came From Beneath the Sea

February 9th, 2010 | article by | 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

rating:
company: Columbia
year: 1955
runtime: 79′
country: United States
director: Robert Gordon
cast: Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue,
Donald Curtis, Ian Keith,
Dean Maddox Jr., Chuck Griffithe,
Harry Lauter, Richard W. Peterson
writers: Hal Smith
and George Worthing Yates
cinematographer: Henry Freulich
music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff
visual effects: Ray Harryhausen
disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
release date: October 7th, 2008
retail price: $107.95
(Blu-ray only available as part of the
Ray Harryhausen Collection 4-film set)
disc details: Region Free / Dual Layer BD50
video: 1080p HD / 1.85:1 / b/w + colorized
audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround (English)
subtitles: English, English SDH, Portuguese,
Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic
(Portuguese, Spanish, French, Japanese for extras)
special features: Audio commentary with
Ray Harryhausen, Remembering It Came From
Beneath the Sea featurette, Tim Burton Sits Down
with Ray Harryhausen featurette, David Schecter
on Film Music’s Unsung Hero featurette, A Present
Day Look at Stop Motion Animation featurette,
theatrical trailers (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,
20 Million Miles to Earth, The 7th Voyage of
Sinbad), video image galleries
order this film from Amazon.com
2-disc SD DVD | 4-disc Blu-ray Collection

Plot: A mammoth octopus roused by nuclear testing rises from the Pacific Ocean and attacks San Francisco.

While its low budget production values may hint otherwise, It Came From Beneath the Sea was a landmark science fiction production, worth noting if only for its pairing of stop motion auteur Ray Harryhausen (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans) and producer Charles H. Schneer.  It was a relationship that would last through the end of both men’s careers and result in some of the most beloved fantasy and adventure films of the past half century.   Without it many of us would never have experienced the many voyages of Sinbad, the wonders of Captain Nemo’s Mysterious Island, or Jason’s adventure with his Argonauts.

As with many beginnings, this one was humble.  Schneer was working under contract to legendary schlockmeister Sam Katzman (producer of such anti-classics as The Giant Claw and The Zombies of Mora Tau) at the time he offered Harryhausen his first post-The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms gig.  It Came From Beneath the Sea plays as a reworking of basic ideas from that box office success, sending a giant radioactive menace on a collision course with a thriving American metropolis.  The details may be different, the monster in this case is an octopus and San Francisco the doomed city, but the end result was much the same.  It Came From Beneath the Sea meant big money for Sam Katzman and Columbia, and its success only solidified Schneer’s confidence in the young Harryhausen’s stop motion process.

Kenneth Tobey (The Thing from Another World, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, The Bigamist) stars as Naval Commander Pete Matthews, who is overseeing the maiden voyage of the latest American nuclear submarine when it has a close encounter with a massive unknown something in the Pacific.  Back in dry dock a piece of fleshy material is discovered on the submarine’s hull, and two marine biologists are called in to classify it.  Between romantic moments and dinner outings (Tobey wastes no time in snagging hotty scientist Faithe Domergue for himself) the scientists discover that the flesh belongs to a gigantic octopus, a finding the Navy begrudgingly accepts after more ships are lost in the Pacific.  With the monster making a bee-line for the American West Coast, it’s up to the scientists and the Commander to come up with a new weapon to stop it.


The screenplay, credited to regular Bert I. Gordon writer George Worthing Yates (The Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. The Spider) and Hal Smith (The Defiant Ones), ranks a few solid clicks above the garbage that was to take over the genre by the latter half of the ’50s and certainly serves its purpose.  Dialogue is consistently literate, and even the obligatory goofy science lessons (an embarrassed-looking Don Curtis explaining cephalopod propulsion with a rubber balloon, for instance) are above par.  The narrative falls back on tried-and-true melodrama to provide the majority of the distraction, with ample scenes devoted to the rather cold romance between Kenneth Tobey and Faith Domergue.  The main cast is a professional lot, though some can’t keep from looking utterly disinterested or even annoyed with the material they’ve signed on to perform.

Actor-turned-director Robert Gordon plays the material in the semi-documentary neo-realist fashion that was popular for such pictures at the time, and keeps things moving and interesting, if formulaic.  Brief snippets of narration (by voice talent William Woodson) accompany many of the non-romantic scenes, but never becomes so overbearing as in some contemporary efforts (like The Deadly Mantis and The Lost Missile).  Gordon builds good suspense on a several occasions and the opening, with the submarine’s sonar display slowly filling with a writhing black blob of contact, is the stuff classic monster movies are made of.  Mischa Bakaleinikoff’s original monster themes, full of brassy power, are great no matter how often we’ve heard them repeated, and were new at the time It Came From Beneath the Sea was produced.  It’s music that figures prominently into my formative childhood memories.

The main attraction of the show, and the reason it was as big a success as it was, is without a doubt Harryhausen’s effects work, which still holds up to scrutiny after all these years.  The climactic assault of his six-armed octopus armature on the famous sights of San Francisco is enough to rate It Came From Beneath the Sea a near classic of the genre, and its dismemberment of the Golden Gate Bridge is one of American science fiction’s most iconic images.  There are more than a fair share of flubs to be seen for those on the lookout, but the experience as a whole is quite effective and it’s still mind-boggling to imagine Harryhausen alone in his rented studio space making it all work.  The details of his labor really come alive in the new high def presentation, the almost sentient attitude of the individual tentacles and even the occasional puckering of a suction cup.


Sony has made a good first effort in committing their extensive science fiction and fantasy library to high definition with their Ray Harryhausen Collection from October, 2008.  The set includes he and Charles H. Schneer’s first four productions under the Columbia banner from this film through Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles to Earth and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.  While 20 Million Miles to Earth and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad are both available separately, the Blu-ray editions of It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers are at present only available as part of this collection.  2-disc SD DVD editions of both are available for purchase individually, with identical supplemental content, and I’ve linked to the SD release for It Came From Beneath the Sea at the start of this review.

The dual layered Blu-ray of It Came From Beneath the Sea combines all the contents of the two disc set in one easy-to-use package, one of the major benefits of the new format for those like me who are quickly running out of shelf space for multi-disc editions (apartment living will be the death of me).  The disc comes with two 1080p 1.85:1 editions of the film, the original black and white and the new colorized variant handled by Legend Films.  Having watched both and given the colorized version its fair shake, this reviewer will be sticking with the black and white original.  The color transfer has a rather processed look to these eyes (understandable given the technique) and while colorization practices have certainly improved since the days when King Kong was fighting a T-rex in cool pastels on TNT, they’re still a far cry from perfect.  Skin tones in particular are flat and lifeless, and some of the effects, like the sunset colors in the background of the mid-film romantic dinner, are flat out terrible.

Both transfers are sharp and very well defined, and have obviously undergone some restorative work to get rid of damage.  The crisp, clean black and white variant is a startling improvement over what I remember seeing on TV as a child, which made the beautiful Faith Domergue appear positively morose.  The experience was like seeing the film for the first time.  The feature is alive with film grain, in understandably higher amounts during the stock footage and effects scenes, and I’m happy to see that no effort was made to smooth it out.  Audio is a powerful Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix, which sounds great to these ears (Bakaleinikoff’s themes burst through the opening credits) even if separation is limited.  No original monophonic track is offered.  Subtitle options are extensive (see the full list at the top of this article) for this all-region disc, and even include Portuguese, Spanish, French and Japanese translations for the supplements.

Supplements are surprisingly stacked compared to the SD edition from 2003.  The feature commentary, featuring Ray Harryhausen and effects artists Randall William Cook and John Bruno, is lively and informative, and Harryhausen’s memories are still pretty clear after all these long years.  Next up are a host of featurettes (totalling 83 minutes), including one devoted to Mischa Bakaleinikoff’s work for Columbia hosted by David Schecter (see the full list of featurettes at the top of this page).  Also included is a digital preview of the comic book continuation of the story, It Came From Beneath The Sea Again.  All supplements appear to be 480p SD with the exception of the trio of trailers for the rest of the films in the set, which are all Mpeg-2 encoded HD.  Oddly, the trailer for It Came From Beneath the Sea itself is omitted.

It Came From Beneath the Sea comprises 1/4 of the most expensive home video purchase I’ve made in a while, and I dare say it was well worth it.  The fact that the first two titles of the Ray Harryhausen Collection are only available as part of the collection will infuriate some, especially those who already own the Blu-ray releases of 20 Million Miles to Earth and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.  That said, my advice is to suck it up, sell your dupes, and pick up the whole set – in my mind, even a sci-fi programmer like this is worth the HD upgrade.  The 2-disc SD package is available otherwise.  The film itself is a minor classic made at the cusp of that mid-50s genre nose-dive, and comes recommended.


order this film from Amazon.com
2-disc SD DVD | 4-disc Blu-ray Collection