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!)
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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.
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