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What’s worthwhile on DVD...with M.V. Moorhead
Original ‘Sinbad’ now 40-plus years old but, hey, it’s history

By M.V. Moorhead

If you've been disappointed in the past few weeks by the current Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, be assured there's a remedy. Anyone who wants to see the exploits of the seafaring folk hero from the Arabian Nights done right on screen needs look no farther than 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, one of the all-time-great adventure yarns of American cinema.

Though directed by the journeyman Nathan Juran from a well-structured script by Kenneth Kolb, the film belongs to neither of them, but rather to Ray Harryhausen, its legendary special-effects artist.

Harryhausen populates his masterpiece with a gallery of mythical monsters brought to wonderful, haywire life through stop-motion animation.

This painstaking technique, now rendered all but obsolete by computer-generated imagery, employs articulated models which are filmed for a single frame, moved ever so slightly, then filmed for one more frame, and so on, to create the illusion of motion when the film is run at full speed.

Kerwin Mathews is the personification of storybook innocence as the title character, who is forced to return to the terrible island of Colossa in order to cure his girlfriend, the Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant), who’s been shrunk to the size of a doll on the eve of their wedding.

The whole thing is the plot of the magician Sokurah, played with sinister joviality by Torin Thatcher, to get his mitts on the Genie of the Lamp (Richard Eyer).

But worthy as all of these human actors are, the true stars of "7^th Voyage" are Harryhausen's scary yet oddly lovable beasts: the hooved, horned, thuggish-looking Cyclops, borrowed from The Odyssey, who licks his lips while cooking sailors on a spit; the mighty Roc, a giant two-headed bird who reacts badly when Sinbad's hungry crewmen kill one of her chicks; a reanimated skeleton with whom Sinbad has a swordfight; and a splendid green fire-breathing dragon with a somehow canine personality.

All of these set-piece sequences are accompanied by Bernard Herrmann's lusty, grandiose musical score.

In the preadolescent, pure-entertainment (and, I suppose, mostly male) realm, movies don't really get much better than The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

It blew my mind when I was a kid, but I wonder, in this time when special-effect spectacle has become routine, if it would have the same effect on today's little kids. I’d guess it would.

The DVD: “7^th Voyage” by itself is all that’s needed to make a great DVD, but as it happens the DVD edition of the film comes loaded with cool goodies: digitally remastered audio and anamorphic video; English, Spanish and Portuguese language options (several other subtitle options); and several documentaries, the best being The Harryhausen Chronicles, which includes much astonishing rarely-seen footage of Harryhausen’s early or unrealized projects.

There’s also a collection of trailers from other Harryhausen films, which makes a great sampler of his career.

There’s some swashbuckling violence and some monster action in the film which might upset the littlest viewers; otherwise this is first-rate family entertainment.

A final note:

Harryhausen made two more Sinbad flicks, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Both are good; both are on DVD; neither comes close to “7^th Voyage.”

Don’t be confused.

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