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Mesopotamian murals and Bernard Herrmann's noble brass promise "Dynamation, the new miracle of the screen," Ray Harryhausen and his stable of beasts deliver accordingly. A canted dolly-in through marine fog to find Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) at the rudder is illustrative of the vibrant pictorialism at play, along for the ride are the beaming bride (Kathryn Grant) and the treacherous magician (Torin Thatcher). Transforming a matronly handmaiden into "the most exotic woman in all Baghdad" is a party trick at the sultan's banquet, the vast urn cracks (cf. Kagemusha) to present a four-armed odalisque with blue skin and a serpent's tail, enough spectacle to get the wizard banished. His revenge is to shrink the princess to Lilliputian dimensions and trade the antidote for the hero's journey, "through uncharted waters with a doubtful crew," to Colossa Island. Wailing demons at sea and two-head chicks and their angry mommas, above all the snarling Cyclops—one-horned and goat-legged, the behemoth ponders the protesting sailor tied to the roasting spit and licks its lips lavishly. (Its propensity for squashing intruders with a tree trunk is complemented by a touching, Kong-like majesty, last glimpsed at the bottom of a gorge.) Zoltan Korda is the model for Nathan Juran's direction, a continuous stream of movement and color with a fresh oneiric vision every five minutes: The blood-red creek that turns out to be to be wine, the melancholy boy-genie (Richard Eyer) who cartwheels into a fireball, the chained dragon versus the giant crossbow, the thumb-sized heroine sliding into the magic lamp with a tiny "wheee!" "From the land beyond beyond... From the world past hope and fear..." A foregleam of Jason and the Argonauts rounds outs the ideal Saturday matinee. With Alec Mango, Harold Kasket, Danny Green, Alfred Brown, and Nana DeHerrera.
--- Fernando F. Croce |