Reviews by JxSxPx

If adversity and strife make for great art, then that perfectly explains why Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast is one of the towering greats of cinema. As the rubble and dust settled from WWII, Cocteau created this pristine and immaculate piece of fantasy cinema to rouse the collective spirit of the country, spurred on by the encouragements of his muse and lover Jean Marais. The film stock was hard to come by, causing certain scenes to look rougher than others were while maintaining the dream-like disorientation that permeates throughout. Cloth was harder to find, and several morning the crew and cast would go to set to find the bed sheets stolen overnight. And Jean Cocteau was gravely ill midway through production, and his condition required continuous breaks to take painful injections.

Now watch the film again and look for where the bleeding sutures from these tears in production show. You can’t find them, but you will find a movie of uncompromising beauty, grace, imagination, and poetry. Beauty and the Beast is equally soulful and fragile, ephemeral and tactile.

The film opens up with Cocteau, stars Jean Marais and Josette Day writing their names on a chalkboard, announcing a certain level of self-reflection and theater at play here. Then Cocteau breaks down the fourth wall further with a written prologue by imploring the audience directly to suspend their cynicism and open their minds to a child-like sense of belief and wonder. Beauty and the Beast is perhaps the most revealing and personal of Cocteau’s handful of films.

Cocteau was an artistic polymath, with a dizzying number of novels, poems, plays, librettos, drawings, and paintings created by him. He is best remembered for his films and this one in particular. By tapping into the sexuality in the fairy tale, and his own queerness in a roundabout way, Cocteau created the greatest film interpretation of a fairy tale and the definitive example of a monster-in-love.

The frustrations of repressed love are palpable in the Beast’s earliest interactions with Beauty. He carries her across the threshold, places her in her bed, and she recoils in terror when she first sees him. Humiliated, as he often will be in these early awkward romantic encounters, he turns from her and demands that she never look him in the eyes. These failed attempts at coitus come to a head when Beauty decides to take a stroll with the Beast in the woods, and the scene of him drinking from her hands is achingly romantic and erotically charged. Name me one queer kid who won’t identify with the abject terror Beauty and the Beast demonstrates in its earlier scenes at burgeoning sexuality and its confusion (Beauty’s bed in Beast’s castle opens up its own sheets, and she flees in terror/horror before fainting).

Yet it wasn’t just his own queerness that Cocteau tapped into here, but the scarred psyche of all of France. Beauty’s home life, a wasting bourgeoisie with a dying patriarch and divided loyalty within its unit, can be read as writ large of France’s immediate national id in the wake of the Nazi Occupation. The happy ending of Beauty and the Beast doesn’t declare itself with a strong period, but a more wistful ellipsis. Beauty’s disappointment in the Beast’s transformation from leonine to handsome prince is unmistakable, and this ending while optimistic is not declarative or definitive in any way.

It taps into much of Cocteau’s work, a deep love of the artifice and aestheticism. Surface textures, ornate costuming, proudly arcane special effects, and a pervading sense of romanticism merge with the ways he contorts our expectations. We expect Beauty to be an ethereal creature, one defined by her goodness and self-sacrifice, but Josette Day plays her with subtler shadings. Day excavates a dancer’s grace in Beauty’s movements even when she performs mundane tasks, and a weakness that borders on the hermetic. She’s doomed to a life of servitude towards her vain sisters, ineffectual father, lout brother, and the aggressive romantic advances of his best friend (Jean Marais, in one of his three roles). Day’s transformation from this oppressed creature to romantic figure is startling when you think about the trajectory of the character, but she does it with tremendous ease that you never see her sweat.

But this is as much Jean Marais’ masterpiece as Cocteau’s, and Marais plays his triple role with grace and confidence. He’s a portrait of toxic masculine aggression as Avenant, the beautiful but morally and emotionally empty friend of her brother’s. He’s poised and regal as the handsome prince with his stiff body carriage and posh manners. Yet these two performances are mere adornments to his work as the Beast, one of cinema’s greatest and most essential performances. His Beast is eternally at war with the regal prince trapped inside and the predatory exterior. The makeup job on him is extraordinary, but it’s the way that it frames and highlights his eyes that truly makes it special. Marais’ eyes are his primary means of expression for a long time, along with his hands that frequently signal his suppressed rages or demonstrate an uncommon grace. Beauty and the Beast is made-up of several great artists bringing their highest operating levels to this project, and Marais’ gesticulations, wounded eyes, and erotic screen presence cannot be praised enough here.

And if Beauty and the Beast is best remembered for anything, it’s the never-ending cascade of surreal, painterly images of magical occurrences. The Blood of a Poet had a few of these, but nothing prepares for the transportive powers of Beauty and the Beast’s sequences. There’s the scene where Beauty cries diamonds, one where she emerges from a wall after putting on a magical glove, she floats above the ground in Beast’s castle, and in yet another her clothing transforms from plainclothes to an elaborate gown by entering a doorway. This is but a handful of them, and sights that are even more wondrous as the film goes on. I’m quite fond of the quick glance of spilled pearls creating an elaborate jewel in the Beast’s palm myself.

If only more fantasy films would borrow the lyrical, imaginative tone on display here. It never shies away from the darker elements at play in the fairy tale, and it takes great relish in examining what we desire and fear. It’s romantic, it’s mature in its emotional life, it has an indomitable ability to make the fantastical feel as real as the poverty of its earliest scenes. Fuck Disney, Beauty and the Beast is the definitive film document of a fairy tale, and as close to cinematic nirvana as we can get. 

The Blood of a Poet is surreal, artistic film that moves and breathes like a piece of diegetic poetry and synthesizes mythology. The film builds itself around an artist’s creativity and the myth of Orpheus, chops itself into four chapters, and a series of oneiric images add disorientating flavor. This film may lack the anchor that later Jean Cocteau films like Beauty and the Beast would contain to provide a grounding reason for the hallucinatory and beautiful images, but it’s still a knockout of a debut.

At times it can feel as though the images are a flurry of strangeness that signify nothing so much as mere peculiarities, but that is a surface reaction to the film. Yes, sometimes the images and their connection to the loosely defined narrative are incomprehensible to anyone but Cocteau, but I wouldn’t trade their strange beauty for anything else. Much of The Blood of a Poet is circular in its logic and storytelling devices creating a closed circuit of logic in its feverish ramblings of divine inspiration and madness.

The first section concerns the artist trying to erase a drawing, only to find the mouth he’s erased affixed to his hand. He then transfers this mouth to a statue in his room, and the statue compels him to enter a mirror. Once in the mirror, things go even more topsy-turvy as the crawls across the doorways and peaks in on various odd happenings in different rooms. This underworld compounds an ever escalating series of weird events to increasingly unhinged and dream-like images. Somewhere along the way it all makes an odd sense as you watch, but it’s near incomprehensible to adequately describe to someone else. This is its own type of virtue and beauty.

I gleam the interior struggle to create art and bits and pieces of the Orphic myth, a story that would possess Cocteau enough to create a trilogy around it. This sense of mystery will either wrap around in comfortingly beguiling terms, or keep you at an arm’s length in intellectual frustration. This is a weird film with relatively few straight scenes, and possibly the most avant-garde of his films without a strong tether to a more coherent through line. The Blood of a Poet is deeply unusual, but it’s staggeringly gorgeous and a clear glimpse into Cocteau’s psyche. He paints with off-kilter images, light, and Enrique Rivero’s sensual body and expressive face. It is an imperfect viewing experience, but no less essential for these hindrances.

Moonlight is a prime example of the ephemeral and indefinable qualities of “it.” Here is a deeply personal story, sometimes achingly and uncomfortably so about one man’s defining and altering experiences across three different points. It’s just the personal empathy and emotional investment that Moonlight commands of us, but the vibrant direction of Barry Jenkins that makes this such a transforming cinematic experience. Moonlight is what I want more of cinema to aspire to be.

The narrative is fairly slight, but this is not a bad thing. So films are epic tomes of dense plotted incidence, and others are finely detailed character portraits. Moonlight is very much the latter with its trio of performances as the central character, Chiron. I’m not sure which one of the three actors inhabited the role first, but all three of them exhibit the same learned postures and expressive eyes. Chiron is a quiet character, deeply withdrawn and prone to moments of silence where we can only gauge his emotional reactions through the way his shoulders slump, or his eyes plead. This specificity of character is written into the narrative, and Chiron’s emotional and sexual awakenings feel like a lived in truth.

Even better is the ensemble of actors, led by the three people playing Chiron. Alex Hibbert is first as a shy kid, then Ashton Sanders as an awkward teenager, and finally Trevante Rhodes as a wounded adult. Hibbert gets the least amount of dialog and business to do, with much of his performance being merely reactive to the chaos surrounding him, but he’s a knockout. His face contains depths of pain and longing that only deepen the character as it’s passed along and the others borrow this body language. Sanders adds a simmering rage that threatens to explode into violence at any minute, and does as the second section wraps up. Then Rhodes adds more complexity to the character by turning these things into masks for a vulnerable core, and expressing a hesitancy that cracks apart his gruff exterior. He interacts with André Holland beautifully, but Rhodes’ best scene is quite possibly the reactive one where Naomie Harris’ mother apologizes for putting him through a never-ending series of horrors and he softly cries before telling her that she has his forgiveness.

Moonlight is made up of these kind of quiet interactions between characters, and several of them are haunting in how real they feel. Moonlight’s three section focus in on Chiron’s relationships with two people in his life: his abusive, drug-addicted mother (Naomie Harris) and school age friend Kevin (also played by three actors, but most effectively by André Holland as an adult). Many of the scenes involving Harris’ Paula struck something very deep within me, a sense of shared pain and history with this character that felt accurate in its small details. The glimpses of objects and interactions among adults that don’t make sense entirely to your youthful gaze, the sense of emotional indifference or downright hostility from a parent that is entirely misplaced on their part, the deep feeling of being collateral damage in their self-destruction. Moonlight was oddly a soulful affirmation of past traumas in giving life to these shared experiences between myself and Chiron. It was as if someone saw us and what we had endured.

Everyone speaks about Moonlight as a gay drama, and it is, make no mistake. But that tidily fits it into too specific a box, the same way that dubbing it a black or urban drama does as well. This is absolutely revolutionary for the simple fact that it gives voice and presence to queer people to often ignored by the wider media, but this is a towering achievement to the complexity of humanity. There’s no soothing balm here like there would be in something like The Help or Dallas Buyers Club, but there is a shared truth in Chiron’s quest for wholeness and to be seen. This is the type of film that I want to see sweep up Oscars by the armful. None of this is to argue that Moonlight’s blackness and queerness are inessential to the narrative, for they very much are, but an argument that someone who would potentially be wary of a film about those things should rethink that idiotic stance. Moonlight takes pieces of all of those film styles, and twist them around so that the souls of its characters are naked and porous for our understanding.  

The greatness of Moonlight can be neatly traced to the final section’s long scene of re-connection between Kevin and Chiron. This is not an ending for either of them, but an arrival. After the heartbreak, anger, and pathos of the first two segments, this third one is a cleansing baptism and rebirth for both men. Chiron, in particular, finally begins stepping into his authentic self and emotional maturity, perhaps finally going about finally putting his emotional truths forward and gaining perspective on his wants and needs. This last section is also a marked departure from the rest of the film, which was kinetic and chaotic portraits of faces, lights, and music. This last section is more straightforward formalism with a pervading sense of calm, and this is necessary to really underscore the point of re-connection, forgiveness, and awakening.

Painterly images and beautiful scenery cannot hide limp-dick kitsch of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, no matter how much pageantry they throw in front of you. It’s a vibrant production in service of historical revisionism and soap opera fable. It screams to the heavens and clatters like thunder while dipping into a particularly squeamish form of English jingoism. How did we come down so hard from 1998’s Elizabeth to this sound-and-fury sequel?

Maybe because the first film was about the transformation of a young girl into a symbolic figurehead, digging down deep into the psychological complexity of how that transition happens. The fires used to forge a woman into a monarch gave way to how that monarch became a frigid, rigid, unpleasant freak show. Then there’s a major problems with the presentation of the Spanish and Catholics as slobbering, zealous ghouls out to purge the Protestants from England. The Golden Age would more accurately be described as The Gilded Age.

There’s only so much that frilly frocks, elegant makeup and hairdos, and artful cinematography can be used to mask the religious fervor that permeates throughout. Elizabeth is filmed in swirling camera movements, haloed light, and framed in a style similar to iconographic religious art in the Renaissance. It’s so damn ridiculous and no one seems to notice just how borderline camp it all plays as. Except it believes in its pretentions very deeply and that dampens some of the inadvertent enjoyment from the slow-motion shot of a white horse leaping off of a sinking ship during a heated battle.

At least The Golden Age is mainly well cast. Cate Blanchett goes big and broad, breathing flirty, demanding, exacting life to a stodgily written figure that the script tries to beatify and entomb simultaneously. Clive Owen and Abbie Cornish generate erotic bluster as the young lovers, while Rhys Ifans glowers as a hammy villain. The best of the supporting players are Geoffrey Rush, a continual MVP in any film he’s in, and an underused Samantha Morton, as a grandiose Mary, Queen of Scots. Not all of the players are doing good work though. Look no further than Eddie Redmayne, an actor with two operating modes, one of quiet, skilled technique and the other all nervous twitches and fluttering. He tends to indulge the second method more often than the first, and that is the case here.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is pomp and circumstance for two hours. There’s nothing much on its brain aside from eye-gouging pageantry. At least returning director Shekhar Kapur provides plenty of ample superficial spectacle. There’s pleasures to be had in watching only for the visuals. Just mute the omnipresent soundtrack and purple dialog. Except for maybe the sight of Cate Blanchett smacking Abbie Cornish while screaming, “My bitches wear my collars!” in full-on drag queen mode.

If Valley of the Dolls had the courage of its convictions, it would be an even better proto-feminist piece of pop kitsch. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of camp enjoyment to be found here as it covers all of the basics. The tenants of camp cinema are all found here in bits and pieces, things like unintentionally hilarious dramatic moments, overacting, carbon-dating its subject matter, and a clear lack of understanding of some of this material.

Despite racking in obscene piles of money, Valley of the Dolls does distinctly lack a clear directorial vision. Mark Robson was a perfectly competent journeyman director, and he had done fantastic work in his partnership with producer Val Lewton (The 7^th Victim, Isle of the Dead). Shame that the pervading sense of atmosphere and personality that he brought to those films is nowhere to be found here. Valley of the Dolls is trashy entertainment, but if Robson had given over to some better artistic impulses then Dolls could rival its sequel in terms of sheer fuckery and balls-to-the-walls camp ascendancy.   

We have a trio of heroines that all aspire to stardom, but Anne (Barbara Perkins) is our surrogate. Anne is a New Englander, all prim manners and emotional reserve, who befriends Neely O’Hara (Patty Duke) and Jennifer North (Sharon Tate) while they try to make it in showbiz. What follows is peaks-and-valleys of insider information, and moments where our heroines reveal the substantial sexism they’re combating. Yet there’s a pervasive sense that the material is somehow afraid (or unable) to encounter the darker, murkier aspects of their individual lives.

Sharon Tate made the lasting impression on me, and in a very good way. Her career was brief, but this was the most substantial and lasting role in it. She’s tremendously vulnerable, and her character’s journey is the one with the most pathos and least amount of kitsch attached. She knows she’s a beautiful girl with limited talent, she knows she’s exploited but has nothing else to offer. Tate is all chic clothing, impossibly glamorous, and deeply effecting by withholding and limiting her performance. Her character’s eventual fate is a moment of genuine seriousness in a movie that up to this point had been pure soap opera.

The only other performance that impresses for positive reasons is Susan Hayward. No surprise, something like this is well within Hayward’s wheelhouse. Overly dramatic soap opera was her forte, and she modulates her performance incredibly well here. The bathroom fight between her and Duke is a humdinger of kitsch, with her wig removal and battered grace something of a moment of brutal truth. Everything else is all ridiculous fun, with Duke’s inability to modulate her performance a real low-light (or is it a highlight?) as her character crashes harder than Icarus.

I do wish the film had mined the feminist fury at the heart of some of this more. The three dolls are at the mercy and sexual pleasure of the men in their lives, with some of them willing to trade on it for favor. The bad behavior on display begins to look more like a well thought-out rebellion. There’s several small tweaks here and there that would improve Valley of the Dolls as camp artifact of the late-60s mod scene. Just sit back and enjoy, because fun is fun, and watching Patty Duke pop brightly colored pills, empty a bottle of Bourbon in her swimming pool, and then have an emotional breakdown in an alleyway is a ton of fun.

That Touch of Mink is the sight of the king and queen of distinct styles of romantic comedies trying to enliven mediocre material. Not even the considerable talents of Doris Day and Cary Grant can keep your interest in a movie that features a great kitchen-sink dramatist taking the directorial duties. This combination of routine material and odd director choice makes That Touch of Mink flat when it should be fizzy.

Granted, Day’s 60s bedroom farce is something of a stale piece of cake in comparison to Grant’s pedigree as the king of screwball. Think of how sexy, fun, flirty, and funny screwball comedies are in comparison to something like That Touch of Mink, which is basically the bedroom comedy distilled to its most primary tenants. There’s Day doing her “world’s oldest virgin” act, Grant as the lecherous suitor, a pair of more colorful and interesting best friends (Gig Young playing neurotic, Audrey Meadows playing sarcastic), and a healthy dose of smarm covering the whole thing.

It’s not that the script is something we’ve seen a million times before in Day’s body of work, look at how effervescent other films she made still are, it’s that Mink is missing that extra oomph. Dick Sargent appears as a newlywed that tells Grant how much he’s dreading his upcoming life as a married man, and this sense of marriage as a tomb pervades. How are we supposed to root for the two leads to get together when the film is obsessed with letting us know that marriage is a small death of the soul?

Even worse is how ill-matched Delbert Mann is with this material. The surfaces are all right, but the beats are wrong or off. Mann was a brilliant director of hefty drama, think of Marty or Middle of the Night. He seems uncomfortable with the heightened artifice and theatricality necessary to pull this material off. At least he knows to deploy supporting players like Audrey Meadows, Gig Young, and John Astin often as they play this material for all of the glossy, goofy weight they can throw at it. Day is perfectly fine here, but this genre was her bread-and-butter and it does feel like we’ve seen this performance a time or two before. It’s Grant who isn’t bad per se, but is undone by the script’s treatment of his character. His character is a smarmy, oily asshole, and Grant feels slightly uncomfortable playing the character next to the youthful Day at this stage of his career.

The conspicuous consumption and materialism on display here is par for the course, but the sexual obligation that Day’s character experiences leaves That Touch of Mink with a bitter aftertaste. There’s a few funny jokes to mine from the material, like Day’s crisis of conscience putting her and Grant on a bed in various locations. Even better is the dressing down that Meadows delivers when she exclaims that the female species sold itself out for the right to smoke indoors, and Day doesn’t even smoke. To be fair, there are minor charms here, and nothing with Day and Grant is totally without merit. It’s just that between them, they’ve blessed the world with plenty of classic romantic comedies and That Touch of Mink is personality-free and unmemorable that it feels worse than it actually is.

Clash of the Titans is a swan song, not only for Ray Harryhausen’s career but for a type of romantic-adventure stories that are no longer made. While it doesn’t compare to its brethren like Jason and the Argonauts or The Thief of Bagdad, it is of a piece with those colorful epics filled with stolid heroes, beautiful princesses, enormous monsters, never-ending quests, and effects work that is arcane and more dream-like than anything in modern cinema. It is delightful in spite of a series of problems, and a fitting end to the storied career of Ray Harryhausen.

Much like Harryhausen’s Sinbad films, Clash of the Titans uses the basics of its mythological framework, a couple of familiar names and monsters, and rearranges them in a straightforward narrative. Ask anyone who is not obsessed with mythology and folklore to tell you the story of Perseus and Andromeda, and they’ll more than likely tell you the story as found here. That is the power of pop culture retelling these legends. This is a film dubbed about the clashing of the Greek Titans without featuring them actually clashing or any of the proper Titans, but instead retrofitting the title onto the Kraken and Medusa.

It also shows the power of Harryhausen’s artistry. After all, who else could plop a well-known aquatic monster from Norse mythology into a Greek myth? The Kraken emerging from the water to destroy cities and capture the sacrificial virgin is crude by today’s standards, but delightful for the quality of a dream that it projects. It exudes personality and menace, as though it were a primordial beast unleashing indiscreet havoc. Who cares if there’s no Kraken to be found anywhere in Greek mythology when this gargantuan monster is so pleasing in its purpose.

Even better is Medusa, quite possibly the most technically accomplished and artistically complex creation in Harryhausen’s entire oeuvre. The seven-headed Hydra and skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts still impress with the bullishness of their artistic brilliance, but they’re almost quaint in the sight of the slithering, glaring Medusa. Her hair made of snakes moves independently at every moment, she crawls across the floor, her tail rattles and slithers, and she alternates between lurching forward and shooting arrows at her attackers. She is the stuff of nightmares, a near prehistoric monstrosity of feminine evil.

Then there’s the curious problem of Bubo, the mechanical owl. A clear concession to Star Wars’ ascendancy no matter what the creators try to claim. It’s a bit of an annoyance, but it’s animated with tremendous care, skill, and personality. It’s a mixed blessing of a film, a clear fault but one that is done with clear, consummate craftsmanship. Bubo is something of the entirety of the film in microcosm.

While Clash of the Titans has the courage to stick to its goofy convictions, completely embracing the passing Saturday matinee fare that was more light-hearted and vibrant than the muddied and grim blockbusters of the current era. We get the Greek gods as played by Shakespearean greats like Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith, glorious hams like Burgess Meredith, and an attractive lead couple in Harry Hamlin and Judi Bowker. All of them genuflect to the material, some far more successful than others. Supporting players like Meredith, here as Ammon, a poet and quest master for Perseus, are right to go broad with the material to pick up for the slack of the blander leads. But Olivier as a petulant Zeus who is quickly tamed by a pretty face, Smith as a petty and vindictive Thetis, Clare Bloom as a haughty and regal Hera all make positive impressions. Hamlin is fine with a thankless role, basically spending the movie playing fetch in an ever escalating series of quests, while Bowker is pretty but vacuous, the only truly terrible performance in the entire film.

It is frequently dysfunctional, completely frivolous and campy in its execution, but dammit if Clash of the Titans isn’t a pleasing trifle. It sticks to the tenants of any Harryhausen film, a pervading sense of kitsch, hammy acting, workmanlike direction, and lovingly arcane special-effects work that give the distinct impression of unreality. Good for it, I say. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a perfect ending to Harryhausen’s incalculably influential career. It features all of his obsessions in one movie, and it’s packed to the rafters with monsters both big and small. No one will mistake it for the loftiest of cinematic arts, but it’s delicious, comforting junk food. Sometimes, that’s just what the soul needs.

Here is further proof that the third installment of a franchise is inevitably the weakest, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger is a retread of not only the two previous entries in the trilogy but the entirety of Ray Harryhausen’s career. There’s no wonder here, no fun sense of otherworldliness at play. In fact, even Harryhausen’s creations are more humdrum than life giving to this limp piece of cornbread.

While neither Seventh Voyage nor Golden Voyage could claim modesty in how often and routinely they paused their narratives to bring in more fantastical creatures, Eye of the Tiger makes them look positively prudish in comparison. But the excess on display here has a strangely numbing effect since so much of has been done already by the master, and better. There’s ghouls, a metallic Minotaur, a troglodyte, a gigantic walrus, a chess-playing chimpanzee, a gigantic wasp, a Smilodon, and a witch who can change sizes and transform into a bird.

But none of them are as imaginatively rendered as they should be. I suppose one should be kind to Harryhausen for this, as even he admitted that there just wasn’t enough time and money granted to him to make the effects really pop. They’re perfunctory from beginning to end leaving Eye of the Tiger as the nadir of Harryhausen’s career. It feels wrong to criticize a master of his craft who has so incalculably aided to my imaginative development, but Eye of the Tiger is just not good or original enough by any measure.

Too much of Eye of the Tiger feels built upon the foundations of other material. There’s Melanthius, a Greek alchemist/exposition dump played by Patrick Troughton like a dry-run for Gandalf in a never-made Harryhausen Lord of the Rings adaptation. There’s Zenobia, another Sinbad movie offers up a dark-arts practitioner as its main villain, this time an evil stepmother played to theatrical heights by Margaret Whiting. Jane Seymour gets saddled with the poorly written love interest role, and Patrick Wayne is a hopelessly wooden Sinbad. The role of Sinbad is something of a mixed blessing for any actor. On one hand you’re the title character, on the other you’re merely a blank space for Harryhausen’s creativity to throw swords and magic spells at. Kerwin Mathews and John Phillip Law were likable, handsome, and knew how to give themselves to the material, while Wayne is just kinda…there.

The worst offender has to be director Sam Wanamaker. He splices the film with little regards or care for creating intelligible spatial geography and basic filmic geometry. He also allows too much bloat to make its way into this. Golden Voyage’s 105 minutes was pushing the boundaries for how long this material could sustain itself, and Eye of the Tiger’s near two-hours is clearly beyond the thin story’s reach. The better directors of Harryhausen’s films knew they were traffic cops trying to keep everything running smoothly, so I guess you could dub this film something of a pile-up.

Distinct and unique sense of mythology and location is noticeably absent here. Where the previous films were gleeful in the ways they mixed disparate bits of cultural mythologies into their whimsical hodge-podges, this feels lazily assembled. There’s obvious stealing from She in the pyramid hidden away in an arctic tundra, complete with steep stairs, a light vortex, and frozen Smilodons. Then there’s the oddball way that our characters enter a valley that either spits them out into a lovely spring and forest, or they walk back a desert pyramid. Looking for logic in these films is a bit of a stretch, but a certain set of fair rules and coherence by their own internal workings is not asking for much. 

Yet I still possess a modicum of affection for it. Call it the hazy gaze of childhood nostalgia, call it my deep fondness and love of Harryhausen, call it what you will. Undoubtedly this is the lamest of the Sinbad films, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t stir some strange form of fondness in me. Hell that battle royale between the troglodyte, Smilodon, and Sinbad is a vast improvement over the Golden Voyage’s climax, and if you only watch Eye of the Tiger for that one scene, well, it’s a damn fine scene.  

Ray Harryhausen’s second spin around with Sinbad the Sailor takes the basic formula that worked so well in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and cranks it to eleven. This steroidal sequel lacks the naïve innocence of the original, but makes up for it in a bigger scope, more fantastical elements, more stop-motion critters, and more of everything else. It’s a worthy successor despite the general sense that the magic of these films was quickly drying up and their promised adventures falling short of the prior heights.

While the script is a collage of incidents with holes built into the material to provide wiggle room for Harryhausen to strut, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad does distinctly lack a certain something that was pervasive in some of his older films. Perhaps changing tastes had left this gee-whiz type of adventure story as archaic by 1974. Still, even with a major problem of middling awe there’s plenty to recommend and catch your imagination during the voyage.

Most notably is a moment of tender poetry, where Harryhausen seemingly wrote in (the Sinbad films are the few movies where he contributed story elements) a self-reflective moment between a creator and creation. Our villain, Koura (played by the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker) uses black magic to create a homunculus then gives it some of his blood to breathe life into the creature. This moment, oddly tender and beguilingly quiet, is a miniature portrait of the master at work, giving pieces of himself to bring to life a cavalcade of horrors to do his bidding.

While that scene is a clear highlight, it’s not the lone moment of inspired magic and imagination. An uncredited Robert Shaw, unrecognizable under layers of makeup and vocal distortion, as the Oracle of All Knowledge in a banging, clattering scene of awe and terror as the oracle drops mysterious clues and vague prophecy to aide our heroes on their adventure. Shaw’s Oracle looks positively demonic with it’s disgusting teeth, wild beard, and many horns protruding from his scalp. He appears and disappears in firestorm and blinding lights, and this is the type of moment that Harryhausen fans are thrilled by.

Of course, the real reason we all return to Harryhausen’s films is the stop-motion creature animation. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is overstuffed with creatures, and a few of them are some of the more memorable inventions of his career. While the one-eyed centaur is fun, and the masthead that springs to violent life is appropriately creepy, but nothing compares to sense of fantasy and wonder that the statue of Kali generates. The battle between Sinbad and his cohorts against the statue is the first sequence in any of these films to live up to the brilliance of Jason and the Argonauts’ skeleton army. This battle with Kali hammers home that when these films are working, whether in individual scenes or as an entire work, they convey a pleasing sense of the otherworldly.

The Valley of Gwangi was an inherited project for Ray Harryhausen. Originally intended by mentor Willis O’Brien as a follow-up to King Kong, with a few sequences of cowboys on the loose in Africa repurposed into Mighty Joe Young, Gwangi is actually the second run-through of this material after O’Brien produced 1956’s The Beast of Hollow Mountain. Of course, a weird western about cowboys battling it out with prehistoric animals sounds like something from the whacky imagination of Harryhausen anyway, so the transition of the idea between the men is seamless.

The Valley of Gwangi is inoffensively kitsch, a movie where you’re very likely to witness an Allosaurus (that would be Gwangi) munching on a character only dubbed “the dwarf,” then fight an elephant, before meeting its end in a cathedral undergoing renovations in a hellish vision of flames destroying the terrorizing monster. The first forty-five minutes has to be powered through, although none of it is terrible so much as it is a bit mundane and workman-like, before the back half goes completely insane.

The second half is where we plunk ourselves down in the valley and a succession of Harryhausen creatures come trotting across the screen. There’s a Pteradon attack, a battle between Gwangi and a Styracosaurus, Gwangi attacking a Ornithomimus in a sequence that was directly lifted for Jurassic Park, and the cowboys trying to wrangle an adorable little Eohippus like a cow. If all of that sounds like wonderfully arcane nonsense, that doesn’t even account for the band of Gypsy hanging in Mexico, a British paleontologist, a traveling Wild West show, and a pervasive sense of daffiness.

Nothing about Gwangi is serious, and nothing in it should be taken seriously. Like many of the films in Harryhausen’s canon, the acting is blandly proficient but the dubbing of Gila Golan is noticeably bad. Her mouth and voice rarely match, nor does the dubbing match the emotive acting that Golan is displaying. Only James Franciscus manages to match the outlandish vibrato of his acting style to the material. Look, if your reaction is anything like mine, then you’ll be rooting for Gwangi to just lay waste to everyone and leave a trail of destruction in his wake as he makes his way back to the valley. I’m not usually so nihilistic, but it would be greatly entertaining to see that happen.

The Valley of Gwangi would prove to be Harryhausen’s last dip into the prehistoric realm, and it is a noticeable improvement over the interminable One Million Years BC. What’s more prominent is just how obviously indebted the entirety of the Jurassic Park series is to this lone film. The Michael Crichton novels provided the beats, characters, and framework, but this Harryhausen film gave the cinematic blueprint and visuals to follow. Trace over in more than a few instances. It’s a good-bad movie, the kind that knows it’s adorably strange, completely implausible, and clunky in its use of clichés.