Reviews by JxSxPx

The major problem with The Animal World, which which renders the film practically unwatchable today, can be traced directly back to this quote from Irwin Allen, the writer-director-producer of this nature documentary: “We don’t use the word “evolution.” We hope to walk a very thin line. On one hand we want the scientists to say this film is right and accurate, and yet we don’t want to have the church picketing the film.”

You can’t play this information both ways, especially if your goal is to show the progression of life over time. Allen is injecting something that is very much not scientific into something that is purely scientific theory and fact. For every moment of the beautiful images and narration detailing the hard scrabble evolutionary chain from aquatic single-call organisms to the more complex fauna we currently find, there’s thrown in a section about Jonah in the body of the whale, a snake described as the first great villain of society for the way it tempted Eve.

The Animal World is only notable by modern standards for a ten-minute sequence involving stop-motion dinosaurs animated by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. We various dinosaurs eating, laying eggs, fighting, and generally engaging in routine animalistic behavior, this sequence was Walking with Dinosaurs or Jurassic Park before either of those properties were even glimmers of artistic inspiration. This is the only part of the film anyone talks about or remembers, and with good reason. Harryhausen and O’Brien bring energy and true awe-inspiring artistic brio detailing these creatures and their ultimate destruction. Watch The Animal World for this section, that’s what everyone else does.

The acting and directing are a step-up from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in It Came from Beneath the Sea, but its Ray Harryhausen’s quirky effects work that’s the real charm here. Another run through “giant radiated creature destroys the city,” It Came from Beneath the Sea is another fast-moving piece of cinematic junk food. I don’t mean that as a criticism, I mean it as a sincere piece of positive criticism.

Ray Harryhausen’s films are memorable for his various creatures; no one watches them as challenging or deep-thinking cinematic exercises. They’re fun, they’re ridiculous, they’re equal parts fantasy and theme-park attraction. So if the plots are riddled with logical holes and the dialog is pure pulp, then they’re all the better. The more propulsive they are, the more entertaining they become.

It Came from Beneath the Sea is still working out the problems of consistent pacing that something like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad has worked out, so that keeps it from reaching the loftiest heights in Harryhausen’s canon. Doesn’t mean that the final attack on the city, and the gigantic octopus doing the attacking aren’t memorable. In fact, much like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, It Came from Beneath the Sea is best when it drops these special-effects heavy scenes at more frequently intervals.

The budgetary constraints do show here, and they trickle down to Harryhausen’s main attraction. A certain jerkiness is evident, and a few sequences feel rushed in order to keep the time and budget under control. At least Donald Curtis, Kenneth Tobey, and Faith Domergue are on-hand to play this purple material with a straight face. Domergue’s brainy-but-sexy professor is a refreshing heroine in that it’s her smarts that frequently save the day. There’s plenty to admire and like in It Came from Beneath the Sea, even if the entire package is a bit sloppy by even the admittedly loose standards of a B-movie.

The faux-dinosaur at the heart of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (dubbed Rhedosaurus) is the twisted atomic heart of an entire genre of films about gigantic monsters created or awakened by nuclear bombs. For all of the stilted dialog, slumberous pacing, and wooden acting, those big set pieces make the journey worth it. It’s brief running time taps into the Atomic Age paranoia by unleashing this super-beast to destroy civilization, only for civilization to eventually prove its undoing.

One of the best things about The Beast is the simplicity of plot and character development. There’s no moral quandaries here, just a zippy race through the big plot dumps and science pseudo-jargon to get us back to the big monster tearing shit up. It’s innocent nonsense and clearly in love with Ray Harryhausen’s charming lo-fi effects work.

Those special effects are a little dated, but they radiate with a curious imagination and dream-like terror. You can see how Jurassic Park’s T-Rex attacks echo the Rhedosaurus’ rampage through New York city, especially a bit where it leans down to eat a passerby, jerks its head from side to side, then swallows the poor guy. The Rhedosaurus is kept at a distance for the first 2/3 of the plot, then in the final act, all hell is unleashed. This last act makes the entire trip worth it, flaws and all, for the artistry of Harryhausen’s stop-motion creation. Its ultimate destruction in the ruins of a roller coaster ride is practically symbolic of the film itself, for what else could best describe this film than a thrill ride gone off the rails?

It is undoubtedly a classic of the genre, but a deeply flawed one. It’s charming to watch not just for the ways it lays the groundwork and all of the pieces for this genre, which Harryhausen made some of the best but by no means the majority of films in, but for its special effects. It’s wonky, but lovable in its giddy hokum. I frankly adored this dinosaur, and felt a child-like joy in watching it destroy a theme park. It was just too perfect and symbolically loaded for words.

Sixteen years after King Kong frightened the masses, several of the primary players reteamed for this novelty, yet another film about a gigantic ape and the pretty young woman who can tame him. Whereas King Kong was all about scaring the daylights of its audience and sending them on a thrill-a-minute adventure story, Mighty Joe Young plays like a children’s film, a perfectly fine rainy weekend charmer that doesn’t have much ambition besides being a vessel for some impressive stop-motion effects work.

Dusting off his King Kong persona, Robert Armstrong once more ventures into the jungle to find animals to exploit for his own financial gains. This time around, he’s opening an African-themed nightclub and wants a piece of realism to engage the masses. While on expedition in the jungle, he comes across a young girl and her gigantic pet gorilla named Joe. It’s a strange mixture of cowboys, apes, studio-bound jungle sets, kitsch nightclubs, and several chase scenes.

The characters are barely written (Ben Johnson and Terry Moore engage in the limpest love story I’ve seen in a while), the actors are wooden, and the whole thing is rather inconsequential. The real reason to watch Mighty Joe Young is for the special effects. Willis O’Brien came up with the storyboards and techniques to make it all work effectively, but a majority of the animator was handed over to Ray Harryhausen. He manages to give Joe a lot of personality, more playful and sweet than King Kong. Hell, Joe even spits at his attackers during a car chase in the final stretch. Joe engages our deepest sympathies and empathy during scenes of his mistreatment while working as a nightclub act, literally becoming a performing monkey. He lacks the pathos and range of Kong, but he’s still a glorious artistic achievement.

Joe is clearly the strength and focus, look no further than the title but it’s a damn shame that the rest of the movie is so inadequate in comparison. O’Brien won an Oscar for his efforts, and they were richly deserving of the honor. Mighty Joe Young clearly lingers in the popular consciousness, as much as it does, more for historical value than its own merits. It’s the first major work from Harryhausen, even if he’s merely a hired-hand here, and a glimpse of the ensuring wit, charm, and individuality he would breathe into his future movie monsters. 

First, a little bit of background information is in order. Begun as the sixth entry in his fairy tale series in 1952, “The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare” was abandoned once Ray Harryhausen realized there was more money in making movie monsters than there was in making short films for schools. Flash forward to 2002, two Harryhausen disciples, Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero, contact the master after hearing about his incomplete film, and ask to finish it for him. Despite this pronounced gap and change in directorial hands, the three men managed to make something charming and seamless.

“The Tortoise and the Hare” is a lively, positively lovely little movie with an adorable array of characters and detailed landscapes. It’s also worth noting that not only did this thing take fifty years to produce, but Harryhausen hadn’t worked on a film in twenty years by this point (Clash of the Titans being his swan song up to this point). For all of the history potentially working against the film, it makes like it’s slower hero and ends up a winner by the end.

Yes, the hare does have a strikingly similar appearance to a certain Looney Tunes brand character, and the fox looks quite a bit like he stepped out of Pinocchio, but no matter. That tortoise is an adorable little thing giving credence to Harryhausen’s defense of stop-motion animation; it’s both a real object and a clearly artificial construct creating a sense of fantasy built into the fabric of the film. The prior completed four minutes and the newly constructed six are indistinguishable from each other, and that is a high compliment. This would prove to be Harryhausen’s last completed work, and it’s nearly poetic how his career began and end with these fairy tale shorts. He was a maker of dreams, a creative genius in his field who inspired countless imaginations with his penchant for soulful terrors and frights. It’s nice to see a creator return to his gentler roots to say good-bye. 

All of these fairy tale adaptations have flirted with terrifying images, but “The Story of King Midas” gives us a warlock that looks like Nosferatu manifesting from a loose golden coin in a puff of smoke. This creature of dark magic wouldn’t be out of place in one of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad movies or Jason and the Argonauts, but he’s a cracked visage of imperious and cruel fairy creatures here. It’s a minimalist knockout of Harryhausen creating mood and tension, character and ominous atmosphere through clever visual tricks and animation.

Just as great is the joy then slowly escalating terror in Midas as he realizes the truth and consequences of his greed and supernatural powers. It’s all fun and games transforming cups, torches, and flowers into golden objects, but once it turns his breakfast and sweet, young daughter, it all comes to a crashing halt. Then Midas sits alone at his table and weeps, a surprisingly tender and sympathetic portrait of a man’s hubris destroying him before the Nosferatu-lite warlock reappears and promises to undue all the damage.

“The Story of King Midas” is the strongest of the fairy tale shorts that Harryhausen directed in the late 40s/early 50s, and it was the last completed entry in the series prior to his ascendancy as a feature-length wizard of special effects and movie monsters. This wasn’t the last of the fairy tale/folklore adaptations though, one last entry, “The Tortoise and the Hare” begun in 1954 and uncompleted until 2002, remained something of an elusive subject for much of his career. Still, if this was the final one of these films, what a way to close them out. 

“The Story of Hansel and Gretel” is a remarked improvement over the same year’s “Rapunzel,” creating a sustained air of dread throughout its ten short minutes and then ending in a bittersweet happy ending. The innocence is forever lost in Hansel and Gretel’s dewy youth, but at least they didn’t get turned into a witch’s banquet. Even better is how thoroughly definitive some of the animation gets here in creating personalities and individual characters.

While Hansel and Gretel still look like Edgar Bergen’s castoff puppets, and frankly like shrunken middle-aged frumps rather than elementary school aged children, their father is a study in haunted, worried paternal love. His body language is broken and fraught with despair, the never-ending poverty and worry about his children’s health and welfare etched into his face. While the wicked step-mother is missing, the nasty witch remains a frightening presence stomping around the forest. While her red eyes and teal skin, she lords over Hansel while he sits in a candy cane chair, slowly studying him before violently grabbing him and throwing his body into a cage. The witch is a ghoulish piece of work, a leering she-devil that erupts into puffs of sparkles when Gretel sends her back into the inferno.

Even better are some of the smaller moments, like the witch creating the candy-and-gingerbread house to lure Hansel and Gretel into her demonic hands. A large pile of sugar spreads out across the forest floor, then evaporates up before the house pops into view. And the two forest creatures are amusing little side attractions, with the hungry duck munching away on the bread crumbs an obvious delight. The problem still remains of the faces sometimes appearing to blur into various emotions, but Ray Harryhausen’s artistry is clearly growing by leaps and bounds. This witch is scarier than Rapunzel’s, and yet another marker on the way towards more memorable screen creations yet to come in just a few short years.

Made up of equal parts of the colored pencil warmth of a children’s storybook and European noir-ish intrigue of To Catch a Thief, A Cat in Paris is a charming mixed bag. The combination of flavors never settles into anything coherent, but it’s consistently lovely to gaze upon, cozy and artisanal in equal measures almost in spite of the sharp turn into danger and never-ending chases that it descends into during the second half.

This burning style is all used it up by the time A Cat in Paris tries to wrestle up some escalating threats. The story concerns a mute girl, her police chief mother out for revenge on the gangster who killed her husband, her cat that sneaks away at night to aid a burglar, and a gangster looking to perform a heist that will tie all of these various plot strands together. The threat of violence never feels realistic, partially out of the animation style that looks a cross between the characters out of a Red Bull ad and a Starbucks promotion. It’s unique looking and consistently captures your attention, but it alternately undercuts any threats of violence. How can we believe anything bad will happen to our heroes if everything looks so twee?  

There’s a lot of plot to work through in so short a running time, but A Cat in Paris manages it all effectively. Doesn’t mean it handles all of it well, with the ending a particular letdown as the burglar turns out to be a good guy and is never punished for his crimes. In fact, that last frame could make a case for the burglar and widowed police chief mother having formed a new family unit in the time since the story’s end. That is an odd turn of events seemingly at odds with the narrative around it, then the big reveal of the spy in the mute girl’s world for the gangster is obvious due to the limited amount of characters we’ve met. There’s so shock or awe there, but a shoulder shrug and a sense of “well, obviously, it couldn’t be anyone else.” Like the film around it, this revelation and the succession of chase sequences and daring thrills are vaguely satisfying. Come for the visuals and slick score, and be glad that it’s brevity masks a lot of its shortcomings.

The Homesman is something of a mess, but in fractured moments it possess a stark, uncompromising poetry and a stellar pair of lead performances. The problem is, instead of just leaving well enough alone and pointing the camera at Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones, Jones, who also directs, takes the narrative from wild turns of ambiguity and calamity into wild torrents of absurdity. There seems to be some internal struggles throughout The Homesman between regurgitating western totems and tropes with little thought to challenging them or their meanings, and giving the whole genre a feminist spin. Guess which one wins out in the end.

In its earliest moments, we believe that The Homesman will give voice to the women so often regulated to the sidelines or completely left out of the narrative in a western. Then we realize that the movie intends to speak for them, and not with them. That makes all the difference, as the three women driven to insanity for a variety of reasons (all of them understandable given the circumstances) are rendered mute for much of the film, frequently cast aside as helpless victims with all the faculties and depth of a trio of toddlers. This is a great shame, but a greater one is forced silence built into the plot when they reach their final destination and the minister’s wife instructs that she doesn’t wish to hear of their plights. We know them because we saw them play out in the earliest scenes, but we don’t know how any of these women feel about their predicaments or if they even understand.

Much of the talking, and explaining, is left to Jones’ character who is forced into helping them out by the machinations of Swank’s Mary Bee Cuddy, a spinster with the task of transporting the three women from Nebraska to Iowa for mental care. Selfishness and bravery, compassion and desperation got confused for one another, or blood together to reach the same ends, and it’s Jones who ends up the hero of the film despite entering it as a near-death drunkard. His performance is solid, but then again, he’s played this type so often that he could do this tender-hearted rapscallion thing in his sleep. He’s much better playing second fiddle to Swank’s pragmatic, slowly breaking heroine, and the first two-thirds are the better parts of the film despite their problems for this very reason.

Once we land in Iowa, and Meryl Streep in a glorified cameo as the minister’s wife comes out to deify Jones, we’re in trouble. Hell, even before this part, Jones angrily burns out a hotel that refused him (and the women) service in revenge, stealing food, and leaving James Spader (yet another glorified cameo in a film littered with them) to burn in his wake. The haunting specter of tragedy looms large over The Homesman’s characters, and these sequences are supposed to underscore all that has been lost and all that has been compromised to reach this point, but it plays out in aggressively overindulgent tones. And the last scene is a bit of a confusing head-scratcher – was that supposed to be a great tragedy, a cruel joke of irony, or something else entirely?

So praise be to Hilary Swank for making this material work so effectively. Even if the plot pulls her character into mawkish territory during her final scenes, the actress digs deep into Mary Bee’s internal conflicts and slow emotional breakdown. Her performance taps into Swank’s hard to cast peculiarities, like her tough, athletic frame, and ability to project both strength and weakness at the same time. That iron exterior goes deep, but her core is soft and fluid. She is a woman of few options in this, but she’s fascinating to watch as she expresses her agency and demands respect. So when the film drops her to focus in on Jones, The Homesman ultimately feels like a superficial bait-and-switch vanity project.

“The Story of Rapunzel” is probably the weakest of the fairy tale shorts that Ray Harryhausen made. Not for any particular reason besides the lack of a truly memorable villain to make it all worth the trip, of course this can be traced back to the source. The fairy tale drops the witch quickly and then continues with our tragic lovers finding each other in the desert wilderness before running off into the sunset.

Once more, the best thing about this short is the animation of the big bad. The witch doesn’t get enough time in the narrative, but her hunched body posture and more feral body movements stand in contrast to the marionette qualities of the Rapunzel and the prince. In fact, Rapunzel and the prince bare a strong resemblance to Edger Bergen’s puppets more than anything else with their apple cheeks, gigantic teeth, and large eyes. They have as much personality as the felt and clay they’re made from, and emote just as well. It’s clear where Harryhausen’s interests lied, and so do ours as a viewer.

Still, like all of the rest, the scenery is gorgeous, looking like a particularly ornate storybook drawing brought to life. It’s entertaining enough, and a breezy eleven minutes despite the source material’s distinct lacking qualities. There’s nothing wrong with Harryhausen’s adaptation other than it follows the material perhaps too closely. I don’t know about you, but the things I’ve always remembered most about this are the sights of Rapunzel’s hair braiding itself and the witch’s petty, cruel face as she enacts her revenge. More liberating scares or wondrous bits of magic like that, and “The Story of Rapunzel” would only improve in my estimation.