9 / 10
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is the film where Ray Harryhausen invented the modern fantasy adventure. Nathan Juran directed it. Kerwin Mathews plays Sinbad. Kathryn Grant plays Princess Parisa. Torin Thatcher plays Sokurah, the magician who’s the antagonist. Bernard Herrmann composed the score. The film made approximately seven million dollars on a six hundred and fifty thousand dollar budget and saved Columbia Pictures’ fantasy production schedule for the next decade. The combination of Herrmann’s music, Harryhausen’s creatures, and the Mediterranean color photography produced something the genre hadn’t seen before.
This was the first feature presented in Harryhausen’s Dynamation process advertised as a marketing brand. The cyclops, the dragon, the two-headed roc, and the skeleton swordsman are the iconic creatures. The skeleton swordfight, in which Sinbad duels a single skeleton on a winding staircase, took Harryhausen approximately four months to animate. The sequence is the foundation of the more elaborate seven-skeleton fight he’d stage five years later in Jason and the Argonauts.
Few films make me grin like an idiot the way this one does. I think Harryhausen’s creatures have more personality than most CGI monsters I could name, because you can feel a human hand behind every movement, and Herrmann’s music makes the film sound like a legend being told out loud.
Bernard Herrmann
Bernard Herrmann scored this film, Jason and the Argonauts, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver and Mysterious Island for Harryhausen, and I’d put those four scores right beside his Hitchcock work. The Sinbad score is the foundation of how movie fantasy is supposed to sound.
The cyclops theme, the dragon theme and the music for the skeleton fight have been imitated for sixty-five years and never improved on. That score is half the reason this film sits at a 9 for me.
Harryhausen’s working relationship with Herrmann was unusually close for a special effects supervisor and a composer. Harryhausen would design sequences with Herrmann’s music in mind. Herrmann would compose to the animation in progress. The result is that the music and the creatures share a rhythm that most fantasy films can’t match.
For Writers
Music in fantasy has weight that prose or dialogue can’t match. The Bernard Herrmann scores for Harryhausen’s films are part of why the creatures still work. The lesson is that the soundtrack is part of the writing. If you’re writing fiction, you’re writing what amounts to the visual track. The reader supplies the music in their head. Give them prose that knows what kind of music it deserves. Internal rhythm matters.
The Cyclops
The cyclops is the film’s signature creature. The design has horns, hooves, a single eye, and a fur-covered humanoid body.
The reasoning is that Harryhausen wanted a creature that looked like nothing else in mythology while still reading as a cyclops to audiences who knew the Odyssey. The cyclops’s sequence on the island, in which the creature roasts a sailor on a spit and battles Sinbad with a club, is among the most-imitated set pieces in fantasy cinema.
The cyclops’s death, falling into a pit after Sinbad blinds him with a torch, gives the audience exactly the satisfaction it’s been waiting for. The creature was a real threat, it’s been beaten, and the film shows the defeat in full. I adore that horned, hoofed brute, and I feel a little sorry for him when he goes over the edge.
For Writers
Iconic creature design comes from specific, somewhat strange choices that distinguish your creature from generic templates. Harryhausen’s cyclops has hooves and horns because he wanted to differentiate the creature from previous cyclops images. The choice produced something unforgettable. The lesson is that creatures and characters benefit from idiosyncratic design choices. Generic familiar creatures are forgettable. Specific oddities are memorable.
The Skeleton Swordfight
The first skeleton fight in Harryhausen’s filmography is a single-skeleton sequence in this film. Sokurah animates a skeleton from a pile of bones in his laboratory. The skeleton attacks Sinbad with a sword.
Sinbad fights it on a winding staircase. The sequence runs approximately four minutes and required Harryhausen to animate the skeleton frame by frame while Kerwin Mathews’s performance had been filmed weeks earlier.
The choreography is the achievement. The skeleton has to attack with reasonable swordsmanship, Sinbad has to defend, and the blows have to land about where they’d land if the skeleton were really swinging at Mathews. The animation matches the actor’s footage well enough that you forget you’re watching a composite. This is my favorite scene in the film, four months of one man moving bones by hand that still looks alive. It’s the direct ancestor of the seven-skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts.
For Writers
A complex action sequence works when the writer has learned the rules of the physical interaction. Harryhausen’s skeleton swordfights work because he understood swordsmanship before he started animating. The lesson is that good action requires real knowledge of the action. If you’re writing a fight, know how the fight would happen. If you’re writing a chase, know what the geography requires. Generic action reads as generic.
Craft Note
Nathan Juran directed. Kenneth Kolb wrote. Ray Harryhausen animated and produced (with Charles H. Schneer). Bernard Herrmann composed the score. Kerwin Mathews as Sinbad. Kathryn Grant as Princess Parisa. Torin Thatcher as Sokurah. Released December 1958. Columbia Pictures. Approximately six hundred and fifty thousand dollar budget. Approximately seven million dollar gross. Filmed in Spain. First feature to use the Dynamation marketing brand.
Does The 7th Voyage of Sinbad still hold up?
9/10. It’s the foundational Harryhausen fantasy adventure and the template for everything in the genre that followed, and I love it with very few reservations. Herrmann’s score is as good as fantasy music gets, and the cyclops, the dragon and the single-skeleton fight are iconic. It stops a hair short of a 10 because Jason and the Argonauts took these ideas further, and that’s where you should go next. Watch this one first.
