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 is 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 had not 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 would stage five years later in Jason and the Argonauts.
Bernard Herrmann
Bernard Herrmann scored this film, Jason and the Argonauts, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, and Mysterious Island for Harryhausen. The four scores are some of his strongest work outside his Hitchcock collaborations. 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 upon.
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 cannot match.
For Writers
Music in fantasy carries weight that prose or dialogue cannot carry. 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 are writing fiction, you are 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 one of the most-imitated set pieces in fantasy cinema.
The cyclops’s final death, falling into a pit after being blinded by Sinbad’s torch, is the kind of small narrative satisfaction the audience needs. The creature was a threat. The creature has been defeated. The defeat is shown in detail. The film respects the audience’s investment in the encounter.
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. The blows have to land approximately where they would land if the skeleton were really swinging at Mathews. The animation matches the actor’s footage well enough that the audience forgets they are watching a composite. The sequence prefigured the more elaborate seven-skeleton fight Harryhausen would stage in Jason and the Argonauts.
For Writers
A complex action sequence works when the writer has internalized the rules of the physical interaction. Harryhausen’s skeleton swordfights work because he understood swordsmanship before he started animating. The lesson is that authentic action requires authentic knowledge of the action. If you are writing a fight, know how the fight would actually happen. If you are 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.
The Verdict
9/10. The foundational Harryhausen fantasy adventure and the template for everything in the genre that followed. The Bernard Herrmann score is one of the great fantasy scores. The cyclops, the dragon, and the single-skeleton fight are iconic. Watch it. Watch Jason and the Argonauts next.