8 / 10
Official trailer
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is the second Harryhausen Sinbad film and the last great Harryhausen fantasy adventure. Gordon Hessler directed it. John Phillip Law plays Sinbad. Caroline Munro plays Margiana, a slave girl with a tattooed palm that turns out to be a map. Tom Baker plays Koura, the evil sorcerer, two years before he was cast as the Fourth Doctor on Doctor Who. The plot involves a magical golden amulet that comes in three pieces, leading Sinbad and Koura on parallel quests to assemble it.
The film made approximately fifteen million dollars on a one million dollar budget and is the most commercially successful Harryhausen production.
I love this film for the reason anybody loves a Harryhausen picture: the creatures have a weight and personality that I’ve never seen computer effects fake convincingly.
Tom Baker is having a ball as the villain, and the Kali fight alone would justify the rating. What keeps it at an 8 for me is the music. Rózsa’s score is lush, and I miss Herrmann whenever a creature moves.
The film was the first Harryhausen feature without a Bernard Herrmann score. Miklós Rózsa composed instead. Rózsa was an established A-list film composer who had won three Oscars in the 1940s for Spellbound, A Double Life, and Ben-Hur. His Golden Voyage score is more orchestrally lush than Herrmann’s work but loses some of the rhythmic specificity that made the Herrmann scores feel like extensions of the animation.
Tom Baker
Tom Baker’s Koura is my favorite thing in the film. He plays the sorcerer as a man whose magic is killing him: every spell ages him visibly, and by the third act he’s a withered husk who can barely stand. A villain who pays for what he does, with the payment right there on screen where the audience can track it, is a sharp choice.
The performance was the audition that effectively got Baker the Doctor Who role two years later. Producer Barry Letts has discussed the film as the moment he realized Baker had the eccentricity needed for the Time Lord.
The connection between Koura and the Fourth Doctor is more visible than the casting history would suggest. Both characters share a particular kind of magnetic, slightly mad, theatrical authority.
For Writers
A villain whose actions visibly cost them is more gripping than a villain whose power is unlimited. Koura ages every time he uses magic. The audience can see what each spell takes from him. The lesson is that giving characters physical costs for their abilities provides a built-in dramatic ceiling. A character who can do anything without consequence is a problem. A character whose every choice carries a visible price is a story engine.
The Kali Fight
The film’s signature sequence is the swordfight between Sinbad and three of his men against a six-armed living statue of the goddess Kali. The statue is animated frame by frame to wield six swords at the same time against three live actors. The choreography is more complex than the skeleton swordfight in Jason and the Argonauts. Harryhausen worked through the sequence across roughly five months of animation.
The fight ends with Kali falling from a high platform and shattering on the stone floor, and you can see the goddess crack apart as she lands. The film gives her destruction real weight. This is the sequence that justifies the 8 on its own, and I’d put it up against anything Harryhausen animated.
For Writers
A single creature design choice can define an entire action sequence. Kali’s six arms transform a standard swordfight into something the audience has never seen. The film could have used a generic giant. It used something that fights differently than a human. The lesson is that creatures with structural differences from humans create combat dynamics that human-versus-human combat can’t produce. Build the creature’s body around the kind of fight you want to stage.
The Centaur and the Griffin
The third-act battle between a centaur and a griffin is the production’s other major creature sequence. The centaur is the cursed servant of Koura.
The griffin emerges from the volcanic interior of the island. The two creatures fight each other while Sinbad and Koura race to complete the amulet. The sequence is the film’s clearest set piece in the tradition of Harryhausen’s earlier mythological battles.
Having two creatures fight each other gives a different kind of spectacle than monster against hero. Both are doing real damage, and neither cares about the humans. The fight is its own small drama inside the plot, and I find it more fun than the human side of the finale.
For Writers
Conflict between secondary characters can carry as much dramatic weight as conflict involving the protagonist. The centaur-versus-griffin fight has stakes the audience cares about even though neither creature is the protagonist. The lesson is that supporting characters and their conflicts can do real storytelling work. You don’t always have to make the protagonist the center of every dramatic moment. Sometimes the strongest scenes are the ones happening next to the protagonist.
Craft Note
Gordon Hessler directed. Brian Clemens wrote, story by Clemens and Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen animated and co-produced with Charles H. Schneer. Miklós Rózsa composed. John Phillip Law as Sinbad. Caroline Munro as Margiana. Tom Baker as Koura. Takis Emmanuel as Achmed. Released December 1973. Columbia Pictures. Approximately one million dollar budget. Approximately fifteen million dollar worldwide gross. Filmed in Spain and Malta.
Does The Golden Voyage of Sinbad still hold up?
8/10. The last great Harryhausen fantasy adventure. Tom Baker’s villain is a career high. The Kali fight is a high point in the Harryhausen filmography. The centaur-griffin battle ranks with his finest creature-versus-creature sequences. Watch it after Jason and the Argonauts and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
