There is little doubt that Ray Harryhausen is the defining creative force behind the stop-motion fantasies and adventures he made with producer Charles Schneer. While he’s never taken credit as director, he developed the stories and scripts and co-produced the films along with designing and executing all of the special effects. And it’s pretty clear when Harryhausen was on the set, at least on his seventies productions The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), as his tight budgets and creative control had him trading down with both leading men and directors.
The 1973 The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, sort of a sequel to his glorious The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), was a return to Harryhausen’s love of myth and grand fantasy with the colorless John Philip Law shedding his shirt and flashing his eyes as Captain Sinbad, the blue-eyed Arab adventurer racing evil sorcerer Koura (Tom Baker) to a magical treasure. Sinbad and his crew battle a centaur, a gryphon, a statue charmed to life by Koura, and most impressively the six-armed goddess Kali, a gold statue that Koura animates to do his bidding. Director Gordon Hessler (a horror veteran of garish Hammer Films knockoffs) seems barely present through most of the film, letting performances slip every which way and staging dramatic scenes so sloppily that you can’t always tell what’s even going on. Until one of Harryhausen’s creations appears, that is, at which time the screen takes on a painterly composition and the performances become more disciplined and focuses.
Tom Baker, who went on to become the most beloved Doctor of the original Doctor Who series, is in Christopher Lee mode as the scheming Koura, a humorless villain who loses a little of his life with every incantation but shows a sliver of affection for every one of his homunculi creations. But for all of Harryhausen’s magic, the film’s greatest special effect is former Doctor Phibes muse and future Bond girl Caroline Munro in harem girl bikinis. And give Harryhausen credit for commissioning a rousing old-school score from the great Miklos Rozsa, which helps give the film a scope that the budget never quite delivers alone. Like all Twilight Time releases, the score is available as an isolated soundtrack, and the disc includes featurettes on three earlier Harryhausen productions (previously available on other DVD and Blu-ray releases).
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) trades out Law for Patrick Wayne, even more wooden as a would-be swashbuckling hero who comes to port to ask the for the hand of Princess Farah (Jane Seymour) and ends up on a quest to save her brother from a curse: his stepmother (Margaret Whiting) has transformed him into a baboon (another Harryhausen creation, of course). The film is a bit sluggish and director Sam Wanamaker, a better actor than director, manages to let Seymour, who was quite assured in Live and Let Die, come off awkward and amateurish. Luckily Patrick Troughton, another Doctor Who of note, plays the ancient world scholar and scientist Melanthius, who navigates the signs on a journey through arctic waters and to a land that time forgot, and he gives the film a solid character at the center (the strength of his presence alone as the curious, wizened old scholar steals the spotlight from Wayne. Taryn Power (daughter of Tyrone Power) come along for the ride as his daughter, another beauty on hand more for window dressing than dramatic purpose.
Harryhausen pits them against a bronze Minotaur, a giant bee, an mammoth Walrus that breaks out of the ice and an ancient sabre-tooth tiger, but he puts his heart into the baboon, a tortured beast hanging tight to the human inside as it slips away under the spell, and a grunting troglodyte, a giant mythic caveman with a horn on his head and an affection for the baboon. Roy Budd provides the score, which is available as an isolated soundtrack.
Both discs looks terrific but the increased detail and color, unfortunately, reveals some sloppy matte work at times. They are colorful films, however, and the disc brings out the best of the fantastic sets and art design and exotic costumes. And, as with all Twilight Time releases, they are available exclusively from Screen Archives and TCM and limited to 3000 copies.
The Blue Angel: 2 Disc Ultimate Edition (Kino, Blu-ray) – Josef von Sternberg went to Germany at the urging of Emil Jannings, whom he directed in the American film The Last Command, and returned to Hollywood emboldened with an international hit and a new star: Marlene Dietrich. Not exactly what Jannings had in mind when he drafted Sternberg to guide his nervous transition from silent to sound cinema, but then how could he know that the theatrical thickness of his gesture-laden silent film style would come across as simply old-fashioned next to the brash, lazy, sensual quality of Dietrich’s easy screen presence and modern performance. It’s of course a perfect pairing in this case: the repressed petty provincial schoolteacher Rath, so obsessed by appearance and authority, and the happy-go-lucky showgirl Lola-Lola more concerned with his pleasure and freedom. With such a strong tale (adapted from Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat) behind Sternberg’s layered visual style, it becomes his most dramatically driven and intense sound film, and his most tragic. (The story of a man’s ego destroyed by his social descent also echoes an earlier Jannings classic: F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh.) The luscious spray of nets and scrims and artful clutter is on gorgeous display in the nightclub scenes, which are simultaneously cheap and exotic, tawdry, and enticing: A marvelous, messy contrast to the neat regimentation of Rath’s everyday life.
The UFA/Paramount co-production was shot simultaneously in German and English versions and Kino’s two disc set provides both. The 106-minute German version, mastered from a good looking restored print from the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung, was previously available singly but the 94-minute English version debuts on Blu-ray in this set. It’s not only shorter and rather stiff in dialogue scenes (the German actors have a tendency to be clumsy in their second language) but shows slightly more damages. Supplements include Marlene Dietrich’s 1930 screen test, three songs performed by Marlene Dietrich in two late career appearances, and a two minute clip from a 1963 interview with Dietrich, plus an image gallery.
Mario Bava directs The Whip and the Body (Kino, Blu-ray, DVD) from the most psychologically fascinating script of his career and adds grand guignol gore to the macabre poetic beauty and sexual perversity to create a true masterpiece of the fantastic. Set in a cavernous castle on a lonely coast, its looks like something out of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe thrillers, at least at first. Christopher Lee is the bad sheep prodigal son, a sexual sadist whose proclivities brought about the death of a young girl and sent him into exile, and he returns home to the family manor and immediately lures his brother’s wife (Daliah Lavi) into his sadistic games upon his return. There’s no shortage of suspects when he’s found dead, a dagger plunged into his neck (the same one his former lover killed herself with), but when he returns as a gray faced ghost, Bava pushes the gothic conventions and repressed sexual desires into surreal territory. Shot in delirious color and accomplished with lush style, this is a ghost story wracked with guilt, sadism, and mad passions. Lee’s iconic presence gives the film an eerie dignity but Lavi’s hungry, haunted eyes dominate the perverse thriller. Features Italian, French, and English dub soundtracks with optional English subtitles and commentary by Bava historian Tim Lucas carried over from the earlier VCI DVD edition, plus a gallery of Bava trailers.
Royal Flash (Twilight Time, Blu-ray), director Richard Lester’s follow-up to The Three Musketeers / The Four Musketeers, reunites the director with his Musketeers screenwriter George Macdonald Fraser in the big adaptation of Fraser’s own novel, a satire of Britain historical adventures and self-congratulatory colonial dramas. Malcolm McDowell is perfectly cast as the professional cad and scheming coward, the charming British officer as born con man conniving his way through the 19th century Germany of Otto von Bismark (Oliver Reed) and Lola Montez (Florinda Bolkan). Alan Bates and Britt Ekland co-star in Lester’s tongue-in-cheek historical adventure. With commentary by Malcolm McDowell and film historian (and Twilight Time cofounder) Nick Redman, two featurettes, and an isolated track with Ken Thorne’s musical score. Limited to 3000 copies.
More releases:
Crawlspace (Shout Factory, Blu-ray)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (single) (Paramount, Blu-ray)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (single) (Paramount, Blu-ray)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (single) (Paramount, Blu-ray)
Hans Christian Anderson (Warner, Blu-ray)
Omnibus: Gene Kelly – Dancing: A Man’s Game (eOne, DVD)
Silent Night, Bloody Night (Film Chest, DVD)
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD