JANE SEYMOUR PATRICK TROUGHTON PATRICK WAYNE AND TARYN POWER: SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER: PUBLICITY STILL

DANA GILLESPIE DOUGH MC CLURE: THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT: GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Patrick Wayne (Ben MacBride), Sarah Douglas (Charly), Thorley Walters (Professor Edmund Norfolk), Dana Gillespie (Ajor), Doug McClure (Bowen Tyler), Shane Rimmer (Hogan) 

PRODUCTION:

Director – Kevin Connor, Screenplay – Patrick Tilley, Based on the Novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Producer – John Dark, Photography – Alan Hume, Aerial Photography – Peter Allwork & John Harris, Music – John Scott, Process Photography – Charles Staffell, Special Effects – John Richardson & Ian Wingrove, Makeup – Robin Grantham, Production Design – Maurice Carter. Production Company – AIP.  

SYNOPSIS:

The log of Bowen Tyler’s discovery of the continent of Caprona, a land that still exists in the Cretaceous, has been found. An expedition to rescue Tyler has been mounted aboard the Polar Queen by Tyler’s old friend Ben MacBride. The rescue team fly over the wall of Antarctic ice and into the humid interior of the continent in a biplane. After crash-landing, they must brave dinosaurs, hostile tribes and an exploding volcano in order to rescue Tyler.

COMMENTARY:

England’s Amicus Productions had a reasonable success with the prehistoric lost world film The Land That Time Forgot (1974), directed by Kevin Connor, produced by John Dark, starring Doug McClure and adapted from the novel by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. With that success in mind, Amicus and all the abovementioned went onto adapt a further Edgar Rice Burroughs novel with At the Earth’s Core (1976). Amicus, a modest company that had success with a number of horror films during the 1960s and early 70s, particularly their horror anthologies, folded shop shortly after that. However, Connor, Dark and McClure regrouped at the English division of American International Pictures (AIP) to make The People That Time Forgot. They would all subsequently go onto make Warlords of Atlantis (1978) for EMI/British Lion, which was not adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs, but could well have been in that it assembled the same lost world and prehistoric monster elements that were a central element of the other three films. 

The Land That Time Forgot (1918) was the first in a trilogy of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs set on the prehistoric continent of Caprona and so for the sequel Dark, Connor et al turned to the second of the books in the trilogy, The People That Time Forgot (1918). (The third and final book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Caprona series, Out of Time’s Abyss (1918), remains unfilmed). This time Dark and Connor did not retain the services of celebrated sf/fantasy Michael Moorcock who had adapted The Land That Time Forgot and turned to Patrick Tilley, a minor British science-fiction writer best known for the post-holocaust Amtrak Wars series. Tilley follows Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book reasonably well, although substantially reduces the number of primitive tribes and much of the running around on Caprona. 

The majority of John Dark and Kevin Connor’s lost world films are better than many genre viewers are often prepared to give them. The main problem that Dark and Connor had was that the imagination on display was often in excess of what the special effects department could deliver. The People That Time Forgot notedly opens with a wonderfully imaginative sequence where the explorers fly up over the wall of Antarctic ice in a biplane, only to face a pterodactyl that starts trying to chew up the wings and they have to shoot it down with a Vickers machine-gun. The sequence teeters between soaring with a genuine imagination and failing through seeing a pterodactyl that only has clunky hinged-jaw movements. The same problem extends elsewhere throughout the film – the stegosaurus that the explorers encounter is painfully clearly only an immobile model with legs that make mechanical back and forth movements as it is winched along behind some rocks. I could not help but break into unintentional titters during the sequence where the party try to traverse a cave passage as snake heads keep popping out, which kept reminding me of the old Frogger arcade game. 

The filmmakers went to shoot in Santa Cruz de la Palma in Spain, which makes for a convincingly primordial and untouched prehistoric landscape. The show moves along colourfully – one particularly liked the journey to a city on a mountainside that has been constructed as a giant skull. However, the adventures concerning dinosaurs, giant snakes, being captured and nearly sacrificed in a volcano by tribes are routine. Everything goes up in the predictable exploding volcano cliche climax where the special effects team set off what would surely have to be a record number of explosions in a film. 

The film has an interesting cast. The lead actor is Patrick Wayne, the son of John Wayne. Patrick Wayne had a minor career as an actor, which hit a peak in 1977 when he appeared as a leading man in both The People That Time Forgot and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). Patrick has the handsome certainty of a classic matinee idol – the great mystery is why he almost entirely vanished off the radar after 1977. Sarah Douglas appears in one of her first performances before she found fame as a super-villainness in Superman (1978) and particularly Superman II (1980) and then went onto uber-bitch roles in Falcon Crest (1981-90) and a good number of B movies. Here she walks through the film, radiating a good deal of confident, sexy, upper-class breeding. There is also the bewitchingly lovely Dana Gillespie, who makes a jaw-dropping appearance as a primitive girl, even if the film promptly provides her with nothing else to do throughout other than show off her undeniably impressive cleavage.

CREDIT:HERE

IMAGES: Marcus Brooks

Dana Gillespie Website:HERE   

JANE SEYMOUR : TARYN POWER : PATRICK WAYNE : SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER : GALLERY AND REVIEW.

CAST:

Patrick Wayne (Sinbad), Jane Seymour (Princess Farah), Taryn Power (Dione), Patrick Troughton (Melanthius), Margaret Whiting (Zenobia), Kurt Christian (Rafi), Nadim Sawalha (Hassan), Damien Thomas (Kassim)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Sam Wanamaker, Screenplay – Beverly Cross, Story – Beverly Cross  Ray Harryhausen, Producers – Ray Harryhausen Charles H. Schneer, Photography – Ted Moore, Music – Roy Budd, Stop Motion Animation – Ray Harryhausen, Models – Les Bowie, Special Effects – Wally Veevers Colin Chilvers, Production Design – Geoffrey Drake. Production Company – Andor/Columbia.

SYNOPSIS:

Sinbad is implored by his beloved, the Princess Farah, to help her brother Kassim, who has been transformed into a baboon by the black arts just as he was about to be crowned Caliph. Behind this is Farah’s stepmother, the witch Zenobia, who desires the crown for her son. Sinbad and Farah seek the help of the wise man Melanthius. Under Melanthius’s guidance, they set sail for the lost land of Hyperborea, a fertile valley amid the icy wastes at the North Pole, in the hope of uncovering the matter transformation secrets of a vanished people. All the while, Zenobia pursues, determined to stop them.

COMMENTARY:

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was the third of cult stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films – following The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973). Both The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad are superb fantasy films and show Ray Harryhausen’s effects at the very peak of their form. However, Harryhausen seemed to lose the plot by the time it came to Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

Ray Harryhausen’s films always seem to belong to the 1950s and the era of the Cinemascope historical spectacle – the era that produced the likes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben Hur (1959). All Harryhausen’s films have the same wooden leads, pedestrian melodramatics and the emphasis placed on spectacle and effects, just as the Biblical spectaculars did. By contrast, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger came out the same year as Star Wars (1977) – and up against Star Wars, Ray Harryhausen’s more traditional type of fantasy film looked decidedly shabby. While Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was a reasonable success in theatres, the effects revolution created by Star Wars showed that Ray Harryhausen’s type of films were increasingly relics of a bygone era.

Harryhausen would only make one other film after this, Clash of the Titans (1981), before announcing his retirement. Both Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Clash of the Titans, made in the 1950s style of filmmaking with glaringly grainy process photography and wooden 50s-styled action, look flat against the modern fantasy and effects revolution, and moreover are weaker Harryhausen films.

In a Ray Harryhausen film, the screen dramatics are wooden but this is unimportant as the film is usually carried by the spectacular stop-motion animated set-pieces. In Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, there is not even that – it feels like a film composed of leftover ideas that were not good enough for the other Sinbad films. The film even rehashes set-pieces from other Harryhausen films – the skeleton duels from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the giant insects from Mysterious Island (1961). Crucially, what it lacks is any big spectacular stop motion set-piece. The ones we do have are lacklustre. The sabre-tooth tiger, which presumably provides the eye of the title that is cryptically unconnected to anything else in the film (or even mentioned anywhere throughout), looks like a stuffed hamster, and only the Trog and baboon have any character. There is never a standout scene that dazzles with the pure wondrousness of Harryhausen’s art like the encounter with the Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) or the Kali duel in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Moreover, the story is often contrived, having to sidetrack out of its way to throw in the various encounters with Harryhausen’s creatures – the visit to a tent where they are attacked by skeletons, the walrus encounter at the North Pole, the giant wasp, the reanimated sabre-tooth. If the plot kept to strictly linear telling of the story and eliminated all side-episodes, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger would lose much in the way of fantasy content.

Actor Sam Wanamaker took the director’s chair and was reportedly not happy making the film, having little interest in the fantasy content and finding the laborious and painstaking necessity of Harryhausen’s special effects frustrating. It certainly shows on screen. John Wayne’s son Patrick makes a wooden Sinbad, while Margaret Leighton camps it up badly as Zenobia. Patrick Troughton, the second incarnation of Doctor Who (1963-89), playing a tetchy guru is the only fun the film offers. Jane Seymour offers a touch of class as the love interest, although remains underused.

Ray Harryhausen’s other films are: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the granddaddy of all atomic monster films; the giant atomic octopus film It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955); the alien invader film Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956); the alien monster film 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957); The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958); The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960); the Jules Verne adaptation Mysterious Island (1961); the Greek myth adventure Jason and the Argonauts (1963); the H.G. Wells adaptation The First Men in the Moon (1964); the caveman vs dinosaurs epic One Million Years B.C. (1966); the dinosaur film The Valley of Gwangi (1969); The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973); and the Greek myth adventure Clash of the Titans (1981).

REVIEW: Richard Scheib
IMAGES: Marcus Brooks