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

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BLACKBOXCLUB PIN UP NUMBER 22: JANE SEYMOUR: SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER 1977

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

FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY (1974) MASON AND SARRAZIN REVIEW AND GALLERY

CAST:

Leonard Whiting (Victor Frankenstein), Michael Sarrazin (The Monster), Nicola Pagett (Elizabeth Fanshawe/Frankenstein), James Mason (Dr Polidori), Jane Seymour (Prima/Agatha), David McCallum (Henry Clerval), Ralph Richardson (Lacey)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Jack Smight, Screenplay – Don Bachardy & Christopher Isherwood, Based on the Novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Producer – Hunt Stromberg Jr, Photography – Arthur Ibbetson, Music – Gil Melle, Special Effects – Roy Whybrow, Makeup – Roy Ashton, Production Design – Wilfred Shingleton. Production Company – Universal.

SYNOPSIS:

After the death of his younger brother William, medical student Victor Frankenstein determines to find a way of reviving the dead. Fellow doctor Henry Clerval shows him a means of reanimating a severed arm with the use of solar energy. Obsessed, Frankenstein joins Clerval in building a handsome creature that they piece together from the bodies of several workmen killed in a quarry accident. After Clerval dies of a heart attack.

Frankenstein places his brain inside the creature and brings it to life. He is amazed at the creature’s intelligence – but soon the process begins to reverse itself and the creature’s body degenerates. The creature falls into despair and tries to kill itself but finds that it cannot, that it is invulnerable. The creature is found by Clerval’s teacher, the crippled Dr Polidori, who forces Frankenstein into helping create an Eve for the creature. Frankenstein builds the beautiful Prima. But after Frankenstein introduces her to high society, the creature exacts a disastrous revenge on them for this, killing her. Frankenstein flees aboard a ship but the creature pursues him up into the Arctic determined to kill him.

COMMENTARY:

The subtitle ‘the true story’ is wholly contentious but this classy, literate television production is a commendable attempt to sidestep the previous cinematic interpretations of the Frankenstein story – respectively Universal’s Frankenstein (1931) and Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – and return to the story that Mary Shelley wrote. Frankenstein: The True Story is not really all that close to the book, but the film does bring in many aspects that have been dropped from other versions of the story – the climactic pursuit into the Arctic, and most importantly the intelligent (as opposed to dumb and brutish) creature and his relationship with his creator, and the levels of Biblical metaphor. 

The film also borrows strongly from Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – it includes an equivalent of the Pretorius character (who is now named Dr Polidori after Lord Byron’s physician, who was also present at the famous Villa Deodati writer’s workshop where Mary Shelley received her inspiration to write the book) and his blackmailing plans for a female creation, as well as the violin-playing blind hermit.

Jack Smight’s direction lags at times but there a number of strong sequences, especially the scene where the monster invades a ball and rips the female creation’s head off. It is all mounted in lavish period style. Particularly good is the rooting of the film inside the historically accurate charnel houses and the appalling sanitary conditions of the hospitals of the period. Although the use of solar power rather than electricity seems an overly strained attempt to avoid the cliches of electric storm regenerations from previous films.

The impressive cast list manages to unite the cream of the British Screen Actors Guild, including the likes of Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, David McCallum and a young Jane Seymour. Leonard Whiting, while rather weak-jawed, projects great idealistic drive and intensity as Frankenstein. Nicola Pagett gives a real moralistic strength of character to Elizabeth. Although the standout is James Mason’s glitteringly megalomaniac performance as Polidori.

On tv, Frankenstein: The True Story aired as a 175 minute production, which is usually screened in two two-hour parts. However the film was also released to cinemas in a 123 minute print, which curtails much of the storyline and was poorly received by critics at the time. Celebrated novelist Christopher Isherwood, best known for the autobiographical stories that formed the basis of Cabaret (1972), was not at all happy at the way his and Don Bachardy’s script was treated by Jack Smight and the producers and they published their own version of the screenplay in book form as Dr Frankenstein (1973).

The other versions of the Frankenstein story are:– Frankenstein (1910), the silent Thomas Edison short; Frankenstein (1931), Universal’s classic James Whale adaptation starring Boris Karloff; The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Hammer’s classic adaptation with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee; The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), Hammer’s lame comedy remake; Dan Curtis’s tv adaptation Frankenstein (1973); the Swedish-Irish production Victor Frankenstein (1977); Frankenstein (1992), David Wickes’ dreary tv adaptation with Patrick Bergin and Randy Quaid; Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) with Robert De Niro; and the tv mini-series Frankenstein (2004) with Alec Newman as Frankenstein and Luke Goss as the monster.

Jack Smight is a director who has made some occasional genre forays including the Ray Bradbury adaptation The Illustrated Man (1968), the serial killer black comedy No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), the Ray Bradbury adaptation The Screaming Woman (tv, 1972) and the post-holocaust film Damnation Alley (1977). Smight is probably best otherwise known for the Paul Newman thriller Harper (1966) and big-budget films of the 1970s such as Airport 1975 (1974) and Midway (1977). 

REVIEW: Richard Scheib

IMAGES: Marcus Brooks

REVIEW: HERE