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There’s a liberating sense of wonderment and child-like awe in this adventure yarn, picking up with his story on a return home voyage with a fiancé and a promise of peace between kingdoms. This simplistic framework is the perfect vessel for Ray Harryhausen’s stellar effects work and imaginatively designed creatures. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad is a non-stop spectacle of exotic sets, strange creatures, magical curses, a beautiful princess, and a handsome sailor. It’s the stuff of warmly nostalgic movie matinee memories.
If the prior films in Ray Harryhausen’s canon were fairly breakneck in their pacing, populated with a few wooden actors and far more memorable monsters, then The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad is the first in a series of triumphs that bring in better actors, better scripts, and more monsters. Harryhausen’s films are best when they focus in on mythology and folklore, his science fiction films were fine and entertaining, but these films based on legendary characters are something truly special. Prior films featured maybe one or two creatures, but The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad would be the first to parade several in front of the camera.
We don’t focus on any one particular event for too long before we’re off to the next one, and this densely packed narrative is all the better for it. Think of it like the original King Kong, we fire through extraordinary set piece after another in the name of entertainment. There’s more going on in this film’s slim 90-odd minutes than in a vast majority of modern day blockbusters. After all, we have encounters with a raging Cyclops, a cobra-woman, a fire-breathing dragon, a skeleton with a sword and shield, the two-headed roc bird, and those are just the ones that Harryhausen created.
If that list sounds exhausting or somehow overburdened, then you’ll be surprised just how fleet and nimble Sinbad is. Much of that credit needs to go to director Nathan Juran and the stars Kerwin Mathews and Torin Thatcher. Juran knows that the spectacle is the main attraction here, and provides ample amounts of it including the impressive sight of a Cyclops wading into the ocean to hurl rocks at an escaping Sinbad. Or the off-kilter way he imagines the inside of the genie’s lamp. Juran’s aided immeasurably by Mathews as Sinbad, knowing he’s a swashbuckling hero, a swoon-worthy matinee idol, and second-fiddle to the extravagance on display, he creates a stoic and appropriately heroic Sinbad. While Torin Thatcher slowly boils his performance from even-keeled and into straight-up theatrical hysterics as the magician Sokurah, who begins the film as an ally before becoming petty and spiteful over losing the magical lamp.
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad is the first truly pleasing Arabian Nights fantasy since the 1940 remake of The Thief of Bagdad. While it cannot compete with the perfection of that creation, it holds its own a lower-tier piece of whimsy and a bumper-crop of bang-for-your-buck entertainment. Look past leading lady Kathryn Grant’s stiff performance, ignore the fact that the film is light plot but heavy on ostentation, in fact, indulge in the fact that there’s a lightness of plotting and a heaviness of action-spectacle. It is all the grander and more engrossing for its simplicity, rightly stepping aside to make way for a series of Harryhausen creations that belong to the ages.
