The Three Worlds of Gulliver

One of the least known entries in Ray Harryhausen’s canon, The Three Worlds of Gulliver keeps a lot of the sarcasm while spinning out an “all ages” piece of fluffy entertainment. It’s relatively light on the stop-motion maestro’s creature creations, but heavy on the glossy fantasy spectacle with loads of scenes of Gulliver interacting with the denizens of Lilliput and Brobdingnag. It’s a damn shame that this film wastes his talents, but there’s other reasons to watch and enjoy.

The Three Worlds of Gulliver is an incredible example of matte work done right, with scene after scene of Lemuel Gulliver (Kerwin Mathews) either towering over five-inch tall Lilliput citizens or being dwarfed by the giants in Brobdingnag. Either way, Harryhausen was in charge of all the effects on his major films, and one can be forgiven for composite work not immediately defaulting into your mind when you hear his name. While Gulliver only gives him two creatures to animate, a gigantic squirrel and a miniature alligator, they are exceptionally done, with the sixties being the decade during which Harryhausen’s artistry was at its peak.

Chiefly a matinee movie for a bored afternoon, Gulliver has several solid actors giving the material a wealth of pedigree and weight that it wouldn’t otherwise hold. This mainly rings true for Basil Sydney, Grégoire Aslan, Charles Lloyd-Pack, and Mary Ellis, while June Thorburn is wasted and awkward as the love interest. For all the scenery chewing of the British character actors, Kerwin Mathews is a bit too staid and a bit too self-righteous in a few scenes. He’s more good than bad, but while his bland handsomeness worked effectively for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad because he was merely a cipher for the succession of monsters, it doesn’t work as well in delivering this snappy dialog or monologues about knowledge and civility.

The script is stronger than many of Harryhausen’s other works, mainly thanks to that literary pedigree. There are bigger character developments at play here, with clearer goals in mind and strongest personalities. There’s also a strong sarcastic streak, borrowed over from Jonathan Swift’s original work and missing none of the political allegories or swipes at English culture. The ending is a bit of a heavy-handed let down though, as it involves Gulliver telling his love Elizabeth that inside of all of us is the capacity for pettiness and arrogance. After so much airy, colorful, humorous, special-effects heavy film making, we’re smacked with social messaging and our lovers running off into the sunset. The Three Worlds of Gulliver is a charming throwaway that is smarter than it has any right to be, while still perhaps justifiably left in the lower-tier of Harryhausen’s work.