Jason, Sinbad, Clash of the Titans all in Harryhausen-fest on TCM, Fri. 3/26

[august]

Surely tying in to the pr blitz for the new Titans movie, Turner Classic movies is running three of Harryhausen's most successful films tonight.

Jason and the Argonauts is at 8 PM, and is often thought to be his best. Almost 20 years after it came out, a friend and I were enough into both movies and fantasy that we tracked down a summer Saturday morning kiddie showing of this at a local movie theatre. (This was before the age of video/dvd rentals, so to be able to actualy *see* something on the big screen that we had only heard of before was a huge treat!) That's future Avengers/James Bond actress Honor Blackman as Hera, Nigel Green (Zulu, Face of Fu Manchu) as Hercules, future Dr. Who actor Patrick Troughton as Phineas (he also played Horatio in Olivier's Hamlet, along w/ Cushing and Lee) Jack Gwillim as Aeetes (believe it or not, he played Van Helsong in The Monster Squad! :laugh: ) and future Sherlock Holmes portayer Douglas Wilmer as Pelias (he also took over Green's hero role in several Hammer Fu Manchu sequels.)

10 PM is the original Clash of the Titans. Apart from the obvious BIG stars, looks for Sian Philips at Cassiopeia - this was right after she mesmerized the world as the evil Livia in I, Claudius just a few years earlier. Also, one of the three "Stygian witches" is played by Flora Robson, a major character actress in the 30's and 40's known for playing roles like Queen Elizabeth in Erroll Flynn's Sea Hawk.

And then Golden Voyage of Sinbad is at 12:15. Caroline Munro in a harem girl outfit - nuff said. :poke:

[RobRoy]

My wife picked up the Harryhausen collection for us last year. It might be that I’m just being nostalgic, but it’s still very good. Gulliver’s Travels is probably the weakest of the lot, but the majority of the special effects still hold up.

[august]

Quite a few of the sfx are creaky, but some look really good even by today's stabdards. When Harryhausen tried to recreate actual animals, it just didn't work. But in cases where an "artifical" look was appropriate - like the skeletons in Jason, the ship's wooden figurehead and the stone Kali statue in Sinbad, and the long shots of Pegasus in Titans - the effect is excellent. I caught a little bit of that one last night, and was amused that the real horse they used for close-ups of Pegasus was about the scraggliest looking nag you can imagine. :laugh:

What impressed me most was the performance of Neil McCarthy as Calibos (in the close-ups - they used a clay model for him in the long shots.) An Avengers fan site accuratley descibes him as "tall, raw-boned, craggy-faced" and this was surely one of the very few times in his carrer that he ever got to play a (sort of) tragic, romantic role, with his very flowery lines about loving Andromeda. Poor guy - this is about the most handsome pic I could find of him:



Sort of like Del Toro in The Wolfman, he didn't really need much make-uup to be Calibos! I recall vividly his touching performance as Tommy, a simple Welsh soldier from the farm country in Zulu, where he's more concerned about a sickly newborn calf than he is about being outnumbered 45 to 1 by murderous natives.

[RobRoy]

What impressed me most was the performance of Neil McCarthy as Calibos (in the close-ups - they used a clay model for him in the long shots.) An Avengers fan site accuratley descibes him as "tall, raw-boned, craggy-faced" and this was surely one of the very few times in his carrer that he ever got to play a (sort of) tragic, romantic role, with his very flowery lines about loving Andromeda.

I always felt for the guy too. Not really his fault, but rather the gods who changed him into a monster. Of course, then he starts to embody that life with all the things he did, but mostly that was part of his vengeance against the gods.