As “Arabian as apple pie!” - “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” 4K UHD
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4K ULTRA HD REVIEW / HDR SCREENSHOTS
The gigantic Cyclops, a creation of stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen. (2) Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and his men try to avoid the Cyclops, who likes to roast men over a fire.
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“THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD”
4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray; 1958; Rated G
Best extra: Commentary with Ray Harryhausen, and two visual effects experts, author Steven Smith and producer Arnold Kuner
IF YOU grew up in the 1950s or ‘60s, you may have seen “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” in a movie theater or on television. If so, the odds are it made an impression on you, and understandably so. With its deeply saturated colors, inventive score, exotic costumes and settings, fearsome villain, towering creatures, dueling skeletons, handsome hero, beautiful princess, and a genie played by a little boy in a turban … what was not to love?
So, even if watching this new 4K/HDR restored (from the original camera negative) version 68 years later makes you chuckle at the occasionally clunky stop-motion animation and practical effects, the charm and nostalgia of the film will likely endear it to you.
The plot draws from the classic collection of stories in “1001 Arabian Nights.” Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) is the captain of a ship sailing Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant), who is also Sinbad’s sweetheart, to Baghdad where the couple are to marry. But after a storm, the ship gets stranded on the island of Colossa, and there Sinbad and his crew must tangle with such dangerous adversaries as an evil magician (Torin Thatcher), some gigantic Cyclopes, a fire-breathing dragon, and the above-mentioned dueling skeletons. The magician saves himself, Sinbad, and his entourage, by rubbing his magic lantern to summon a genie (Richard Eyer), but the lantern ends up in the Cyclops’ hands. In Baghdad, when the king won’t provide the magician with means to return to Colossa so he can retrieve his lamp, he takes revenge by shrinking the princess down to a few inches. The only thing that will restore her, he says, is the shell of a bird that only lives on Colossa. So, you can probably guess the rest, which involves more dangerous critters, battles, and challenges for Sinbad to handily overcome.
(1) “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” premiered just before Christmas in 1958. The majority of the exteriors were filmed in Spain, on the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean Sea. (2&3) Sinbad’s men call out the depth numbers as the ship avoids the rocks along the shoreline. (4) Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant) and her pet parrot, a blue-and-gold macaw.
VIDEO
Sony Pictures scanned the open matte (1.37:1 aspect) camera negative in 4K a decade ago, and mastered everything in the same ultra-resolution. UK’s PowerHouse Indicator series, released the first 4K remastered imagery using the common European 1.66:1 aspect ratio, in its 2017 “The Sinbad Trilogy” Blu-ray box set. The clarity jump was quite breathtaking compared to the old 2K master Blu-ray released by Sony for its 50th anniversary. The new 4K disc takes the imagery to even a higher level, especially with its expanded HDR10 and Dolby Vision grading. It’s also matted at the 1.66:1 aspect, which Harryhausen agreed upon nearly 20 years ago, but he still preferred the open matte 1.37:1 aspect.
The film grain is much more refined and cinematic, but does enlarge with the numerous composite effects shots as the image softens.
AUDIO
The 4K disc includes a nicely remastered six-channel DTS-HD soundtrack and the original Mono DTS-HD track. The expanded track provides a wider soundstage for Bernard Herrmann’s lively score. Harryhausen originally wanted composer Miklós Rózsa (“Ben-Hur,” “Spellbound”) or Max Steiner (“Gone with the Wind,” “Casablanca”).
EXTRAS
The 4K disc includes an exclusive documentary, while the carryover 50th anniversary Blu-ray from 2008 is packed with excellent archival bonus features. The legendary Ray Harryhausen was still alive then (he died in 2013) and appears in several of the features, lending his unique perspective to the group commentary.
It wasn’t easy to pick the best of all these extras, but the commentary is especially informative and entertaining.
“The Harryhausen Chronicles” (58 mins.) – originally aired on the AMC cable network in 1998, directed by Time Magazine film critic Richard Schickel and narrated by actor/director Leonard Nimoy.
The documentary includes a number of interviews with Harryhausen, author/screenwriter Ray Bradbury, filmmaker George Lucas, ILM visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, and filmmaker Henry Selick (“The Nightmare Before Christmas”). It highlights how Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion technique in the classic “King Kong” (1933), inspired teenager Harryhausen to produce his first stop-motion film in his parent’s basement. During World War II he produced stop-motion shorts for the U.S. military and, after the war, a series of fairy-tale shorts.
His first major break was creating the giant ape in “Mighty Joe Young” (1949), in which he captured over 80 percent of the actual stop-motion animation. Then worked on several 1950s sci-fi flicks, including “It Came from Beneath the Sea” (1955) with its giant octopus destroying the Golden Gate Bridge; “Earth vs. The Flying Saucers” (1956), where extraterrestrials terrorize Washington D.C.; and “20 Million Miles to Earth” (1957) and its deadly Venus lizard.
Harryhausen’s masterful work on “Sinbad,” with the dueling skeletons and the giant Cyclops, led to “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963) and the 100-foot-tall bronze statue that comes to life, and “Clash of the Titans” (1981) and its sea monster and supersized scorpion.
The finale came with Harryhausen receiving the Gordon E. Sawyer Award of Technical Achievement at the 1992 Academy Awards.
“Remembering the 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (23 mins.) – an in-depth interview with Harryhausen, who was drawn to the “Sinbad” story after “Mighty Joe Young.” “The beauty of stop-motion animation: you could create this illusion in a more convincing way than dressing up a Greek man as the Cyclops.”
“The Harryhausen Legacy” (26 mins.) – features a number of interviews with visual effects artists and filmmakers including Phil Tippett, Jon Berg, Rick Baker, Dennis Muren, Ken Ralston, Doug Beswick, Hoyt Yeatman, John Dykstra, The Chiodo Brothers, John Landis and Joe Dante.
“The Music of Bernard Herrmann” (27 mins.) – biographer Steven Smith provides a number of stories about the Oscar-winning composer (“Psycho,” “Vertigo,” “Taxi Driver”) and his collaboration with Harryhausen.
“Photo Gallery” (10 mins.) – includes dozens of production images with Herrmann’s score.
“Sinbad May Have Been Bad, But He’s been Good to Me” Music video (3 mins.) – a hilarious 1958 music promo for the film, sung by Ann Leonardo.
“A Look Behind the Voyage” (12 mins.) – interviews taped in 1995, with producer Charles H. Schneer, co-star Kerwin Mathews and Harryhausen.
“This is Dynamation – Special Effects” (3 mins.) – a movie trailer for the “Sinbad” animation process.
“Ray Harryhausen interviewed by director John Landis” (12 mins.) – captured on a Columbia soundstage in 1995.
The informative and entertaining running commentary (100 mins.) – features special effects master Ray Harryhausen, visual effects experts Phil Tippett and Randall William Cook, author Steven Smith, and producer Arnold Kuner. Originally recorded in 2008.
Smith notes how influential Herrmann’s score was, and that it was partially inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” Herrmann always insisted on choosing his own orchestration, such as which instruments were to be used for his film scores, and he didn’t begin writing the score until the movie was finished.
Harryhausen needed to be on set for most of the production, so he could direct the camera placement when any of his effects were involved. It was his first feature-length movie, before which he was making short films of fairy tales, using puppet animation. He says he didn’t get to meet Richard Eyer, who played the little boy genie, until Eyer was an adult, because his scenes for the movie were all shot in a Hollywood studio. Harryhausen jokes that Eyer, as the genie, was as “Arabian as apple pie!”
Much of “Sinbad” was shot on location on the Spanish mainland and the island of Majorca. It was rare for a Hollywood movie to be made overseas in those days, but “The Pride and the Passion,” starring Sophia Loren, Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra, was being shot in Spain at the same time.
The “Sinbad” production received permission to shoot inside the magnificent, Islamic-inspired Alhambra in Granada, something that is no longer allowed. Due to its relatively small budget, most of the costumes for “Sinbad” were recycled from a Rita Hayworth picture that was never made. The ship in the film stayed moored in Barcelona harbor, Harryhausen recalls, because the one time they took it out into the ocean, it almost capsized. Scenes with the ship at sea all came from stock footage, as the cost of building a giant tank would have been prohibitive. To suggest waves and storms, gimbals were used to make the docked ship rock, and the local fire department sprayed the sets with fire hoses. The water for the hoses came from the bay, which was so polluted that after Mathews accidentally swallowed some during a shoot, he got sick.
Toward the end of the film, when the Cyclops is mortally injured, Harryhausen discusses the pained expression on its face: “I try to give a little sympathy to my dying creatures.” Herrmann’s score, Smith says, had to be recorded in Germany because there was a musicians’ union strike in the United States. Smith quotes Herrmann, regarding “Sinbad”: “I tried to shroud the entire movie in a mystical innocence.”
The exclusive extras on the U.K. Blu-ray are missing in this two-disc set – “The secrets of Sinbad,” an interview with Tippett, four Super 8 set pieces from the film, Herrmann’s isolated score played with the film; and a brief birthday message to Harryhausen by Tippett.
— Peggy Earle and Bill Kelley III, High-Def Watch producer
SPECS:
100 GB disc
TRUE 4K mastering
Captured on 35mm film stock in the open matte (1.37:1 aspect), but this presentation is matted at 1.66:1 and with spherical lens.
Video bitrate: Averages around 75 Megabits per second, with a running time of 88 minutes.
HDR10 maximum light level: 1203 nit
Max frame average light level: 84 nit
Box office: Worldwide gross $29 million from nearly 85 million ticket sales. The production budget was $650,000.
British Film Institute – 10 Essential Ray Harryhausen films
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