The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

Plot

Sinbad, the heir of the Caliph of Baghdad, makes landfall with his crew on the island of Colossa, where they encounter Sokurah the magician fleeing a giant cyclops. Though he escapes, Sokurah loses a magic lamp to the creature. Sinbad refuses his desperate pleas to return to Colossa because Parisa, Princess of Chandra, is aboard. Their coming marriage is meant to secure peace between her father's sultanate and Baghdad.

In Baghdad, Sokurah performs magic at the pre-wedding festivities, temporarily turning Parisa's handmaiden into a snake-like being. Despite Sokura's prowess and a dark prophecy about war between Baghdad and Chandra, the Caliph refuses to help him return to Colossa. Later that night, Sokurah secretly shrinks the princess, enraging her father, who declares war on Baghdad. Sinbad and the Caliph give in to Sokurah's demands after he explains that the eggshell of a Roc is needed for the potion that can restore Parisa, and it can be found only on Colossa. Sokurah provides Sinbad with the plans for a giant crossbow for protection against the island's giant creatures.

Sinbad recruits additional crewmen from among convicts. Before they reach Colossa, the cutthroats are inspired to mutiny by the treacherous Karim, and capture Sokurah, Sinbad, and his men. During a violent storm, the sounds of keening demons from a nearby island drive the crew nearly mad, endangering the ship. One of the men releases Sinbad so he can save them, after Karim falls to his death from the crow's nest.

On Colossa, Sinbad, Sokurah, and six of his crew enter the valley of the cyclops, followed by Sinbad's loyal aide Harufa. Sinbad and Sokurah split up. Sinbad and his men find the cyclops's treasure cave, but are captured and locked in a wooden cage. Instead of helping them, Sokurah retrieves the magic lamp, but is chased by the cyclops, who kills three of the men. With Parisa's aid, Sinbad manages to escape, then blinds the one-eyed creature and lures it off the edge of a cliff to its death. Sinbad decides to hold on to the lamp until Parisa is restored to normal size.

Sokurah leads Sinbad and his starving men to the nesting place of the giant Rocs. Out of hunger, Sinbad's men try to break open a Roc egg, causing it to hatch. The chick is killed by the men and roasted for food. Meanwhile, Parisa enters the magic lamp and befriends Barani, the childlike genie inside. He tells her how to summon him in exchange for her promise of freedom. The parent Roc returns and slays the men. Sinbad tries to summon the genie, but he is grabbed by the Roc and dropped, unconscious, into its nearby nest. Sokurah kills Harufa and abducts the princess, taking her to his underground fortress.

Production

Producer Charles H. Schneer announced the production in June 1957. It was a co-production between Columbia Pictures and his company Morningstar.

Schneer left for Europe to scout locations on 15 July. Filming started the following month in Granada, Spain.

Casting

The leads, Kerwin Mathews and Kathryn Grant, were under contract to Columbia, both having played in crime and war films in the years before.

Special effects

It took Ray Harryhausen 11 months to complete the stop-motion animation sequences for his first full color film, using proper lighting design and editing live action footage with rear projection. His "Dynamation" label was used for the first time on this film.

The cyclops, the film's most popular character with his horn, goat legs and cloven hooves, was based upon the Greek god Pan. Harryhausen lifted much of the creature's design—torso, chest, arms, poise and style of movement—from Ymir, the Venusian creature he animated in 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957). He used the same armature, removing Ymir's latex body.

Harryhausen's personal favorite was the serpent woman belly dancer, created by the magician Sokurah to entertain the Caliph and the Sultan. As reference for this creature with four arms and a cobra's tail, Harryhausen watched a dancer in Beirut, Lebanon." The figure was reused to make the Gorgon Medusa in Harryhausen's final film, Clash of the Titans (1981).

The original script had a climax with two cyclops fighting. It was replaced by a cyclops facing a dragon, a sequence that took nearly three weeks for Harryhausen to complete. It was planned to have the dragon breathing fire during its entirety but the cost was deemed too high. In the scenes where it does, Harryhausen filmed flames shooting out a flamethrower 30 to 40 feet against a night sky, then superimposed them near the dragon's mouth. A more than three feet long model difficult to animate, the dragon used parts of the Rhedosaurus from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

The sword fight scene between Sinbad and the skeleton proved so popular with audiences that Harryhausen recreated and expanded it a few years later, with seven armed skeletons attacking the Greek hero Jason and his men in Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

Film score

The music score for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was composed by Bernard Herrmann, better known at the time for his collaboration with the director Alfred Hitchcock, and composing the film scores to Citizen Kane and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Herrmann went on to write the scores for three other Harryhausen films: Mysterious Island, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, and Jason and the Argonauts. Of the four, Harryhausen regarded the score for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as being the finest, due to the empathy Herrmann's main title composition evoked for the subject matter.

The soundtrack producer Robert Townson, who re-recorded the score in 1998 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, described the music as rich and vibrant, commenting: "I would cite The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as one of the scores which most validates film music as an art form and a forum where a great composer can write a great piece of music. As pure composition, I would place Sinbad beside anything else written this century and not worry about it being able to stand on its own".

Box office

In the United States and Canada, the film earned $3.2 million in rentals upon release. It went on to gross $9 million in US revenue from 13,846,000 ticket sales. In France, the film sold 1,009,546 tickets, equivalent to an estimated $370,000 in revenue. In the Soviet Union, the film sold 70.1 million tickets, equivalent to an estimated $20 million in revenue. Worldwide, the film grossed an estimated $29.4 million from 84,955,546 ticket sales.

Reception

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad continues to be well-reviewed, with many critics holding the opinion that it is the best film of the "Sinbad" trilogy. The film carries a 100% approval rating at the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 16 reviews with a weighted average score of 7.7/10, with several reviewers citing its nostalgic value. Mountain Xpress critic Ken Hanke, for example, calls it "childhood memory stuff of the most compelling kind".

The film was released during Christmas 1958 to cash-in during the family holiday, but it continued to do well following the holiday period, becoming a sleeper hit. In its first three weeks the film grossed $3.5 million, including $500,000 at the Roxy Theatre in New York City. Its total rentals were more than $6 million worldwide.

Producer Edward Small, impressed with the film's success, produced a fantasy film on his own in 1962, titled Jack the Giant Killer, reuniting the starring cast members of The 7th Voyage, Kerwin Mathews as Jack and Torin Thatcher as the evil sorcerer Pendragon.

Comic book adaptations

Dell Four Color No. 944 (September 1958)

Marvel Spotlight No. 25 (December 1975)