Ah, classic Hollywood orientalism. Let’s get that out of the way first, the film is full of obviously white people in varying degrees of makeup playing characters that are clearly meant to be Middle Eastern, but it’s not like any of these characters are actual people as such, so I suppose if we can cope with the other legendary monsters the film features, we can cope with these equally mythical Anglo-looking Arabs? Too bad if we can’t, cos I have a few more films in this vein waiting to be watched and reviewed, and in this case at least you’d be missing quite a lot of fun. As Wiki notes, the film’s not really based on the actual “7th voyage” story, but more on other adventures of Sinbad with a bit of the Odyssey thrown in (though those elements seem to be in one of the Sinbad stories too)… Sinbad and his crew land on the isle of Colossa and fall in with a magician called Sokurah when the latter loses a magic lamp to a cyclops; Sinbad is disinclined to go back there despite Sokurah’s begging, so the latter contrives an interesting reason to make him change his mind. Director Nathan Juran was building a certain reputation as a director of this sort of thing, and we’ll see more of him as I go through the collection cos I’ve accrued quite a few of his titles; here he teamed up again with Ray Harryhausen, whose first colour production this was, and let’s face it, Harryhausen’s work is what you come to a film like this rather than the thespian display… no doubt star Kerwin Matthews was a lovely person, but possibly not the most magnetic screen presence. But you’re not here for him, you’re here for the cyclopes, and the snake woman, and the rocs, and the dragon, and the fighting skeleton (which he’d expand upon a few years later in Jason and the Argonauts), and though HD video possibly enhances just how old these effects look all these decades later, I’d still take them over their probable modern CGI equivalents. This must’ve been an absolute blast in 1958, especially if you were a kid.
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