by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Three nights ago, after Charles and I returned from the
three-day ConDor science-fiction convention, I figured we’d want to watch a
film in the science-fiction or fantasy genres and I ended up showing us Jason and the Argonauts, the 1963 fantasy classic from Columbia Studios and
a paper production company called “Morningside World-Wide Productions”
(imdb.com also lists an enterprise called “The Great Company” as one of the
producing entities but they don’t get screen credit). It was produced by
Charles H. Schneer and directed by Don Chaffey, though the real reason anyone would want to see this film is because
of the spectacular special-effects sequences created by Ray Harryhausen, the
second of only two world-class masters of stop-motion animation. (The first was
Willis O’Brien, the special-effects genius behind the original 1933 King
Kong, from whom Harryhausen learned the
technique working as his assistant on the 1949 film Mighty Joe Young.) Harryhausen consistently made his best films,
including The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), for Schneer, who seems to have been the producer most willing
to go to bat for him and get the studios to cough up the money needed for the
long production schedule stop-motion animation requires. For example, the most
famous sequence in Jason and the Argonauts, in which Jason (Todd Armstrong, dubbed with British actor Tim Turner
— so many voices here were dubbed with people other than the ones who play the
characters visually this film has a place alongside the first Mad Max as one of those films dubbed from English into
English) fights an army of skeletons, took four months to film even though it
lasts only about five minutes on screen.
Not even Schneer got enough money for
some of Harryhausen’s most extraordinary ideas — when they made their last film
together, Clash of the Titans,
Harryhausen wanted to depict Cerberus, the giant dog that guards the gate to
Hades in Greek mythology, with the three heads the mythical writers said he
had, but he had to content himself with two. This time Schneer got Columbia,
the producing studio, to cough up for enough to do the skeleton army, the
seven-headed Hydra Jason battles in the immediately preceding sequence (the
skeletons supposedly arise from the Hydra’s teeth when the film’s principal
villain, King Aeetes of Colchis [Jack Gwillim], sows them into the ground and
they grow into animate skeletons), the Greek god Talos (a giant bronze statue
that creaks to life in one scene — Harryhausen deliberately made the animation
of this sequence clunky instead of smooth to indicate this was a metal statue
coming to life and literally creaking in the joints, and he got letters
wondering why this sequence didn’t have the fabled smoothness of most of his
work!) and Triton, son of the sea god Poseidon, who rises from the ocean in one
scene to menace Jason and the Argonauts. (Triton was actually played by a live
actor — since he looked human Harryhausen decided he’d be easier to create that
way than as a stop-motion model, and also he had to rise from the sea and using
water in stop-motion sequences is always tricky because the miniature
photography enlarges a drop of water to unnaturally huge size. To get him to
rise with the precise ponderousness needed to make him look real, the crew had
to shoot the scene at 96 frames per second, four times the standard speed, to
give him ultra-slow motion, and at one point the camera literally blew up from
having to handle running at that speed.)
Jason and the Argonauts is, along with The Seventh Voyage of
Sinbad, one of Harryhausen’s two best films
because they’re the best constructed and the ones most engagingly faithful to
their mythological sources: Zeus (Niall MacGinnis, getting a promotion after
playing King Menelaus in the 1955 film Helen of Troy), king of the Greek gods, sends word to Acastus
(Gary Raymond) that he’ll be allowed to overthrow the rightful king of Thessaly
and take his place, only Acastus goes beyond Zeus’s authority and kills the
king’s two daughters and tries to kill the king’s son Jason as well — but
someone spirits the young Jason away and he grows up, determined to get his
family’s throne back. Hera (future Bond girl Honor Blackman), Zeus’s wife and
queen, takes Jason’s cause and looks down at him through the water-screen TV
the Greek gods must have got from the Egyptians, since a similar device is seen
in the 1932 film The Mummy in
which the reincarnated mummy Imhotep (Boris Karloff) uses it to show modern
girl Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann) her life in past incarnations, including the
one in ancient Egypt in which they were illicit lovers until he was caught and
sentenced to being entombed alive. Hera offers Jason, not the usual three, but five wishes he can use when he needs help in the quest
for the Golden Fleece, which he’s told he needs to acquire to re-establish
himself as the rightful heir and king of Thessaly — and being a typically
feckless movie hero, he uses them up in the first 40 minutes and for the rest
of the film he’s on his own. At least the story makes internal sense, and
though we’re getting a bowdlerized version of the myth — Medea (Nancy Kovack,
who later played the female romantic lead in the Three Stooges’ last feature, The
Outlaws Is Coming, with Adam “Batman” West
as the male lead) turns into a Valley Girl and a traditional movie girlfriend
for the hero — at least it plays well.
The production standards this time are
substantial enough that the Golden Fleece is genuinely impressive even though
it looks more like a whole sheepskin than just a fleece — I remember one other
sword-and-sandal non-epic, the original 1958 Hercules from Italy with Steve Reeves in the title role, in
which, as I wrote about it in an earlier post on this blog, the Golden Fleece “turns
out to be a bit of mangy-looking wool dipped in gold paint hanging off a branch
on a tree that appears to be planted on the head of a Godzilla-style monster” —
and the sets are substantial (probably Schneer and Chaffey had the run of sets
from previous productions set in ancient Greece or Rome; though most of their
cast was British the movie was filmed entirely in Italy) even though they have
that just-new, freshly painted look critics like Dwight MacDonald used to
complain about (and directors like Terry Gilliam have gone out of their way to
reverse — Gilliam even called one of his companies “Poo Poo Productions,”
reflecting his obsession with covering his characters in mud and shit to show
just how dirty ancient times
were). Though it leaves out the character of Medea’s younger brother Absyrtus
(whom, as Jason and the Argonauts leave Colchis and Aeetes’ ships are pursuing
them, Medea kills and cuts up into little pieces which she throws into the sea,
knowing that Aeetes’ sailors will have to pick up the pieces and reassemble
them so they can give Absyrtus a proper burial) as well as all the events of
the sequel (in which Jason keeps Medea as a mistress, then gets engaged in a
dynastic marriage to another woman, to which Medea responds by killing Jason,
his new fiancée and, most
famously, her and Jason’s children), Jason and the Argonauts — produced in the waning days of the Production Code
and later given a “G” rating under the ratings system that replaced it — is a
fun romp through Greek mythology and one of the few Harryhausen films that’s
entertaining even when his dazzling stop-motion creations aren’t front and center on the screen.
