After almost 120 posts I finally get to Ray Harryhausen and while that is a sad it took so long I also knew it was only matter of time before I began some posts on this great man and his work. I am sure he needs no long winded introduction and since this posts is a Quickie (bereft of original vidcaps, media or research that involves more than some skimming) I will just say I truly admire his film work. This one is certainly one of my favorites as far as his fantastic stop action animation technique goes. It was directed by Nathan H. Juran and produced by Charles H. Shneer for Columbia pictures, who collaborated with Harryhausen on many of his films. It stars William Hooper as the no bones, he man hero Col. Robert Calder. This type of ale lead was so prevalent at the time. Calder is take charge ex-quarterback type who though brimming with misogyny always wins the girl, in this case Italian medical student Marisa Leonardo, played by pretty Joan Taylor.

What I love about the films with Harryhausen’s animation is just that as the stories no not really rise too much higher than the rest of the science fiction-fantasy fare of the day, with some notable exceptions such as Jason and the Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. The story here is really pretty campy to the point of being a bad movie I love type film. However it is not really a bad movie , in my definition, though there are some sore spots. The acting is wooden and Calder is simply an asinine ape in ways and to see Marisa fall under his “charm” and promise him a candle lit dinner right after he denigrates her is too much to believe. The action takes place in Italy and was filmed in Rome where Harryhausen wanted to spend his vacation. One character is one of the most obnoxious I can recall since Omar the love spreading beatnik from The Flesh Eaters. Pepe, played by Bart Baverman with a horrible Italian accent, is simply grating on your nerves as he does whatever he can do to get a real cowboy hat “…like the cowboys in Texas wear”. This included selling a canister with some slimy substance inside to the local zoologist who lives in a little aluminum sided trailer, the type so popular in Italy in the 1960’s. The canister washed ashore after an American spaceship returning from Venus crashes into the Mediterranean Sea. Only two men survive but one of them soon die while being cared for in the local hospital by medical student Leonardo. No need to have a real nurse or doctor attend to injured astronauts, much less notify the American embassy, when you can have a student do all that.

When the zoologist, who coincidentally is Marisa’s father, Dr. Leonardo (Frank Puglia) releases the substance from the tube he is stunned to find a small lizard man on the table later, and more stunned when the lizard man seems to be doubling in size at a very fast rate. This is explained later as having something to do with the differences in the gravitational fields of Venus and Earth. Soon the creature is the size of a man is on the loose. We discover that the beast is actually a herbivore and not really aggressive at all unless provoked, which Col. Calder has no problem doing. He explains this is how he and his crew handled the brutes on Venus and starts poking it with a long sharp stick. The creature does not respond well to this and attacks a farmer and flees in panic. It is later captured when an electrical net is thrown over it when is feeding on some bait of irresistible sulfur. While chained down in a huge laboratory the beast is set free after some accident where a bumbling assistant short circuits the control panel. The first thing it does is provoke a fight with an elephant. While the elephant is huge it is no match for the stronger and fang equipped “Ymir”, the name Harryhausen gave the creature. It is actually a great fight sequence but sort of unsettling to see the beast kill a big dumb elephant so cruelly. There is a chase of the gigantic monster all over Rome and it winds up atop the Coliseum where it is essentially picked off like a sitting duck and falls to its death.

Again, the star of the film is not the dialog or storyline or the aveage level acting. It is the Ymir itself. The model looks great. It has a reptilian face with whisker looking features, the torso of Arnold Schwarzenegger and a dinosaur like tail that is constantly moving around. The creature actually is never menacing to me and even when it attacks the elephant we sense it is only because the Ymir has been driven past the point of endurance by the human experimenters. No one really seems to ever sympathize with it not even Marisa. Luckily Pepe is written out the script soon enough and we do not have the little boy who loves the monster routine to drive us nuts. I included a couple color stills because actually Harryhausen wanted the film to be shot in color originally but there was not enough of a budget to do that. The color version released in 2007 was done under his supervision. Here is a link to Harryhausen’s website which is loaded with images and information.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Science Fiction-Fantasy . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.