I have long had a soft spot for "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad", and Ray Harryhausen's work in general, ever since I was taken, as a child, as part of a friend's birthday treat, to see the film on a double bill with "Jason and the Argonauts". This would have been in the early seventies, nearly a decade and a half after it was first released in 1958, but in those days children's films seemed to have a longer shelf-life than they do today, and it was quite common for cinemas to wheel out the familiar old classics every school holiday. (My friend's birthday fell in July, so his parties normally included a trip to the movies).
The plot concerns a beautiful princess who has been shrunk to a height of only a few inches by an evil magician. She can only be restored to normal by a magic potion, the ingredients for which can only be obtained by a hazardous voyage to a distant island. Step forward the heroic Sinbad, who has fallen in love with the princess. Once on the island he and his crew must face many dangers, including a cyclops, a dragon and a roc, a gigantic two-headed predatory bird.
This isn't really the sort of film you go to for the acting, so it doesn't really matter that neither the handsome Kerwin Mathews as Sinbad nor the lovely Kathryn Grant (aka Mrs Bing Crosby) as Princess Parisa were the sort of actors who were ever likely to receive Oscar nominations. What matters is that both looked and sounded right in an Arabian Nights fantasy movie.
Monsters were Harryhausen's stock-in-trade, and the monster scenes were filmed using Dynamation, the widescreen stop-motion animation technique which he created. He later worked on two more Sinbad films using the same technique, "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" from 1973 and "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" from 1977. I have never seen "The Golden Voyage", but by 1977 (the same year as the original "Star Wars") Harryhausen's work, and stop-motion animation in general, was starting to look a bit retro in the age of CGI.
For me, however, the retro look is part of the charm of this sort of film, and we have to remember that in 1958 it was not retro at all, but cutting-edge film technology. It may look old-fashioned today, but "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" still retains its ability to transport the audience into a world full of wonders. And that is the whole point of films like this. 7/10
