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The camera travels over a fresco for the opening credits, then passes from planar flatness to deep focus simply and quite beautifully by panning from a soldier in profile (Corinthian helmet, red plumes against oceanic blues) to the camp where Pelias (Douglas Wilmer) receives his prophecy. The raid on Aristo's palace is swift, only baby Jason escapes the slaughter to return to Thessaly a young warrior (Todd Armstrong) claiming his rightful throne. He's a defiant non-believer until Godzilla-sized Hermes (Michael Gwynn) materializes and takes him to Mount Olympus, to seize the Golden Fleece at "the edge of the world" becomes his mission. "The gods want their entertainment." In this humorous treatise on mythological determinism, Hera (Honor Blackman) and Zeus (Niall MacGinnis) are Mom and Pop at the chessboard, Hercules (Nigel Green) is a graying celebrity coasting on the Labors while Medea (Nancy Kovack) is a painted odalisque. Don Chaffey sculpts the spectacle of tunic and plaster, but auteur duties fall to Ray Harryhausen and his stop-motion prodigies. (Talos the creaking titan grabs the Argo out of the water as it sails between its bronze legs, and no further analysis of beefcake subtext is necessary.) The blind prophet (Patrick Troughton) curses the heavens and takes revenge on pesky harpies (Pasolini multiplies them in The Canterbury Tales), and there's Neptune rising out of the foam to push the Clashing Rocks apart, flapping fishtail and all. Aldrich's Sodom and Gomorrah is concurrent with the feast and betrayal in Colchis, the showdown with the Hydra is a Moreau canvas followed by the Holbein woodcut of the squad of sword-wielding skeletons. "Deliver to me the children of the Hydra's teeth... The children of the night." The "calm sea" at the close once more becomes Harryhausen's turbulent canvas in Clash of the Titans. With Gary Raymond, Laurence Naismith, Jack Gwillim, and John Cairney.
--- Fernando F. Croce |