He projects the regal quality necessary, and only falters in a strange scene where he speaks to his son Perseus (a pre- L.A. Olivier spends most of the film sitting at a throne with sparkling blue laser-lights beaming from behind his head. Besides Olivier, the film has a post- Rocky Burgess Meredith as the poet Ammon, Ursula Andress as Aphrodite (though present, it seems, just to sell the film – she hardly gets any lines), and a host of esteemed British actors including Maggie Smith – Professor McGonagall herself – as the vengeful Thetis and Claire Bloom ( The Haunting) as Hera. The credits proudly boast the presence of Sir Laurence Olivier as Zeus, and as far as I’m concerned, his is the definitive interpretation, though I also have a fondness for the more earthy, low-key Niall MacGinnis in Jason and the Argonauts. The film has an all-star cast, some attractive location shooting, and – most importantly – lots of monsters it was a return to form after stumbling slightly with the low-budget Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), a film that had the misfortune to be released the same year as Star Wars, and which Harryhausen fans frequently, casually refer to as the master’s weakest (for the record, I enjoy Eye of the Tiger, and as I’m writing this, the gorgeous poster for the film is staring down at me). With the benefit of hindsight, this is a fitting end to Harryhausen’s string of films with producer and longtime partner Charles H. In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing I just shrunk down into my seat instead. I wanted to stand on my desk and lecture them on who Ray Harryhausen was and the depths of his achievement. In middle school, and long before Jurassic Park, my Latin teacher showed Clash of the Titans to the class, and as soon as the first of Harryhausen’s creations – the giant winged vulture – appeared on the TV, the students started to laugh. It was even briefly considered for Jurassic Park (1993), until Spielberg became convinced that computer effects had come far enough to deliver his dinosaurs. Stop-motion would stick around for just a little while longer, but in more subtle forms, such as go motion, to further the illusion of reality. And while Clash of the Titans‘ weaknesses seem more evident the more time passes, I have an inescapable nostalgia for this movie, partly because I grew up with it – I’m pretty sure this is where I saw a naked woman for the first time – and partly because it became Harryhausen’s swan song.
Those films are much better, but they also belong to the childhood of the so-called “monster kids.” To the next generation, Clash of the Titans – along with Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – helped form the basis of their blossoming imaginations. Harryhausen fans of an older generation probably have mixed-to-negative feelings about the film, since it simply can’t touch the brilliance and magic of his seminal works, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). The appeal of the original, analog Clash of the Titans – and I make this distinction because the 2010 remake feels like a bland video game, one that you’re watching someone else play – relies a lot upon your affinity for Harryhausen, as well as how old you were when the film came out.
Perseus (Harry Hamlin) enters the Underworld to confront Medusa. But his stop-motion miniatures all moved at the guidance of his hands, and that makes a difference: this is a spectacle with fingerprints. Sure, his creations don’t look as “realistic” as the monsters and cosmic environs of Thor: The Dark World. The credits were much shorter, because most of the work – apart from some assistance by Steven Archer and Jim Danforth – was by one man, Ray Harryhausen. Fast-forward to later in the evening, when I decided to revisit the original Clash of the Titans (1981). The seemingly endless scrawl listed one special effects company after another. Of course, since this was a Marvel film, I was obliged to sit through the ending credits for the Easter egg at the end. It’s a fine moment of surrealism, or at least Marvel-brand psychedelia in the vein of Jack Kirby’s Thor comics. In one moment, we catch a glimpse into some kind of Asgardian museum where it appears that a galaxy is suspended in the boughs of a tree. Hardly a scene in the film goes by without some kind of CGI effect. So yesterday I went to Thor: The Dark World (2013), and – probably because I had just re-watched 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) that morning, I was particularly struck by how far special effects have come, how casually sophisticated they are.
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