The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen by Richard Crouse

Author:Richard Crouse [Crouse, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: ECW Press

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JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963)

“The epic story that was destined to stand as a colossus of adventure!”

— Advertising tagline for Jason and the Argonauts

Stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen created unique worlds and monsters on film one frame at a time. His work on film, inspired by seeing King Kong at the young age of 13, was honed by making stop-motion training films for the navy in World War II before creating Dynamation, a process that combined live action with live-action backgrounds.

His first feature, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, led to work on a series of eye-popping films based on Greek and Arabic myths that would redefine movie magic. The best known of these, 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, was a box-office hit, leading to a series of sci-fi films like The 3 Worlds of Gulliver and Mysterious Island. In 1963 he returned to mythology, creating his greatest film, Jason and the Argonauts. In 1992 actor Tom Hanks gave tribute to Harryhausen, saying, “some say Citizen Kane is the greatest movie of all time, others say its Casablanca, for me, the great picture of all time is Jason and the Argonauts.” It's easy to see why the film would have captured Hanks's imagination, as it is a near-perfect blend of storytelling mixed with Bernard Herrmann's rousing score, manly-men Argonauts, and (for the time) mind-blowing special effects.

The story centers on Jason and his efforts to regain his kingdom by traveling on a death-defying expedition to acquire the Golden Fleece. He gathers the greatest heroes of all time, including Hercules, and sets out on a ship with the assistance of the gods. On the way they encounter a seven-headed Hydra; Titan Talos, a giant bronze statue come-to-life; and the evil winged Harpies.

The Hydra provides the film's greatest sequence, when Jason must battle the skeleton soldiers that grow from her teeth. It's a jaw-dropping scene that brings the film to an exciting climax. In the original myth the skeletons were the rotted corpses of the Hydra's victims, but the filmmakers decided that would be too gruesome an image for their film. Instead Harryhausen choreographed the live-action actors swinging the weapons at imaginary adversaries, and later, using his Dynamation technique, spent four-and-a-half months adding in seven sword-wielding skeletons. “The dueling scene in Jason with the skeletons had to be very carefully laid out,” he told Animation World in 2000, “because the touching of the swords and all that had to be perfectly synchronized or it wouldn't be convincing.”

Harryhausen went on to make films until 1981 — including One Million Years BC (1966), starring the genetically blessed Rachel Welch, a special effect all her own — when his stop-motion technique fell out of vogue. In his golden years the animation maestro found a second career when modern filmmakers paid tribute to him by casting him as an extra in films like Beverly Hills Cop III, Spies Like Us, and Mighty Joe Young. In 1992 Harryhausen's gifts to the art of special effects were rewarded with an honorary Oscar.

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