Jason and the Argonauts

Jason and the Argonauts -- Although nominally directed by someone else, the great special effects technician Ray Harryhausen must be considered the author of this 1963 sword and sandal film.  A tour of monsters, the movie features stoic and brawny heroes battling stop-action beasts, most notably a skyscraper-tall bronze warrior and seven or eight grinning and malignant skeletons.  A serpentine hydra, not fully realized and implausibly propelled, and some gnat-bat harpies also make appearances together with the clashing rocks visualized as a perpetual tawny landslide of boulders pelting a foaming blue bathtub where toy galleons are tossed about.  Harryhausen's creatures are charming enough and their herky-jerky motion is strange enough to convey the quality of legend about these images, but the movie is bland and most unexpressive.  Archaic marble Kouros figures are better actors than the musclemen populating this show and the goddesses and nymphs, including Honor Blackman, are Ursula Andress lookalikes, all seeming vaguely embarrassed by their coiffure and form-fitting chlamys robes.  Already in 1963, special effects extravaganzas felt licensed to ignore narrative precision and physical reality.  In an early sequence, a bad guy kills a young woman praying at the throne of Hera.  A baby left on the altar and material to the plot is simply ignored -- the infant seems to vanish.  Portentous prophecies are made much of at the outset of the film -- Jason is supposed to kill Pelias -- but the movie seems to run out of steam after the combat with the skeletons and just screeches to a halt, someone intoning a promise of "further adventures."  The hydra seems curiously distracted from its murderous assault on our hero -- whenever it gets Jason down or clutches him in its coils, the beast pauses politely to let the protagonist escape.  A vast and towering bronze giant who chases the argonauts in the first bravura special effects sequence is disabled by being drained of its ichor -- a water-tower full of the stuff is released through the bronze automaton's heel but simply vanishes from sight as it pours out.  Harryhausen apparently couldn't figure out where to put the stuff cascading from his monster.  A couple of grim opening scenes involving the destiny of men and the sardonic cruelty of the gods are effective and, indeed, capture, in a miniature way, some of the tensions in Greek tragedy, but anything approximating thoughtfulness is quickly submerged in the special effects.  By far the best thing about the movie is Bernard Hermann's majestic score -- sometimes, the music sounds like The Rite of Spring, other times Hermann channels Mussorgsky and Bartok.  There are ominous Dies Irae chords, wild fanfares, and, in general, the score gives the impression of a massive gate being slowly and ponderously opened on its rusty hinges to the bleating of maddened bassoons.  There are some impressive landscapes, a day-for-night view of the ruins at Taormina that has a dream-like beauty, and many rock-girt coasts that look like Sicily or, maybe, Malibu.  Great flippered tails vanish into a viscous-looking brilliantly blue foaming sea -- this is an effect that I especially enjoy.