RE:View – Clash of the Titans
“Greek and Roman myths contained characters and fantastic creatures that were ideal for cinematic adventures. If some of the adventures were combined with 20th century storytelling, a timeless narrative could be constructed that would appeal to both young and old.”
-Ray Harryhausen
Clash of the Titans was both the end and the beginning of an era.
It was first of the Eighties sword and sorcery movies, but it was also the last Ray Harryhausen film. And it was quite the swan song. In a career that stretched decades, this film is easily his best. Although I’m afraid, that does raise the awkward question, how good were the rest of his films?
And does this one still hold up?
Clash of the Titans started in a way that doesn’t happen anymore. Someone wrote an original script. For values of original anyway. In 1978, veteran screenwriter Beverly Cross put pen to paper and created a screenplay based on the Perseus myth. Her original screenplay would have earned the picture an R rating but we’ll get back to that. She massaged her work until the British Board of Film Classification gave it a thumbs up with an “A” certificate. With that in hand, she started shopping her script around and naturally sent a copy to a man who had produced her work before, Charles H. Schneer.
As soon Schneer fell in love with the story he started “getting the band back together.” You see Schneer and Cross had worked together on Jason and the Argonauts as well Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Since Clash of the Titans was going to be a sword and sandals flick that was heavy on the special effects, Schneer didn’t think twice. He probably didn’t think once. Calling Ray Harryhausen was probably more of a spinal reflex.
In 1933, a thirteen-year-old Raymond Frederick Harryhausen saw King Kong for the first of many times. While watching in wrapped fascination while a black and white herky-jerky clay monkey shambled back and forth on the screen, an artist was being born. By the time, “twas beauty that killed the beast,” was uttered. Harryhausen knew what he wanted to do with his life.
While in school young Ray spent what little of his money that was available on his own tiny stop-motion studio. After meeting the man who did the effects for King Kong, he followed his advice to study anatomy as well as filmmaking.
It paid off. His demo reel was enough to get him hired on the spot by George Pal.
This worked out well for Harryhausen for reasons he couldn’t have seen coming. He was drafted.
The army after looking over Private Harryhausen’s list of skills shipped him over to the Army’s Special Services Division. This was where the Hollywood types that ended up in uniform got sent to make propaganda, training, and entertainment films. He was just a goffer, a grip, and a clapper, basically doing all the “here’s my shit-bird” jobs on the set but that didn’t matter. Who you know in Hollywood is critical to your success and Harryhausen was suddenly rubbing elbows with the likes of Frank Capra and Mikey Rooney. It gave him the golden Rolodex.
When he left the Army he landed a gig on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Harryhausen’s career began in earnest.
What set Harryhausen apart was his attention to detail. He didn’t move a clay creature’s arm unless it was anatomically possible for it to move in that direction. He experimented constantly with paint to make certain that it would stay the exact shade of color while it was baking under studio lights. He invented a process called Dyna-motion that allowed for (a reasonable degree) of interaction between live actors and his stop-motion creatures.
But what he did to really set himself apart was to give his sculptures a soul. There was something behind the eyes of his creatures. Watching them on screen you knew they could feel anger, pain, shock, and disappointment. He could even manage the near-impossible task of getting them to act with each other.
Here’s a clip from Sinbad and Eye of the Tiger. Advance to the 4:00 minute mark.
(*sigh*) Yes, it’s scene where Jayne Seymour is skinny dipping but try to get past that, please.
While Harryhausen was never a rich man, he was incredibly influential. Ask the likes of James Cameron and Joe Dante who was their favorite filmmaker when they were kids and the answer is always the same. Ray Harryhausen. It was his movies and everybody else’s. As a bleeding-edge Gen-Xer, I can still remember the excitement I would feel if the TV Guide said, one of his movies would be on this Saturday afternoon.
By the time Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was in theaters, it was Ray Harryhausen who was the star of the show. Which was a problem for his career because Patrick Wayne was a terrible Sinbad. Everything else was okay but John Wayne’s son was horribly miscast in a swashbuckler role.
As a result, the film seriously underperformed. It earned out, but Columbia was rather cautious when Schneer shopped his new property to them. Eventually, they got cold feet and pulled the plug in pre-production. Schneer liked the property enough to start shopping it around everywhere, finally ending up at MGM.
MGM didn’t just like it, they were nuts about it. The modestly budgeted kid’s movie had its expense account mushroom by a factor of five. The gods of Olympus were going to be played by the biggest names on the British stage with Sir Laurence Olivier as Zeus himself. The reason was obvious, “look at all the stars in this one.”
The leads would be less well-known. Although, there was a frantic effort on Schneer’s part to shoot down the last-minute studio suggestion of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Perseus.
Let’s take a look at it.
The film opens with the ancient Greek soldiers escorting a beautiful woman and her infant son to a rocky shore. King Acrisius fills us in on his version of events and orders his daughter and grandson put in the box and thrown into the sea. He slowly takes off his helmet revealing the cold visage of veteran actor Donald Houston. The soundtrack makes its presence felt at this point in a pretty big way.
We see a rat-with-wings flying overhead and the opening credits roll. Nobody does credits like that anymore, the vast expanses the bird is flying over combined French horns trumpeting a call to adventure speaks of exploration and journey into the great unknown. The soundtrack is head and shoulders above the 2010 version and remains the element of the film that has aged the best.
I’m afraid the same can’t be said of the initial visual effects. The seagull kept disappearing while it was on its way to Olympus.
Regardless, when you see the mountainside turn to snow and the credits are winding down you know you’ve arrived at Olympus. Quite a few people would sneer at the miniature city of the gods but I still think it has charm. It did what it needed to do. You have no doubt that it is the home of the gods.
The seagull turns into the Posieden and recaps the prelude to his brother. Zeus is furious at the blasphemy of the king throwing his daughter and grandson into the sea in the name of Zeus. This was also staggeringly tactless since Perseus is Zeus’s son.
Zeus gives an awkward bit of dialog that introduces the gods by name but it was either that or hang signs around their necks. He then pronounces sentence on the king.
“My Lord Poseidon I order you to raise the wind and sea. Destroy Argus! And to make certain that no stone stands and no creature lives, I command you to let loose the last of the Titans…
Release the Kraken!”
A four-armed stop-motion kaiju attacks Argus. While Zeus personally kills the king. Which takes care of one or two loose ends so far as Perseus is concerned. In the original myth, Danae was only locked away in the first place because her son was prophesied to kill her father, which he did but kind of by accident.
And speaking of Perseus’s MILF, we check back in on Danae her breasts bare, feeding the infant demi-god. Nudity didn’t happen in PG movies back in 1981. I think Clash got away with it because it was masquerading as semi-educational and there was no sexual content. There was supposed to be more nudity in the original script with Andromeda bound naked to the rock. While she has frequently been depicted that way by artists since 1600, it was too tough a sell to the censors. That and Pegasus got ripped apart in that version of the script.
So, we see Perseus growing up under his father’s watchful eye. The various deities of Olympus are instructed by Zeus to give him gifts. A nuisance for Hera as she is never cool about these things, and they happened a LOT.
I found myself admiring Beverly Cross as a writer. She went out of her way to make sure plot holes were filled in advance. During a needed montage whose only real job was to turn Perseus from a boy to a demi-god, she plugged in a scene where he was performing riding tricks bare-back. The kid they hired to do those tricks bareback at a gallop was an impressive as-hell rider, and the audience wasn’t muttering later in the movie, “So he can just tame a flying horse?” His expertise was already established in the back of the viewer’s mind. Your brain noticed even if you didn’t.
First act concluded, time for the plot to start and that means an antagonist. And Calibos wasn’t a bad one. The Kraken was more on par with being a force of nature than an opponent for Perseus. Perseus couldn’t interact with the Kraken but he could with Calibos. Like the “gods of Olympus,” Calibos is a Shakespearian import, although this time it’s the character and not the actor. He’s clearly and obviously, a Hellenized Caliban to include his oneitis for the hot chick in the story.
Again, Beverly Cross covered her bases. One of the reasons that Zeus was pissed at Calibos was for hunting and killing every one of his herd of sacred flying horses except for Pegasus. The viewer has now had it planted in his mind that Calibos will have no trouble capturing Pegasus.
Zeus beats Calibos with an ugly stick and that royally POs his mom, Thetis the goddess of the sea. Well, she can’t take it out on Zeus but she can dish it out to everyone else.
She plucks Perseus out of his beach bum existence on Serifos and dumps him in an amphitheater. Meanwhile, Calibos’ former intended bride Andromeda gets it pretty hard along with her entire city of Joppa. No man may wed her unless he answers a riddle. Get the answer wrong and you get burned alive.
Wait a second. Joppa? That’s Tel Aviv! Andromeda is Jewish? Now that I think about it, she was Ethiopian in the original myth. Considering what Arabs looked like in Harryhausen’s last couple of films, it can’t matter too much. Screw it. Moving on.
Perseus wakes up and meets Ammon the poet and playwright. He’s the mentor that provides needed exposition. That part was originally supposed to be played by Sir John Gielgud. MGM shot that down and insisted on an American because they didn’t want this to look like an all-Brit production. Frankly, that was all to the good because Burgess Meredith was the only big name in this movie who wasn’t completely phoning it in. The Olympus scenes were shot in eight days and the lassitude shows. The titans of the British stage clearly didn’t give a damn about anything but their paychecks, they totally phoned it in. But Meredith was doing his job and bringing the goods.
Perseus is given some magical swag by his old man, and he heads off to Joppa to “find his destiny,” because the guy in the shield told him to go look for it there.
We are brought up to speed about the curse and the riddle when he sees a man who has been burned alive. Perseus is understandably a little curious about how any girl could offset the risk/reward involved. So, he used his helm of invisibility and goes to peep on her in the middle of the night.
He finds out this chick has issues. She astrally projects at night and her “spirit” gets carted off by a gigantic vulture. Kind of a red flag so far as I’m concerned but Perseus felt he could get passed it because he fell in love with her at first sight, which is a terrible contrivance but a conveniently unavoidable one because all the myths agree that he did.
Perseus needs to learn to fly. Icarus isn’t available but Pegasus is. In the original myth, it was winged sandals which are terrible for both 1980s cinematography and action figure sales, and in a post-Star Wars Hollywood, that last really mattered. So, Pegasus it was.
P&P fly off to the swamp the next time Andromeda goes for a sleepwalk without bringing her body along.
We finally see Calibos and that is one fucked up Afro.
We also see him in stop motion and I’m suddenly suspicious about something.
(*googlegooglegoogle*)
Yep, same model. Harryhausen reskinned the Troglodyte from his last Sinbad movie. They built the actor’s costume around a recycled stop-motion model.
Regardless, I liked Calibos’ court with his decrepit and deformed courtiers. He had found some terrible, dark and corrupted corner of the world where the men were so debased they almost weren’t men anymore and gathered them to him. It was a nice touch.
He gamma whines to Andromeda about how much he loves her and then sends her off with a new riddle to burn the next Alpha that tries to put the moves on her. As she is leaving he spots sandal tracks appearing behind her.
Calibos jumps Perseus in the swamp. Perseus wins but loses a helmet that would have come in handy later in the story.
Again, Beverly Cross showed she knew how to write a tight story. The helm of invisibility was useful in the second act but would have completely broken the story in the third. It had to go.
Perseus answers Andromeda’s riddle and takes her off the market. She’s pretty cool about it but is a little freaked when he confesses, he spied on her when she was asleep. However, when women are writing the story, peeping is fine. Provided the peeper is good-looking enough, it’s totally validating.
And Harry Hamlin brought the right looks to the party. He wasn’t that great of an actor but he stayed clear of roles where that would be an issue. And he was obviously a better choice than Ahunuld. Also, Hamlin could carry a love scene back in the day, the Terminator never could.
Judi Bowker was a superb Andromeda. She was adolescent crush-worthy and had the perfect eyes for this part. Bright, shiny, and looked great when filled with tears. She was a perfect “little wounded bird.”
Calibos calls his Mom to complain about the bully who cut off his hand. And interestingly she doesn’t lay waste to Joppa at his say-so. The gods of Olympus have until this point been just as petty and selfish as the ones in mythology. This was one of the few indications that Thetis was interested in justice. Or else she thought it was going to be a tough sell to Poseidon who can’t be all that cool about his surprise stepson. One of those anyway.
Perseus and Andromeda’s wedding is interrupted when Cassiopeia makes some unfortunate comparisons between Andromeda’s beauty and the Goddess of the Seas, in Thetis’ own temple. Wedding is off because the bride has to be a virgin when she gets eaten. The Mother of the Dark Spawn says she totally gets it and would have done the same thing as Thetis.
When Perseus and his buddies are about to head out, Andromeda joins them, and shows she has a bit of backbone doing it. Her husband-to-be is not going without her and that’s all there is to it. Strong but feminine.
We next meet Bubo the R2-D2 stand-in… I mean the mechanical owl. I was about to say you could have easily lifted Bubo out of the movie and never missed him but he did perform the all-important task of rescuing Pegasus when the time came, and the Bubo toys did sell better than anything else.
After chatting with some sweet old cannibals Perseus sets off to do battle with the ultimate bad hair day.
I’ve got to say, the fight with Medusa holds up today. It’s much more about suspense and tension than it is about action. The sickly green lighting combined with the deep shadow is still oily and spidery.
Perseus loses a couple of first-rate henchmen but still manages to come out… “Ahead”
So, he and what is left of his troop head back to Joppa. Andromeda had to go back early because she had a date she couldn’t miss but would really like to.
They get jumped by Calibos and the last of the extras, plus Perseus’ designated new best friend are killed. Calibos is whacked out but this fight has taken too much out of Perseus. He collapses and begs his robot-owl to find Pegasus and bring him back.
The gods watch him fall and Thetis tells Zeus it is time. He reluctantly orders the release of the Kraken once more. But he slips his son some Olympus Energy Drink when no one is looking and Perseus is ready for action.
We get to see Judi Bowker’s body-double’s naked butt and then she’s off to get chained to a rock.
The Kraken arrives and I just realized that was the closest Ray Harryhausen came to fulfilling his big dream of animating King Kong. Sure there are differences like the tentacle arms but overall both the Kraken model and the scene it is used in are both pretty close. I’m glad Harryhausen got to have that as his last major motion picture moment. It was indeed memorable.
Perseus arrives in the nick of time. Screws around a bit and gets himself and his horse knocked into the drink. In most of the original myths, Perseus defeats “Cetus” with his magic sword, despite the fact that all of the myths agree that he had a perfectly good, second-hand Gorgon’s head with him at the time.
This version of Perseus spares himself a pointless workout and just zaps the giant monkey-octopus with what is left of Medusa.
There is a brief denouement, where Zeus wraps up a few loose ends and then puts Perseus and company into the stars as constellations. Possibly fulfilling the educational portion of the flick that allowed them to get away with non-sexual nudity.
The End
So, does it hold up?
There are two different films that I can compare this one to. The 2010 version of Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts.
The 2010 version had modern special effects, modern lighting tricks, and contemporary high-speed action scenes. However, it also had a malignantly atheist meta-context, Hades is the bad guy (despite being the only god that never shirked his duties), a Calibos-Acrisius combination that simply did not work. Perseus was an annoying anti-hero and he got the wrong girl because Andromeda was white. Liam Neeson’s “Release the Kraken” was nowhere near as good as Olivier’s. The computer effects had no charm whatsoever. The music wasn’t half as good and I would rather be dragged over five miles of coarse sandpaper and be sprayed with lemon juice rather than watch it again.
Yeah. It. Sucked.
Jason and the Argonauts is more in Clash’s league. It is a Ray Harryhausen movie for a start and that means it has charm. It has the same sentimental affection from the same generations of men who were once boys. Harryhausen’s effects weren’t quite as big or refined. However, the actors were actually trying to earn their paychecks. The music was just as good and the dialogue was much better.
Secret Evil King: When your father’s kingdom fell, no man fought harder than I.
In some ways, Jason scores over the newer work but in the end, you are likely to feel the same sentiment for both movies if you are the right age. Both speak of Saturday afternoons in front of a CRT television that wasn’t high res enough to shackle the imagination.
If you are of the right age, then, yes. It holds up.
