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(1920– ). American special effects artist.
Harryhausen began his career by helping Willis O'BRIEN
with the unremarkable Mighty Joe Young, then made his name in the
field by creating the dinosaur of Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and
the giant octopus (famously with only six tentacles, to save money) of
It Came from beneath the Sea. After working with O'Brien on some
dinosaurs for Irwin ALLEN's documentary The Animal World, Harryhausen
then showed, with his Venusian creature in Twenty Million Miles to
Earth, that he could evoke sympathy as well as awe with his work.
But his most striking achievement of the 1950s was for Fred SEARS' Earth
versus the Flying Saucers. While this is hardly a noteworthy film,
the Harryhausen-supervised scenes where the saucers attack Washington,
D.C. should be required viewing for all science fiction film critics;
rarely has a city been ravaged on film with such delightful ferocity.
Indeed, the sheer exuberance of the sequence rather undermines the contrived
air of crisis that the movie otherwise strives to convey. In his later
science fiction films, he had fun with various oversized animals in Mysterious
Island (watch for the battle with the giant chicken), the dinosaurs
of One Million Years B.C. and The Valley of Gwangi, and
his insect-like Selenites for First Men in the Moon, which seem
very close to H. G. WELLS's own descriptions.
However, Harryhausen and his regular colleague, producer
Charles H. SCHNEER, decided in the late 1950s to focus on fantasy films:
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, The Three Worlds of Gulliver,
Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. All of these are fast-moving and
colorful and contain impressive animation sequences, yet one must echo
the common criticism that these films are merely series of setpieces crudely
connected by episodic and uninvolving stories, and their casting decisions
are certainly open to question; only Harryhausen, for example, ever saw
any virtues in the acting talents of Patrick Wayne. By far the best of
these films is Jason and the Argonauts, which benefits from an
unusually strong story (based on the Greek myth) and the clever framing
device of chess-playing gods who determine the hero's fate.
In a film obviously designed to be the climax of his
career and his crowning achievement, Harryhausen followed the pattern
of Jason and the Argonauts in creating Clash of the Titans,
although the chosen myth this time was the story of Perseus. For once,
Harryhausen was blessed with a large budget, and after long accepting
the status of a second-string filmmaker, Harryhausen must have found it
gratifying indeed to have the great Laurence Olivier himself playing Zeus
and presiding over his fantasy world, though director Desmond Davis let
him get away with an indifferent and playful performance; able veterans
like Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom and Burgess MEREDITH strengthened the
film; and a young Harry Hamlin proved the best hero Harryhausen had ever
had. But by this time, alas, Harryhausen had emptied his bag of tricks;
everything in the film had already been seen in his previous films, and
the giant sea monster of the final scenes seemed especially derivative
and woefully anticlimactic.
Paradoxically, the power that Harryhausen achieved over
his own destiny may have been his undoing, since he did much of his best
work for projects he did not conceive and could not have been inspired
by; some creators do better when they are fulfilling the visions of others.
Or perhaps his career offers a broader lesson about the difference between
fantasy and science fiction. The established genre of fantasy features
a stable set of conventions controlled by tradition, and creators who
specialize in that field may be eventually doomed to repeat themselves;
while the younger genre of science fiction offers more possibilities for
novel and original work. Of course, such a sweeping hypothesis can hardly
be justified by my reactions to Harryhausen's films, since it may only
be because of my personality that I prefer his flying saucers to his flying
horses. |
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