Professor
von Cucumber
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There
Were Giants In Those Days – and Harryhausen was the largest!
by
Jon Dunmore © 28 Jul 2005.
His
name was synonymous with SPECTACLE.
View
any movie from the 50s or 60s with a gigantic, roaring,
pseudo-prehistoric, collateral-damaging monster and you
were probably watching one of Ray Harryhausen's herky-jerky
children of fantastic plastic.
Just
as Ed Wood is The King of B-Movie Schlock, as Alfred Hitchcock
is The King of Suspense, as Hayden Christensen is The King
of Bad Actors, as George Lucas is The King of Nominal Directing,
Ray Harryhausen was once The King of Monster Movies.
Though
he was minimally responsible for the production side of
the movies he worked on (only rarely donning the caps of
director, producer, writer or actor) his "stop-motion"
visual effects method was so innovative and startling that
movie-lovers came to refer to a whole genre of films as
"Ray Harryhausen" movies.
And
why not? Were it not for the blind-man's-bane Harpies in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963), or the kidnapped Allosaur in THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), or the damsel-devouring Kraken
in CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981), where would those movies
have been had the film-makers opted to have some guy in a
rubber suit do Ray's dirty work? Harryhausen's creations brought
character to the movies – in more ways than one. (No,
he didn't do the seminal stop-motion grand-daddy of them all
– his mentor, Willis O' Brien, did KING KONG (1933).
This
film, like many of its ilk, has barely any set-up (nuclear
tests in the Arctic) before The Beast is unleashed (During
the Cold War, it was de rigueur to detonate nuclear
devices willy-nilly, irradiating animals into gigantism causing
45 minutes of cinematic running and screaming...) Then some
wooden acting amidst mundane set design until – more
unleashing! It seemed to be a staple of "Harryhausen"
movies that the directors and screenwriters gleaned so
much quality from Ray's creatures that they were off the
hook in providing little more than running, screaming and
military stock footage to bridge the gaps between monster
scenes.
Though
it must be noted that integrating Ray's footage into the
body of their movies was masterful, utilizing every trick
they knew to retain the illusion of proximity and size of
the fictional beasts. This Beast rampages through city streets,
eats a diving bell, sinks a ship, topples a lighthouse,
looms above the populace, pushes over office buildings -
no doubt affecting the Dow-Jones Average egregiously –
with nary a doubt that it is really performing these feats.
Though
it does look goofy by today's standards, there was
a certain level of pseudo-realism attained that magnificently
satisfied those pre-CGI audiences and allows even a post-Episode-III
audience to appreciate at least the towering aspirations
of the state-of-the-art back then.
Identifying
The Beast was an exercise in malarky: The Chick gives White
Hero a ream of artist's renderings of dinosaurs, to pinpoint
what he may have seen during his unnecessary Arctic nuclear
tests. From the ream of realistic renderings he pulls the
obvious cartoony one (done by a movie studio artist
on the quick&cheap) and The Old Paleontologist identifies
it with a laughable name as faux as its rendering –
a "rhedosaurus" ("rhedo" being Latin
for "bogus"?), though I'd be apt to question the
Paleo's credentials with the centerpiece of his lab being
a Glue-By-Numbers, anatomically-imbecilic sauropod skeleton
purchased from Wal-Mart.
Mandatory
running and screaming scenes lead to the mandatory military
stock footage, to the mandatory big-chested, all-white,
square-jawed Hero having unbridled access to all levels
of the military and police forces as if he was in
charge – and them obliging his every whim as if he
was. The top-level brass in both Army and Navy are
somehow always just a phone call away and eager beaver to
accommodate White Hero simply because he's the tallest and
whitest guy they know. (Albeit, this particular Hero has
some funky Euro accent sprinkling his American megalomania.)
White
Hero (in Harryhausen movies, who knows or cares what
the stars' names were?) determines a solution to the Beast
problem – i.e. how to KILL this wondrous organism.
It seems that there's only one paleontologist in the world
– and after he becomes brunch for The Beast (in a scene
which might have been more tragic were it not so illegitimately
verbose, with the Old Paleo in a diving bell, in the throes
of scientific discovery, spouting obliquities like, "the
clavicle suspension appears to be cantileveric" –
whatever you say, doc! – while the Beast bears down
on him), there is no one else to step forward (no zoological
organization, no Greenies, no special interest group) to
speak for this unique animal's Right-To-Life. So die it
must - in another staple of 50s cinema – The Fiery
Finale.
In
a final sequence so heart-stoppingly boring that test-audiences
couldn't answer their survey cards from being ASLEEP, White
Hero and a boyish Lee van Cleef (!) ride a roller-coaster
to the top of a trellis, to shoot a radioactive isotope
into the bloodstream of The Beast (don't ask), while hundreds
of troops stand watching like statues. If there was any
doubt they resembled statues, the director inserted many,
many cutaways back to them to remind us that yes,
they did indeed resemble statues. While The Beast frolics
innocently amidst the roller-coaster trellis, White Hero
and van Cleef, dressed as beekeepers, shoot it, then cautiously
– read as "tediously" - descend the trellis,
whilst the runaway roller-coaster crashes and starts the
aforementioned Grand Finale Fire. While the troops stand
like statues. Watching. While White Hero and van Cleef climb
down. Slowly. While the troops watch. While they climb.
Thankfully,
the inanimate humans in the film were overshadowed by the
cutaways of a backdrop ablaze with the roller-coaster trellis,
silhouetting The Beast roaring its long goodbye.
Troops
cheer. White Hero gets The Chick. But the real Hero
of the film was a man who scared the tit-willow out of those
boring humans with a plastic model no more than three feet
high – RAY HARRYHAUSEN.
END
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