Clash of the Titans

 

Released in 1981 after a difficult production history, Clash of the Titans was famously the swansong of visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, who retired from filmmaking shortly after he finished it.  Already in his sixties, it is likely that the advent of Star Wars and the new age of special effects had shown him which way the wind was blowing, and that his kind of small-scale monster picture would not survive the new era that was coming.

It was a good way to bow out, as Clash is the most lavishly produced Harryhausen film, and boasted the biggest budget he’d ever worked with.  He created a huge cast of monsters for the movie, from the humanoid Calibos to the winged Pegasus, from the mesmerizingly terrifying Medusa to the towering, city-flattening Kraken.  It is also the film in his ouvre that has most in common with Sword & Sorcery, and displays more grit, horror, and violence than any of the other, more kid-friendly movies in the Harryhausen history.

The original script was apparently much more pulpy, with the Kraken ripping Pegasus into bloody pieces at the end, and Andromeda spending a lot of time naked.  As it is, there is still quite a bit of pulp DNA in this, with some casual nudity and some quite graphic violence.  Between Calibos getting his hand chopped off, the soldiers’ gruesome deaths at the stingers of the giant scorpions, Medusa’s bloody decapitation, and the butchery of her two-headed guard dog, there is a good bit of gore to be found, certainly out of bounds from what one expected from a Harryhausen movie.  The film opens with King Acrisius putting his daughter and her infant son in a coffin and casting it out to sea while she wails and begs for her life, followed shortly by the complete destruction of the city of Argos.  It’s actually pretty intense.

The cast is famously star-studded, with both big names and some that would go on to greater notoriety later.  Lawrence Olivier may have been phoning it in with laser Floyd lights behind his head, but his natural gravitas and authority made him the perfect Zeus.  The gods are rounded out by other well-known names like Ursula Andress, Pat Roach, Claire Bloom, and Maggie Smith as the antagonist, Thetis.  Sian Phillips does a lot with a small part as Queen Cassiopeia, and Judi Bowker adds some spark to the bland princess role.  Harry Hamlin as Perseus is good-looking, but comes across as rather dim, and he’s not that good an actor, being totally upstaged by Burgess Meredith as his funny sidekick.

In Sword & Sorcery the gods are always either distant and unknowable, or they are monsters from some ancient epoch when mankind was cattle.  In Clash the gods are – as in the genuine epics – very much present in the narrative.  They talk to the hero and villain, they take sides, they grant favors and send gifts.  What keeps this from turning into a moral axis that would be more reminiscent of High Fantasy is that the Greek pantheon were never paragons of virtue.  The gods were just very much like people with their passions writ large.  The whole story starts because Zeus couldn’t keep it in his pants, and the rivalry between Perseus and Calibos is fueled by them both being the semidivine children of gods, favored by their parents.

There’s nothing inherently opposed to S&S with this idea, as there is never a sense that Perseus is engaged in some kind of holy crusade.  He is caught up in a very personal struggle to save the woman he loves and defeat the subhuman monstrosity who has cursed her and the city she will someday rule.  That he is aided by Zeus, his father, while Calibos is aided by his mother Thetis makes it seem more like a war by proxy, with the divine parents using their children as agents to fight each other.

But Perseus is saved as a hero figure because he does not get everything given to him by his dad.  He takes actions that he decides on himself, and which take courage and involve great danger.  Nobody told him he had to tame Pegasus, consult cannibal witches, or do battle with the Kraken – those are all things he decides to do himself, he just gets some help along the way.  At the end, when he rides across seemingly half the Levant to face the Kraken, he gets just the tiniest nudge from Zeus to help him along.

This isn’t really a Sword & Sorcery film, because the characters are drawn too broadly, and too easily divided into good guys and bad guys.  But the crazy, overheated landscape of monsters and curses, bloody burnings and beheadings, and of everything being at the whim of capricious, vindictive gods is something that could definitely be made to work.  Almost 30 years later Hollywood decided this needed a remake and, unfortunately, we will get to that one next.