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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Filed under: Imported

Original French poster for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, 1958

Once again, our last quiz proved to be much tougher than I thought it would be. (Have I proven sufficiently by now that I don't have the slightest idea how these quizzes will go over?) Perhaps there would have been more winners if I'd mentioned that the composer of the music in question also wrote the scores for what most film buffs consider Hitchcock's and Welles's best pictures. And it would have been all but giving it away to have mentioned that the real genius responsible for the movie learned his craft in part by working with the man who brought King Kong to life.

But I didn't give any clues, so only three intrepid readers knew that the beautiful music was composed by Bernard Herrmann and that it was from Ray Harryhausen's masterpiece, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, starring Kerwin Mathews as the titular hero. It's a tribute to Harryhausen's animation that, 45 years and quantum leaps in technology later, the movie still seems magical, at least to those of us who were lucky enough to see it in childhood. The story moves very fast and the performances are both straight-faced and funny (Torin Thatcher is especially splendid as the evil magician Sokurah).

Anyone who's seen it will attest, however, it's Harryhausen's creations that are the real stars. There was the double-headed roc, seen here right after it hatched:

The sword-fighting skeleton (the precursor to the team of battling bone-bags in Harryhausen's almost equally great Jason and the Argonauts):

And everyone's favorite, the Cyclops, seen here in the movie's climactic death-battle with Harryhausen's magnificent dragon:

So congratulations to our three experts: Hank Parmer, Wayne A. Palmer and Mike Hardenbrook. (Mr. Parmer earns extra points by pointing us all to a nice bio of Bernard Herrmann.) And to everyone else, do yourself a favor this holiday season and skip the current kid-crap that Hollywood's spewing and treat the children around you to a screening of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad-- they'll remember it long after the latest Seuss desecration has been forgotten.

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 24, 2003 3:16 PM

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