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CLASH OF THE TITANS
Rating: 
USA. 1981.
Director – Desmond Davis, Screenplay – Beverley Cross, Producers – Ray Harryhausen & Charles H. Schneer, Photography – Ted Moore, Music – Lawrence Rosenthal, Stop Motion Animation – Ray Harryhausen, Special Effects – Colin Chilvers, David Knowles & Brian Smithies, Art Direction – Frank White. Production Company – MGM.
Cast:
Harry Hamlin (Perseus), Judi Bowker (Andromeda), Laurence Olivier (Zeus), Burgess Meredith (Ammon), Maggie Smith (Thetis), Claire Bloom (Hera), Neil McCarthy (Calibos), Sian Phillips (Cassiopeia), Susan Fleetwood (Athena), Jack Gwillim (Poseidon), Tim Piggott-Smith (Thallo)
Plot: The god Zeus gives birth to a son Perseus by a mortal woman. The goddess Hera is angered when Zeus punishes her mortal son Calibos with deformity and retaliates by transporting Perseus far away from his home to Joppur. There Perseus falls for the beautiful Princess Andromeda, the former betrothed of Calibos. However to become a suitor he must solve a riddle that Andromeda gives, or join all other failed suitors and be burned at the stake, a curse that has been placed on Andromeda by Calibos. Using a helmet of invisibility and a captured Pegasus, Perseus follows Andromeda’s sleeping doppelganger to the marshlands where Calibos lives and overhears as she receives the current riddle Calibos gives, and returns to successfully answer it. Their marriage is announced. But when Andromeda’s mother Cassiopeia foolishly boasts that Andromeda’s beauty surpasses that of the goddess Thetis herself, the wrathful Thetis appears, demanding the sacrifice of Andromeda within 30 days or else she will loose the Kraken on the city. And so Perseus must set out on a quest to find a means of destroying the Kraken.
In the 1950s and 60s stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen was the equivalent of what Industrial Light and Magic are today. Ray Harryhausen became a cult figure with stop-motion animated vehicles such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), One Million Years B.C. (1966) and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973). Harryhausen’s creations of mythical creatures and use of stop-motion animation was unparalleled. But sadly beyond the mid-1970s Harryhausen’s work did not age well. The resurgence of fantasy with Star Wars (1977) eclipsed and overshadowed Harryhausen. Clash of the Titans was Harryhausen’s only attempt to make a film in the post-Star Wars era. Certainly the influence of Star Wars on Clash of the Titans is undeniable – most notably in the character of the mechanical owl Bubo, which has been all but outrightly stolen from R2D2. Clash of the Titans was also the biggest budgeted of Ray Harryhausen’s films, something that allows him to bring in a name cast from the British film industry to play the immortals – although most of these have more marquee value than they do actual screen time, with Ursula Andress getting a total of two lines, for example.
Clash of the Titans was a return to the Greek mythological adventure that Harryhausen so successful conducted in Jason and the Argonauts – and to such extent Harryhausen has brought back his Jason scripwriter Beverly Cross. Clash of the Titans was a modest success when it came out, unfortunately Harryhausen has not adjusted to the type of filmmaking of the post-Star Wars era. Ray Harryhausen’s films belonged to the type of 1950s historical spectacle that specialized in rather stagey historical surroundings, stolid actors and characters, and where the whole appeal of these films was the spectacle of Harryhausen’s special effects creations. The new era only tends to show up these dramatic deficiencies. The period dialogue is rather stilted. And more importantly Clash of the Titans is not great Harryhausen. The effects creations are not that great – there are no standouts sequences such as the skeleton fights in 7th Voyage and Jason, or the Kali duel in Golden Voyage. The one brief exception is the encounter with the Medusa, which is directed with fine suspense and atmosphere.
And on a wider level Harryhausen’s special effects have not dated that well. There are grainy matte plates and obvious cuts between actor and model, between white horse and stop motion animated pegasus. This is most obvious in the scenes with the troupe fighting a horde of giant-sized scorpions. The stop-motion animation of the tauntauns and the Imperial Walkers in the previous year’s The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is far superior to anything Harryhausen conducted here, even though Harryhausen was a thirty year veteran in the field and Industrial light and Magic were the relative newcomers. The same year as Clash of the Titans, ILM also provided the effects for the stunning Dragonslayer (1981), wherein they devised a new form of stop-motion animation called Go-Motion. Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion techniques relied on a model making one movement per frame resulting in the characteristic jerky gait familiar to stop-motion animation, whereas Go-Motion had a model making multiple movements per frame resulting in much more fluid form. Although Clash of the Titans was a much greater success than Dragonslayer at the box-office, Go-Motion paved the way for the future. And of course with the arrival of CGI in the 1990s, stop-motion animation became an almost entirely obsolete form of filmmaking. In 1982, Harryhausen announced plans for a new stop-motion animation film called Force of the Trojans but in the end he instead announced his retirement and Clash of the Titans was his last film.
A remake has been announced with Clash of the Titans (2010).
Ray Harryhausen’s other films are: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the granddaddy of all atomic monster films; the giant atomic octopus film It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955); the alien invader film Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956); the alien monster film 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957); The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958); The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960); the Jules Verne adaptation Mysterious Island (1961); the Greek myth adventure Jason and the Argonauts (1963); the H.G. Wells adaptation The First Men in the Moon (1964); the caveman vs dinosaurs epic One Million Years B.C. (1966); the dinosaur film The Valley of Gwangi (1969); and the two Sinbad sequels The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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