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THE 3 WORLDS OF GULLIVER
Rating: 
USA. 1960.
Director – Jack Sher, Screenplay – Jack Sher & Arthur Ross, Based on the Novel Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Producer – Charles H. Schneer, Photography – Wilkie Cooper, Music – Bernard Herrmann, Visual Effects Supervisor – Ray Harryhausen, Art Direction – Derek Barrington & Gil Parrendo. Production Company – Morningside Productions.
Cast:
Kerwin Mathews (Dr Lemuel Gulliver), June Thorburn (Elizabeth Wesley), Sherri Alberoni (Glumdalclitch), Gregoire Aslan (King Brobdignag), Lee Patterson (Reldresal), Basil Sydney (Emperor), Charles Lloyd Pack (Makovan), Martin Benson (Flimnap), Marian Spencer (Empress), Mary Ellis (Queen), Jo Morrow (Gwendolyn Bermogg), Peter Bull (Lord Bermogg)
Plot: In 1699 Lemuel Gulliver takes a job at sea because he cannot earn enough money as a doctor. His fiancée Elizabeth stows away with him. But he is washed away during a storm and finds himself in the land of Lilliput where he is a giant compared to the tiny Lilliputians. But he is seen as a pawn in the Emperor’s war with the neighbouring Blefuscu, which is being fought over whether people should cut open their eggs from the top or the bottom. Gulliver then sails on to the land of Brobdignag where he is now tiny and the natives are giants. There he is reunited with Elizabeth and both become a source of great fascination to the royal court. But then the advisor Makovan seeks to have Gulliver tried as a witch.
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver was the second English-language film made of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The film reiterates the popular misapprehension that Swift wrote the original as a children’s book. Swift’s original story is filled with biting satire and a quite bawdy writing style. This version plays it as a simple fabulist adventure where the hero is alternately a giant and then a little person. Like most other film versions, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver also only tells half the Swift book. The book comprises of five journeys – the well known ventures through the lands of Lilliput and Brobdignag, but with other two sections, the journeys to the floating island of Laputa, inhabited by mad scientists, and the lands of the Houyhnhnms, inhabited by intelligent horses, usually being thrown out.
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver was made by cult stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen and his producer Charles H. Schneer, who had both just come from the enormous success of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). They cast the story as the same type of Cinemascope epic that The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was. But the Swiftian satire doesn’t quite sit at ease with this. Kerwin Mathews, who was also Sinbad in 7th Voyage, is clearly miscast as Gulliver – he is all wooden heroics whereas Gulliver is really a role that requires something more in the way of intellectual prowess. Nevertheless, despite its scaling up as a big screen adventure, the film allows some of Jonathan Swift’s social absurdities to show through. The pomposities of the Lilliputians and the Brobdignagians do come across with a certain jolly amusement. At its worst – as in the scenes with the Lilliputian ministers – the film descends to clumsy lowbrow clowning, but these aren’t too many.
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver is celebrated as part of the great Harryhausen canon but surprisingly in this regard Harryhausen’s work does not really feature that much. He only animates (not very well) a gopher and (extremely well) a giant crocodile. But these creations are relatively minor and not the focus of the story – indeed for once the story is enough to stand on its own rather than merely as a showcase of Harryhausen’s effects. The effects work that allows Gulliver to be tied down, to sit at a table as miniature pigs are winched up to him in on a pulley, his towing the Blefuscu ships over his shoulder and the like are all excellent. And frequent Harryhausen collaborator Bernard Herrmann delivers another fine score.
Other versions of Gulliver’s Travels are:– Max Fleischer’s animated version Gulliver’s Travels (1939); Gulliver’s Travels (1977), a partially animated Belgian version starring Richard Harris; and Gulliver’s Travels (1995), a tv mini-series starring Ted Danson, the finest and most faithful of the adaptations and the only one to cover the whole of the book.
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 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); the two Sinbad sequels The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977); and the Greek myth adventure Clash of the Titans (1981).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1995
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