Mysterious Island

Mysterious Island, another Schneer/Harryhausen production, was very loosely based on Jules Verne's novel of adventure The Mysterious Island (L'Île mystérieuse in the original French). In the transition to the big screen a lot more than the definite article was lost - unsurprising, considering that the book runs to over seven hundred pages in its unexpurgated form. Being a Ray Harryhausen picture, a lot had to be added in the form of marvellous creatures: a giant bee, an outsized crab, a prehistoric chicken and a mammoth octopus - all animated through the miracle of Dynamation. Herrmann's music helped to bring these clay models to life, and his monumental piece "Escape to the Clouds", which underscored a lengthy hot air balloon flight through a storm, was so Wagnerian in scale that it easily diverted attention from some obvious model work. Another set piece was the music for "The Giant Crab", a crashing battle of horns, strings, wind and cymbals that imitated the spidery gait of the creature. A piece that manages to be terrifying and funny at the same time is "The Phorarhacos", a madcap fugue that accompanies the appearance and slaying of a giant bird. For the underwater sequences featuring Captain Nemo (this time played by Herbert Lom with his ingenious conch shell breathing apparatus) Herrmann used the same techniques that had served him well on Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef. The cue titles I've given come from the Cloud Nine release of excerpts from the original soundtrack (ACN 7017). The complete score - at just over seventy minutes - is available on Tribute Film Classics (TFC-1001), and, as the catalogue number suggests, it was the label's very first release.