The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was the first of  four films that Herrmann would score for producer Charles Schneer - the other three were The Three Worlds of Gulliver, Mysterious Island, and Jason and the Argonauts. Nobody calls these movies Charles Schneer pictures - they call them after the name of their special effects supervisor, Ray Harryhausen.

The wizard of Dynamation became fascinated by the possibilities of fantasy cinema when, as a young boy, he saw the original King Kong. Like Steven Spielberg and Perter Jackson (both of whom cite his influence on their own work), Harryhausen spent his boyhood experimenting with film, making animated shorts in his father's garage. He honed his skills in the Army Motion Picture Unit during the war under the command of film director turned colonel Frank Capra. His first major Hollywood project was Mighty Joe Young, the story of a giant ape, and he followed this with The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms, which was about a beast from twenty thousand fathoms.

Both these pictures were shot in black and white, but by the end of the Fifties Harryhausen had graduated to colour, a decision which would present him with all new kinds of technical challenges. Rather than continue making movies about monsters in the real world, Harryhausen looked to ancient legend for his first colour feature. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was the first of three Sinbad movies that Harryhausen would make over a period of almost twenty years, but, sadly, it was the only one that would be scored by Herrmann (the other two went to Miklos Rosza and Roy Budd).

Herrmann explained his approach to the project in the liner notes for The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann (B000000IUQ). "The music I composed had to reflect a purity and simplicity that could be easily assimilated to the nature of the fantasy being viewed. By characterizing the various creatures with unusual instrument combinations ... and by composing motifs for all the major characters and actions, I feel I was able to envelop the entire movie in a shroud of mystical innocence."  

The film's main title sequence - a tapestry of marvellous images and fabulous creatures - is scored with an Oriental-style overture, which contains the kernel of the love theme that Herrmann would later develop for Hitchcock's Marnie. This segues into a moody dirge ("The Fog") - reminiscent of the opening of Rachmaninoff's The Isle of the Dead - as Sinbad's ship appears out of the night. I sometimes put this cue on repeat and listen to it over and over again. The score is like a treasure chest, overflowing with soft pearls ("The Princess") and glittering diamonds ("The Egg"). It also has its fair share of sturm und drang in the music for the Cyclops, the Roc, and the Dragon. A duel between Sinbad and a grinning skeleton is given a frantic xylophone scherzo, which - on the original soundtrack, at least - is played at a breakneck speed.

I have two versions of the score: the original soundtrack on the Soundtrack Library (CD 62), which I think is a bootleg; and the Varese Sarabande re-recording by John Debney (VSD-5961), which came in for a lot of stick from Herrmann purists for taking some of the cues at too slow a tempo. There's no pleasing the Herrmann purists. In the interests of fairness, I've just played the two discs back to back, and I have to say that I prefer the Debney.