Francisco Attacked! The Golden Gate Bridge De- stroyed!”, “Roman Rampage!”) smack a bit too much of early FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, but the overall tone of Hankin’s writing is a win- ning combination of the scholarly, the humorous and the obsessive.
As a chronicle of the films themselves, the book is faultless, and its decision to be a collection of definitive production articles rather than a critical biography is commendable. Hankin allows him- self room for the occasional evaluative comment, as when he notes that THE VALLEY OF GWANGI seems to be dating better than ONE MILLION YEARS, B.C., but his focus is ideally balanced be- tween process and product. The books include biographic information—such as Harryhausen’s 1962 marriage to Diana Livingstone and the sub- sequent birth of their daughter Vanessa in 1964, which roughly coincided with the death of his fa- ther, who had encouraged Harryhausen’s work to the point of assisting it—and they also chronicle the ongoing hopes and disapppointments of his career, but they don’t really aspire to the condi- tions of biography. Hankin admits early in VOL- UME 2 that the only skeletons he found in Harryhausen’s closet were posable. These were admittedly workaholic years for Harryhausen, much too busy and ambitious to allow for much adventure (or misadventure) outside the realm of work. One imagines that VOLUME 1, when it ap- pears, will necessarily be far more focused on the young man behind the stop-motion figures, and only time will tell how well this book will follow that one. Hankin is perfectly forthcoming about personal issues whenever they affect production— such as the time when 7TH VOYAGE director Nathan Juran’s “explosive” manner was directed at a script girl, resulting in the entire mortified Spanish crew’s refusal to assist him until he of- fered her a public apology. He also seizes upon an interesting opportunity to chronicle the earliest stirrings of Harryhausen fandom, including color photos of a visit by two early, unidentified fans to Harryhausen’s Malibu home, a testament to the artist’s down-to-earth accessability that fortunately preserves shots of some animation models before their foam rubber exteriors began to deteriorate. VOLUME 2’s last 70 pages, nearly a fourth of the book’s length, are reserved for appendices ranging from the necessary (synposes) to the cu- rious (double-bill information, sampled film reviews of the time), and from the completist (Harry- hausen’s history on home video) to the strangely gratuitous (glamour shots of Harryhausen’s female stars, mostly from non-Harryhausen films). There
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is also a Foreword by Jim Danforth, who returns at the end of the book as Hankin covers Danforth’s animation for producer Edward Small’s JACK THE GIANT KILLER (1962), a film closely patterned on 7TH VOYAGE not only in terms of its special ef- fects but its casting as well. If some of the book amounts to glossy padding, its overall handsome design, the quality of its photos and, especially, the high level of its scholarship makes the book well worth its original cost, perhaps even twice that figure—but the book is now impossible to find for less than $400. As impressive as VOLUME 2 is, VOLUME 3—cov- ering Harryhausen’s British films from THE THREE WORLDS OF GULLIVER (1960) to CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981, and thus encompassing such ma- jor works as MYSTERIOUS ISLAND [1961] and JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS [1963])—eclipses it in nearly every way. The doubled page count results in a noticeably thicker, heavier book, yet the paper stock is conspicuously thinner and the typeface is visibly smaller and more compacted. In addition to the expected chapters and appendi- ces, three pages of three-dimensional photos of various stop-motion figures are included, along with a single pair of anaglyphic 3D glasses. There is a Foreword by Caroline Munro and a Preface by Guillermo del Toro whose clarity and appreciation of the book’s achievement poses a challenge to anyone else attempting to write about it. Though VOLUME 2 is hard to fault for its depth of photographic coverage, the films made during the VOLUME 3 years were more thoroughly docu- mented, coming as they did after the major suc- cess of 7TH VOYAGE. The chapter on ONE MILLION YEARS, B.C. alone is an astounding bom- bardment of previously unpublished images, not only related to Harryhausen’s work but to Raquel Welch’s star-making presence in the picture. (The shots of her in her dressing room are priceless.) The text hits the ground running as a continua- tion of the story from VOLUME 2 and, with more participants available to pool their memories, the range of interviews is more extensive. This time around, the principal cast and crew members still receive an appendix covering their filmographies, but the actors in particular receive more detail within the chapters, in keeping with their higher status as talent but also preparing the reader for their recollections. Among the fascinating details unearthed for this stretch are cinematographer Wilkie Collins’ dissatisfaction with the color in MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, the manifestations of even- tually suicidal actor Nigel Green’s erratic moods on the set of JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, and
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