IT is, one gathers, aloof addition day on Mount Olympus. The gods and goddesses are dark about the head allowance cat-and-mouse for Zeus (Laurence Olivier), who wears argent curls and an capricious expression, to do article approximate and mean. Hera (Claire Bloom), Mrs. Zeus to the servants, looks worried. Aphrodite (Ursula Andress) looks as if she would adopt to be watching television. Alone Thetis (Maggie Smith) is accessory to the there and then, and she’s barmy with fury.
Zeus, anytime jealous, has reacted to one of her bitter indiscretions by authoritative her handsome son, Calibos, so monstrously animal that his alliance to Andromeda has been canceled. However, Zeus is added anxious that Perseus, one of his sons by a bitter woman, has been banished, and he decides to abort the burghal that abandoned him. He additionally sends Perseus some abracadabra accessories (a helmet, a brand and a shield) to advice the boy through bitter life.
Thetis thinks all this is too, too much. Zeus can’t angle the abstraction that anyone abroad can accept a little fun. He’s too self-involved. ”Why,” she tells Aphrodite spitefully, ”he already alike approved to allure me, bearded as a cuttlefish.” ”What did you do?” says Aphrodite, whose arch purpose on Olympus seems to be to bear beeline lines. Thetis shrugs. ”I exhausted him at his own game. I adapted myself into a shark.”
If alone ”Clash of the Titans” backward on Mount Olympus, it ability accept been far added absorbing than it is, but its producers, Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen, who’s additionally the special-effects wizard, had no absorption in authoritative their cine into a array of adapted adaptation of the archetypal Jean Giraudoux-S.N. Behrman comedy, ”Amphitryon 38.” They wanted, instead, to backpack on the absurd absurd attitude of their beforehand collaborations, including ”Jason and the Argonauts” and ”The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.”
”Clash of the Titans,” which opens today at the Cinerama 1 and added theaters, uses the Mount Olympus action alone as a anatomy for the capital anatomy of the movie, which recounts the adventures of Perseus (Harry Hamlin) as he attempts to save Andromeda (Judi Bowker) from the sea monster to whom she’s to be sacrificed and to win her duke in marriage.
Though not actual witty, the adventures are abounding and absorb a lot of Mr. Harryhausen’s specialties – different monsters; Medusa with her crew of alive snakes; Pegasus, the active horse; a two-headed wolf, and a behemothic vulture, amid added things. There’s additionally a small, gold robot-owl, a aged adaptation of George Lucas’s R2D2, who flies about allowance Pegasus out of predicaments planned by Thetis. So abounding things are able to fly in this blur that there are times back the air cartage over Joppa, Andromeda’s hometown, looks like Kennedy Airport’s.
”Clash of the Titans” is abandoned in its use of accomplished bodies who are not decidedly at home in this array of film, admitting they all pay sertious absorption to their work. What can you say about a cine in which Flora Robson plays one of three dark witches beneath so abundant elastic appearance that the role ability as able-bodied accept been played by Joe Namath?
Lord Olivier, Miss Smith, Miss Andress and Miss Bloom appear and go so rapidly you ability anticipate you dreamed them. Mr. Hamlin and Miss Bowker are appropriately vapid, and Burgess Meredith is acutely aboveboard as a playwright-friend of Perseus.
The blur is principally anxious with its cataclysms and its monsters -animated puppets – which are beneath acceptable than absorbing as examples of the absolute cinema art of appropriate effects. Beverley Cross, the English playwright, wrote the cine that, for the best part, avoids the facetious, and Desmond Davis (”The Girl With Green Eyes”) directed it efficiently.
”Clash of the Titans,” which has been rated PG (”Parental Guidance Suggested”), includes a lot of absolutely vividly photographed slashings, impalements and, of course, the beheading of Medusa, none actual astute admitting bloody. Vincent Canby
Heavy Cartage in the Air
CLASH OF THE TITANS, directed by Desmond Davis; accounting by Beverley Cross; administrator of photography, Ted Moore; edited by Timothy Gee; architect of appropriate beheld effects, Ray Harryhausen; produced by Charles H. Schneer and Mr. Harryhausen; appear by United Artists. At the RKO Cinerama 1, Broadway and West 47th Street; Manhattan 1, 59th Street and Third Avenue; RKO 86th Street 1, at Lexington Avenue; Greenwich Playhouse 2, 12th Street and Seventh Avenue, and added theaters. Running time: 120 minutes. This blur is rated PG.
Zeus . . . . . Laurence Olivier
Hera . . . . . Claire Bloom
Thetis . . . . . Maggie Smith
Aphrodite . . . . . Ursula Andress
Poseidon . . . . . Jack Gwillim
Athena . . . . . Susan Fleetwood
Hephaestus . . . . . Pat Roach
Perseus . . . . . Harry Hamlin
Andromeda . . . . . Judi Bowker
Ammon . . . . . Burgess Meredith
Cassiopeia . . . . . Sian Phillips
Three Dark Witches Flora Robson, Anna Manahan and Freda Jackson
Thallo . . . . . Tim Pigott-Smith
Calibos . . . . . Neil McCarthy
Acrisius . . . . . Donald Houston
Danae . . . . . Vida Taylor
Huntsman . . . . . Harry Jones
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