Clash Of The Titans Marked The End Of An Era In Filmmaking
Ray Harryhausen’s magnum opus came out just as the tide shift for stop-motion effects was taking place in Hollywood.
The 1981 film Clash of the Titans marked the final on-screen work of stop-motion visual effects legend Ray Harryhausen. Launching his career in 1949 on the giant ape movie Mighty Joe Young, under the tutelage of pioneering model animator Willis O’Brien (King Kong), the Los Angeles-born Harryhausen forged a career that made him one of the most influential visual effects artists of all time. His efforts brought an array of fantastical creatures to life in sci-fi and fantasy classics like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Jason and the Argonauts (arguably his masterpiece).
Clash of the Titans, which premiered on June 12, 1981, was meant to be Harryhausen’s magnum opus. His longtime producing partner Charles H. Schneer secured a reported budget of $10-15 million (a large sum for the time) for the adaptation of the Greek myth of Perseus, as well as acclaimed British actors like Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, and Claire Bloom to portray the deities Zeus, Thetis, and Hera respectively. The relatively unknown Harry Hamlin was cast as Perseus, while Harryhausen’s stop-motion creations for the film included the winged horse Pegasus, the man-turned-monster Calibos (also played in heavy prosthetics by Neil McCarthy), a two-headed dog, a pair of oversized scorpions, Medusa the Gorgon, and the gigantic Kraken.
Even though Clash was directed by Desmond Davis, it’s Harryhausen’s film through and through. For a long stretch of time, the movies on which he sprinkled his stop-motion magic represented the gold standard in fantasy and sci-fi filmmaking wizardry. Plenty of fans of a certain age — among them people with last names like Spielberg, Cameron, Lucas, Burton, and Jackson — watched his films in slack-jawed wonder and marveled at the (literally) hand-crafted way in which he brought monsters to life straight out of pulp sci-fi and ancient myths.
By the time Clash was completed and released in June 1981, however, the tide in Hollywood was turning: the visuals that had turned Harryhausen projects like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and One Million Years B.C. into fantasy classics were being overtaken by the likes of Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Alien, with The Thing, Blade Runner, and Tron still to come — many of these films, ironically, created by filmmakers on whom Harryhausen’s work had the greatest impact.
It didn’t help that Harryhausen’s projects — because he did all the stop-motion work himself, largely alone — took so long to assemble: Clash was only the third project he and Schneer completed since 1969. Both the times and filmmaking had changed remarkably in the intervening decade: Ostensibly a family film, Clash of the Titans even included a brief bit of (non-sexual) nudity. Yet Clash did relatively well at the box office, earning a then-impressive $70 million worldwide. That was good enough for No. 11 on that year’s list of highest-grossing films, while critics were generally kind, if mixed, in their reactions.
At the same time, there’s no getting around the fact that compared to the genre blockbusters it was competing against, Clash seemed almost impossibly quaint. While shooting on location in Italy, Spain, Malta, and other locations gave the film some needed scope, the sword-and-sandal genre was more or less moribund. Hamlin and Judi Bowker as love interest Andromeda are largely wooden (although Hamlin handles the action well), while the Brits play to the cheap seats. The most delightful presence is American actor Burgess Meredith — better known as the Penguin from the 1960s Batman TV series — as poet (and exposition officer) Ammon.
One of the many stop-motion monsters Harryhausen crafted for the movie.
The first hour of the film is slow, with Davis only picking up the pace for the admittedly exciting last 40 minutes or so as Harryhausen rolls out his big guns. And while the latter comes up with some fantastic creatures as usual, even those scenes suffer by comparison. Matte lines and layers of compositing are clearly and often painfully visible in a number of scenes. Yet the Kraken is an inspired creation, and the scene in which Perseus battles Medusa — he using reflective surfaces to avoid looking directly into her eyes, she a truly nightmarish demon with a serpent’s body and snakes for hair — is the film’s best example of both Harryhausen’s skills at their finest and Davis stepping up to craft a genuinely suspenseful sequence.
Yet Harryhausen himself seemed to know that the torch was passing, and retired shortly after his work on Clash was finished. As he wrote in his memoir, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, “(With) the knowledge that I was losing precious control of solo animation, I was forced to concede that it was time to stand aside for others and their new technology to take over.”
Stop-motion animation continued to be used sparingly in live-action genre movies after Harryhausen left the scene, and has even experienced a resurgence in full-blown animated features, thanks to the efforts of companies like Aardman and filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Henry Selick, and Tim Burton. There is something about the tactile nature of a hand-sculpted and painted stop-motion model that cannot be replaced by all the CG trickery in the world (as proven by this film’s soulless 2010 remake). Yet Clash of the Titans became the swan song for an artist whose imagination, sense of wonder, and artistry brought myths and monsters to the screen and inspired entire generations of moviegoers — including the very filmmakers who would take over the industry in his wake.
