In my previous Shuker In MovieLand post (click here to read it), I revealed how on 19 April 2021, following years of unsuccessful searching online, I finally discovered which movie contained some very striking chevron-headed monsters and gigantic hell hounds that I'd recalled seeing a long time ago in a film clip on YouTube. The movie was Almighty Thor, which I later watched on DVD and have now reviewed here. However, this was a very fortuitous, serendipitous discovery, because on that particular occasion I was actually searching for a totally different yet equally mystifying movie that once again I recalled seeing a clip of on YT several years earlier but whose identity I'd once again been unable to uncover. All I knew about it was that it was an Arabian Nights-type film that featured a very distinctive magical bird with the head of a woman, which I remembered very clearly from the YT film clip that I'd viewed.
Consequently when on 19 April 2021, brimming with delight at finally identifying Almighty Thor, I posted some details about it on my Facebook timeline page, I also added a brief mention of the Arabian Nights mystery movie with the woman-headed bird, in the hope that it may sound familiar to someone else. And sure enough, only a little later on that very same day, FB friend Richard Hing posted a comment beneath mine, in which he conclusively identified the latter film – thanks Richard!
It turned out to be The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, an English-dubbed version of a Russian movie originally released a decade earlier with the title Sadko – a movie that, ironically, has precious little to do with either Sinbad or the Arabian Nights, as I discovered to my surprise after tracking down and watching both versions as well as reading about their odd history. All will now be revealed.
Directed by Aleksandr Ptushko, produced by Mosfilm, and released with English subtitles in the USA by Artkino Pictures in 1953, Sadko was adapted by Konstantin Isayev from the famous Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's 1898 opera Sadko. This in turn had been based upon a bylina (a medieval Russian oral epic poem) of the same title.
The movie Sadko tells of its namesake (played by Sergei Stolyarov), a noble medieval mariner and musician from the Russian city of Novgorod, who has been away for some years but has now returned to Novgorod, only to discover to his horror that during his absence the city's ordinary folk have become so poor that many are starving, or have been forced to sacrifice themselves into slavery in order to survive. Meanwhile, the rich merchants have become ever more wealthy and disparaging to the poor ordinary folk, treating them with disdain and mockery, and deliberately flaunting their money and resplendent clothes. Sadko entreats the merchants to be kind to the poor people, to give them money and make everyone in Novgorod happy, but they laugh in his face, dismissing him as a fool, a simpleton.
As well as being an experienced sailor, however, Sadko is also a skilled singer and player of a zither-like musical instrument called a gusil, which originated in Novgorod. One night, sitting alone beside a lake, he plays his gusil and sings a beautiful ballad so sweetly that he enchants the youngest daughter of the great Sea King, who rises up from the lake and promises to help him persuade the merchants to give money, food, and clothing to Novgorod's poor people.
The sea princess (Ninel Myshkova) tells Sadko to go into town the following morning and challenge the merchants to a wager – if he should succeed in netting some magical golden fishes before the end of that same day, they must give the poor people their riches. This Sadko does, and with the princess's unseen underwater assistance he nets three golden fishes before sundown, forcing the merchants to honour their pledge. But Sadko is shocked to find that even when they do, there are simply too many poor people in Novogorod for all of them to be adequately fed, clothed, and rendered truly happy.
Consequently, Sadko announces that he plans to set sail on an epic voyage to far-off lands in search of a fabled creature known as the Bird of Happiness, which he will capture and return with to Novgorod so that everyone's sadness there will be vanquished forever. Unfortunately, however, such a voyage will cost a great deal of money, far more than Sadko possesses, but once again the sea princess comes to his aid, by transforming the three golden fishes netted by him into a huge pile of gold!
Now a very rich man, Sadko with three newly-acquired ships and their personally-selected crews duly sets forth on his quest for the Bird of Happiness, but during their first landing in search of it, on a rocky, wind-swept island, they encounter a belligerent band of weapon-brandishing Viking warriors. However, Sadko and his men bravely confront these attackers, and eventually achieve victory. They also capture a beautiful horse that the Vikings have left behind, so they take it with them when they continue their search elsewhere for the Bird of Happiness, having correctly decided that such a heavenly creature couldn't possibly exist in such a hellish land as this Viking-infested island.
Eventually Sadko and company reach India, where the bird is said to be securely housed in the uppermost, golden-hued tower of a heavily-fortified palace owned by a despotic Indian prince and protected by a thousand guards. But despite encountering initial hostility from the prince, Sadko finally extracts a promise from him that he and his men can freely take the Bird of Happiness back home to Russia with them if he beats the prince at a game of chess. If he loses, however, the prince will receive the beautiful Viking horse. Sadko agrees to this proposition, and wins the chess game, so the prince shows them a pair of enormous doors inside the very heart of the palace that open to reveal a hidden passageway leading up via a steep series of steps to the golden tower's chamber in which the wondrous bird resides.
Once Sadko and three of his men are inside the passageway, however, the huge doors close behind them, exactly as the treacherous prince had planned. With no backward exit from the passageway now available to them, therefore, nor any other option other than to continue their journey forward through it, Sadko and his comrades duly clamber upwards until they finally enter the tower's secluded chamber – and there, at last, they encounter the Bird of Happiness…except that it's not!
Instead, it proves to be a sirin, a creature from Russian mythology but derived directly from the sirens of classical Greek legends. For whereas it sports the body of a large bird regally adorned with shimmering green plumage, its head is that of a woman, wearing not only a glittering crown but also an imperious, perpetual scowl on her haughty, disdainful face – not an expression that I'd expect any authentic Bird of Happiness to be wearing, that's for sure!
The sirin also possesses the malign power to lull swiftly into deep, eternal sleep anyone who hears her soporific chant-like singing, which she attempts to accomplish with Sadko and his three companions, but Sadko is sufficiently strong-willed to resist her deadly lullaby and is able to awaken the others, who have indeed fallen asleep. Although he now realises that this evil creature is not the Bird of Happiness, Sadko decides to take her with them anyway, so he encloses her inside a large sack – a decision that soon proves very propitious. For when they successfully escape from the chamber with this magical bird, and are pursued by the prince's numerous guards, by plucking out a couple of her tail feathers Sadko and his men force the sullen sirin to sing, and all of the guards fall to the ground, fast asleep (Sadko & Co have presumably blocked their own ears to avoid suffering the same somnolent fate!).
After sailing onward to other exotic locations in search of the real Bird of Happiness, including Egypt (and where, bizarrely, the Pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza are on the coast!), but always without success, a homesick Sadko decides to seek his feathered quarry no longer, and to journey back to Russia instead, but that is by no means the end of his adventures. For during some very stormy weather at sea, their three ships are in imminent danger of capsizing, so Sadko sacrifices himself to the sea gods by throwing himself overboard in the hope that they will bestow calm weather upon his ships and their crews in return. Instead of dying, however, he finds himself on the ocean bottom, where he miraculously survives without drowning and makes the acquaintance of the elderly Sea King (Mikhail Troyanovsky). However, the king promptly forces Sadko to select one of his many princess daughters as his bride, because he is anxious for Sadko to take over as ruler of the undersea world once he has died.
Sadko chooses the king's youngest daughter, as she turns out to be the princess who had earlier helped him net the magical golden fishes and transform them into gold, but he cannot love her as he is already betrothed to a fair maiden named Lyubava (Alla Larionova) waiting for him in Novgorod and whom he truly loves. The king is not best pleased about this, but despite her own profound sadness and love for him the princess helps Sadko to escape – fleeing upon a very speedy hippocampus (giant sea horse) from the pursuing Sea King, and returning home to Novgorod both a hero to its people and a man of independent means, thanks to the remainder of the transmuted fish-into-gold that he still owns. So is that the end of the movie? Not quite…
The movie closes with Sadko very belatedly experiencing an epiphany of sorts, comparable with that of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz – informing his fellow noble Novgorodians that in fact they don't actually need a Bird of Happiness from a far-flung land to bring happiness to them after all. For in reality, Sadko goes on to state, it is here, within their own homes, where true happiness exists – or, as Dorothy would more succinctly say, there's no place like home. What a pity that he didn't extract this pearl of wisdom from his oyster-shell brain before launching his exceedingly arduous sea-quest! Who'd be the long-suffering crew members of an even longer sea voyage led by such a flighty bird-brain? (And I don't mean the sirin either!)
Nowadays widely deemed (and rightly so) to be a cinematic masterpiece, Sadko is a beautifully shot movie, the vibrant colours of its magnificent sets rivaling those of an American Technicolor film, and the undersea sequences are both highly imaginative and exquisitely staged, especially for that time period. True, the characters are two-dimensional stereotypes rather than three-dimensional individuals – Sadko is indefatigably noble, cheerful, handsome, and brave, the sea princess is unwaveringly demure, loving, beautiful, and self-sacrificing, and so forth. But as someone who has seen all too many modern-day fantasy movies in which the principal characters have been invested by the script writers with all manner of 'issues' and troubled back-stories that were conspicuous only by their absence in the original folkloric source material, it was actually very refreshing to encounter here some characters that simply played their parts in an uncomplicated, unburdened manner, exactly as presented in the original medieval Russian fairy story.
Also needing a serious mention here is this movie's exquisite musical score, appropriated very extensively but effectively from Rimsky-Korsakov's opera, to yield a sizeable number of melodious songs and energetic dances that make it a bona fide musical film, and with the hypnotic 'Song of India' accompanying the somniferous sirin's first appearance being a particularly inspired choice. Speaking of which: the sirin is indeed the woman-headed bird that I remembered so well from the film clip I'd viewed all those years ago on YouTube, and is a visual highlight of this film.
That, then, is Sadko, the original 1953 Russian movie featuring a medieval Russian singer-sailor travelling to India and elsewhere in search of an elusive Bird of Happiness but encountering a creepy sleep-inducing woman-headed bird from Russian folklore instead. So how did this same film later come to feature Sinbad and an Arabian Nights setting? I'm glad you asked!
The year 1958 saw the release of the smash-hit Columbia Pictures Hollywood film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the first in a now-classic trio of Sinbad-entitled fantasy movies in which the eponymous Arabian Nights sailor pits his wits against a plethora of spectacular monsters of the stop-motion Dynamation variety created by special-effects genius Ray Harryhausen.
Mindful of how successful it was, and mindful also of Sadko, American film director Roger Corman had the novel idea of acquiring the latter's rights and converting it into a Sinbad movie, which he duly did, retitling it as The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, providing it with English dubbing, and releasing it in 1962 through his own company The Filmgroup.
Corman achieved this ostensibly unlikely movie plot conversion by employing a certain youngster named Francis Ford Coppola to adapt (uncredited) the script of Sadko accordingly in a number of ingenious ways. Firstly, despite the fact that all of the characters in medieval Novgorod were, naturally, dressed in medieval Russian attire, Novgorod was recast as a city beyond Arabia and renamed Kobasan (vt Copasand in some coverages), home of Sinbad. Speaking of whom: Sadko was renamed Sinbad, and a vocal narration was added that opened the movie with a back-story for Sinbad, and which even referred to his adventures in the earlier, afore-mentioned Harryhausen film (though not actually mentioning the latter film by name). Quite a few other place-names and character names were changed too, to ones in accordance with a Middle Eastern setting, and even Sadko's gusil was now reimagined as a magical harp owned by Sinbad.
The movie's basic storyline remained the same (albeit with Soviet Communist propaganda present in Sadko mostly deleted from it here), but the Bird of Happiness was now the phoenix – even though none of the phoenix's most famous attributes, such as burning itself alive in its conflagrating nest, and being reborn from its own ashes, were present. Nor does the phoenix's mythology state that it sported the head of a woman, brought happiness, or could lull people to sleep with its song. In short, this was all merely a conversion of convenience, the best Arabian avian replacement available for the Russian sirin. Another notable change was the excising of virtually all of the songs and much of the music that had featured in Sadko, and which in my view had immeasurably enhanced its appeal. No longer a musical as such, but thereby closer in form and content once again to the successful Harryhausen style of Sinbad movies. Finally, the names of the cast and technical crew in the movie's credits list were anglicized as much as possible, to give them more of an American appeal, disguising their Russian reality. For instance, Sadko/Sinbad actor Sergei Stolyarov became Edward Stolar, Sea King actor Mikhail Troyanovsky became Maurice Troyon, Lyubava actress Alla Larionova became Anna Larion, and so on.
Transforming Sadko into The Magic Voyage of Sinbad was an inventive cinematic experiment, and aside from the lack of geographical costume correspondence it actually worked quite well, but it never attracted even remotely the attention and acclaim either from the critics or from the viewing public that Sadko has done, or the bona fide Sinbad films of Harryhausen. This is a great shame, because even though it is a repackaged movie, it is still sumptuous to behold, with sets and effects wholly unlike anything previously seen in an ostensibly Western fantasy film (this being due of course to the fact that in reality it was of Russian, not Western, origin). Hence I recommend The Magic Voyage of Sinbad to anyone like me who has a particular liking for fantasy movies with an Arabian Nights flavour. To appreciate fully what you are viewing, however, you obviously need to watch it in its original unadulterated Russian form, as Sadko.
Incidentally, in 2018 Sadko reappeared as the star of a full-length Russian animated feature film variously entitled in English as The Underwater Adventures of Sadko or simply Sadko. However, this version, although visually stunning, plays very fast and exceedingly loose with the original Sadko storyline – I certainly don't recall a villainous tentacular undersea witch named Barracuda in the latter! Directed by Vitaliy Mukhametzyanov and Maksim Volkov, and released by CTB Film Company, an English-subtitled version of The Underwater Adventures of Sadko can be viewed for free on YouTube by clicking here.
Meanwhile, if you'd like to view the original 1953 Russian movie Sadko, click here to watch it in its entirety for free and with English subtitles on YouTube. And click here to view free of charge on YT its repackaged, English-dubbed, Arabian Nights equivalent, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, in its entirety.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
Wow! You've done a lot of work on this matter. Great to read, and I want to see the original Sadko, if possible. By the way, early in his writing career as an exile in Europe, Vladimir Nabokov used "Sirin" as a pseudonym. I wonder if he was thinking of the bird with a woman's head.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much! Yes, it did take a while to research, and I'm glad that you enjoyed reading it. I include in my article's penultimate paragraph a clickable link to the original Sadko, viewable in its entirety on YouTube for free, so you can check it out there - it really is a beautiful movie. And yes, I think it likely that this is the origin of Nabokov's pseudonym, because the sirin is well known in Russian mythology so he would certainly have been aware of it.
Delete