Publicity poster for The
Magic Voyage of Sinbad (© Aleksandr
Ptushko/Artkino Pictures/Roger Corman/The Filmgroup – reproduced here on a
strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
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.
Publicity
poster for Sadko (© Aleksandr Ptushko/Mosfilm/Artkino
Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use
basis for educational/review purposes only)
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
beautiful sea princess from Sadko (©
Aleksandr Ptushko/Mosfilm/Artkino Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly
non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
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.
Sadko
holding up the magical golden fishes caught by him (© Aleksandr Ptushko/Mosfilm/Artkino
Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use
basis for educational/review purposes only)
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!
Hardly
a picture of happiness! The sour-faced sirin from Sadko (© Aleksandr Ptushko/Mosfilm/Artkino Pictures – reproduced
here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review
purposes only)
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…
She's mean and green but seldom seen – the sinister sirin ensconced inside her gilded chamber (©
Aleksandr Ptushko/Mosfilm/Artkino Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly
non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
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.
From the scene in Sadko featuring the woman-headed bird aka the sirin that
I remember so well seeing on YouTube several years ago (© Aleksandr
Ptushko/Mosfilm/Artkino Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial
Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
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.
Publicity
poster for The 7th Voyage of
Sinbad (© Nathan H. Juran/Charles H. Schneer/Ray Harryhausen/Morningside
Productions/Columbia Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly
non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
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.
Publicity
poster for the 2018 animated movie The
Underwater Adventures of Sadko (© Vitaliy Mukhametzyanov/Maksim
Volkov/CTB Film Company – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use
basis for educational/review purposes only)
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.
Sadko,
depicted in a traditional Palekh miniature painting (public domain)
