Ray Harryhausen’s films always seem to belong to the 1950s and the era of the Cinemascope historical spectacle – the era that produced the likes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben Hur (1959). All Harryhausen’s films have the same wooden leads, pedestrian melodramatics and the emphasis placed on spectacle and effects, just as the Biblical spectaculars did. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger however came out the same year as Star Wars (1977) – and up against Star Wars, Harryhausen’s more traditional type of fantasy looked decidedly shabby. While Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was quite a reasonable success in theatres, the effects revolution created by Star Wars showed that Ray Harryhausen’s type of films were increasingly relics of a bygone era. Harryhausen would only make one other film after this, Clash of the Titans (1981), before announcing his retirement. Both Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Clash of the Titans, made in the 1950s style of filmmaking with glaringly grainy process photography and wooden 50s-styled action, look flat against the modern fantasy and effects revolution, and moreover are weaker Harryhausen films.

In a Ray Harryhausen film, the screen dramatics are wooden, but this is unimportant as the film is usually carried by the quite spectacular stop-motion animated set-pieces. In Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger there is not even that – it feels like a film that is composed of leftover ideas that weren’t enough to make it to the other Sinbad films. The film even rehashes set-pieces from other Harryhausen films – the skeleton duels from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the giant insects from Mysterious Island (1961). Crucially what it lacks is any big spectacular stop motion set-piece. The ones we do have are lacklustre. The sabre-tooth tiger, which presumably provides the eye of the title that is cryptically unconnected to anything else in the film (or even mentioned anywhere throughout), looks like a stuffed hamster, and only the Trog and baboon have any character at all. There’s never a standout scene that dazzles with the pure wondrousness of Harryhausen’s art like the encounter with the Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) or the Kali duel in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Moreover the story is often contrived, having to sidetrack out of its way to throw in the various encounters with Harryhausen’s creatures – the visit to a tent where they are attacked by skeletons, the walrus encounter at the North Pole, the giant wasp, the reanimated sabre-tooth. Crucially if the plot kept to strictly linear telling of the story and eliminated all side-episodes, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger would lose much in the way of fantasy content.

Actor Sam Wanamaker took the director’s chair and was reportedly not at all happy making the film, having little interest in the fantasy content and finding the laborious and painstaking necessity of Harryhausen’s special effects frustrating. It certainly shows on screen. John Wayne’s son Patrick makes a wooden Sinbad, while Margaret Leighton camps it up badly as Zenobia. Patrick Troughton, the second incarnation of Doctor Who (1963-89), playing a the tetchy guru is the only fun the film offers at all. Jane Seymour offers a touch of class as the love interest, although remains underused.

Ray Harryhausen’s other films are: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the granddaddy of all atomic monster films; the giant atomic octopus film It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955); the alien invader film Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956); the alien monster film 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957); The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958); The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960); the Jules Verne adaptation Mysterious Island (1961); the Greek myth adventure Jason and the Argonauts (1963); the H.G. Wells adaptation The First Men in the Moon (1964); the caveman vs dinosaurs epic One Million Years B.C. (1966); the dinosaur film The Valley of Gwangi (1969); The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973); and the Greek myth adventure Clash of the Titans (1981).