In the Flesh: Clash of the Titans (1981)

Watching this movie makes me feel like Tony Soprano showing his daughter, Meadow, the church their ancestors helped to build on a crew of masons before grumbling, “Go out there now and try to find me two guys who can put decent grout around your bathtub.” People edited the scenes in Clash of the Titans in which human actors fight hand to hand with stop-motion monsters. They labored over sequences of divine retribution in which miniatures are destroyed by floodwaters while hapless citizens are swept away or crushed, all superimposed over elaborate sets. Real people sweated blood to create creatures like the roc and the gorgons out of elaborate miniatures combined with puppetry and clever cutting. It’s not that people don’t labor with skill over modern films, but the sheer technical knowledge, patience, and ingenuity required to create these effects is so tangible in the final product that it still feels like magic. This isn’t an attempt to simulate reality, it’s an attempt to show us the wonder of artifice, the transporting power of an obvious fabrication made with love, skill, and focused intent.

Ray Harryhausen’s pioneering stop-motion work has become virtually synonymous with the film, and it’s hard to overstate the extent to which it shapes director Desmond Davis’s vision from “mild campy fun” to “groundbreaking visual fantasia”. How many movies have a special effects director not just better-known but orders of magnitude more famous than the director themself? It’s a short list, and Harryhausen, deservedly, is right at the top. He’s also fun and acquisitive in his own right, borrowing from the artists he himself inspired as with his unmistakably R2-D2-esque mechanical owl, Bubo. It’s thrilling to see an artist at the height of his influence still so actively engaged in the world of popular film, as influenced by it as it was by him. His work is ably supported by Harry Hamlin’s offbeat prettyboy performance as the legendary hero Perseus, half-human son of Zeus. With his chiseled, pouting good looks and sultry voice, Hamlin plays as a matinee idol unstuck from time and place, and his chemistry with his mentor, the playwright Ammon (Meredith Burgess), is a real pleasure to watch.

It’s the film’s villains who drive it, though. The imperious and thwarted Maggie Smith as the sea goddess Thetis, her callous, cursed son Calibdo (Neil McCarthy), and the monsters conjured by Harryhausen’s work invest these sword and sorcery hijinks with real weight and terror. The scene in which Perseus tames the flying horse Pegasus and takes to the skies on his back is thrilling in spite of its constraints, the famous sequence in which Perseus’s men are picked off one by one by Medusa’s bow and petrifying gaze, the editing in this scenes is so meticulous that at times it feels believable that human performers and their stop-motion counterparts might actually occupy the same world, a heightened fictional plane where the edges of dreams bleed into reality, if only ever so slightly. Sure there are shortfalls, too, and places where the contrivances necessary to film these sequences stand out more clearly, but Harryhausen’s monsters are so exciting and wonderful to look at that it’s hard to feel bothered by it. Earnest genius, even when janky, always wins out over smooth, cynical seamlessness.