By Adam Mahan

A trailer for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), directed by Nathan H. Juran and released by Columbia Pictures

In 1958, Columbia Pictures released The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which was not only commercially successful, but was –  and continues to be –  critically acclaimed.  The fantasy epic was based on Sinbad the Sailor, a heroic Arabic captain featured in the famous collection of Middle Eastern, medieval tales One Thousand One Nights, which were compiled and written down during the Golden Age of Islam. Sinbad the Sailor’s epic tales are essential to Arabic medievalism, and the 1958 adaptation brings those fantastical medievalist elements to life.

Taking Bettina Bildhauer’s standard of cinematic medievalism into consideration, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad does not have a typical medieval setting for a Western audience, but it would classify as a piece of medievalist cinema as the film is adapted from medieval literature (47).  According to Bildhauer, a common medieval film setting is “a mythical or legendary pre-history,” a setting which can be disassociated from the historical Middle Ages (53).  It is in such a setting in which The 7th Voyage of Sinbad takes place, during the prosperous reign of Baghdad in the fictitious Sultanate of Chandra.

Lesley Coote’s exploration of medievalist elements in twenty-first century films certainly contains insights applicable to the late 1950s Sinbad epic.  She begins her survey of films examining the medieval genre of “fantasy,” “miraculous characters,” and “fairy tales” (103).  The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is high medieval fantasy at its most epic.  Sinbad’s voyage is filled with dragons, giant birds, treasure chests overflowing with colorful jewels, cyclopses, a dark sorcerer, skeleton fighters, and a wish-granting genie in a lamp.  The narrative too is a classic hero epic: a virtuous, chivalric sea-faring captain fighting his way to rescue his betrothed princess held captive by an evil sorcerer.  The film itself is an escapist piece of entertainment, a fantasy film that takes its audience on a medieval adventure through turbulent seas, magical islands, mountains, and underground sorcerer caves.

The legendary setting of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and all of its fantastic elements “veer into fairy-tale territory,” as Bildhauer would claim, while still being classified as a piece of medievalist cinema (54).  A large part of what makes this film successful are its locations and cinematography.  In a 2017 Sight and Sound review, Kim Newman notes that much of the movie had been filmed in Spain, “where Mediterranean backdrops and Moorish architecture” help create an authentic world that grounds the fantasy in a particular time and place.  Secondly, the film’s co-producer, Ray Harryhausen, utilized a combination of color effects and stop-animation, which he developed and termed “dynamation,” to create the film’s many fantastical creatures and sequences (Newman).

The lasting success of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad led to two sequels in the mid 1970s and Harryhausen’s animation.  To this day, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad remains a cinematographic achievement and a classic medievalist fantasy film which, as Newman asserts, is “beyond criticism.”

Bibliography

Bildhauer, Bettina. “Medievalism and Cinema.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, edited by Louise D’Arcens, 45-59. Cambridge, 2016.

Coote, Lesley. “Survey of Twenty-First Century ‘Medieval’ Film.” In Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture. London, 2015.

Newman, Kim. “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.” Sight and Sound 27, no. 10: 87.