Despite the title, this was the first of the Sinbad films made by visual effects maestro Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer (the others would be The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977)) and it would be the first to feature Harryhausen’s work in colour – it6 was also the first to bub his animation process “Dynamation”. It’s a toss-up between this and Golden Voyage as to which is the best of the Sinbad films (7th Voyage might just have the edge) but whichever film you champion, you have to admit that it’s a terrific piece of work with some of Harryhausen’s most iconic monsters. Kenneth Kolb’s script suffers the usual flaws of the Harryhausen/Schneer films, the thin characters, the flimsy plot that exists only to move the characters from one monster encounter to the next, but director Nathan Juran, who had also directed the Harryhausen-animated 20 Million Miles to Earth in 1957, rattles everything along so nicely that one scarcely has time to pause for breath let alone consider the script’s failings.

There are sometimes valid complaints made that Harryhausen’s films can take a tad too long to get to the good bits, i.e. his monsters. Not so here. The film opens with the adventure already under way, Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and his crew arriving on the island of Colossa. There, they rescue the magician Sokurah (Torin Thatcher) from a giant cyclops, one of Harryhausen’s very best creations. And we get to see it with almost indecent haste, the first sighting of the monster coming less than 7 minutes into the film. Sokurah loses a magic lamp during his escape and Sinbad refuses to take him back to retrieve it, more concerned with his forthcoming marriage to Parisa, Princess of Chandra (Kathryn Grant) who is also aboard, a union that should ensure peace between her homeland and Sinbad’s native Baghdad. Back in Baghdad, Sokurah entertains at a pre-wedding feast, turning Parisa’s handmaiden Said (Nana DeHerrera) into a dancing snake-woman but later shrinks Parisa, claiming that the only way to restore her to her proper size is to use the egg of the giant bird the Roc, found only on Colossa. With no other choice, Sinbad and an unruly crew recruited from convicts in the Caliph’s prisons, set sail. An attempted mutiny is thwarted by the unearthly sounds of screeching demons from Colossa that drive the crew mad, but they eventually make it to the island where they again encounter the cyclops, fight a protective Rocs after they hatch one of the eggs, battle a dragon and are aided by the genie Barani (Richard Eyer) who appears as a young boy.

There’s some outrageous overplaying among the supporting cast (Thatcher leaves not an inch of the Spanish scenery unchewed and at times seems to be trying for a Bela Lugosi accent), but it only adds to the fun. It sometimes feels like the world’s most expensive and beautifully appointed pantomime, with the sort of production values even the most extravagant London West End or Broadway show could merely dream of. Thatcher’s over-playing is nicely balanced by a more subdued but quite effective turn from Mathews as Sinbad (he’d go on to play a very similar role in the inferior Jack the Giant Killer (1962) produced by Edward Small). Everyone seems to be having a ball and it helps to ease us through the admirably few slower moments.

But as ever, it’s the monsters we’re here for and what a collection they are. Harryhausen might have expressed a preference for the dancing snake-woman but it’s the cyclops that steals the show, a screeching, terrifying creation built on the cannibalised armature that brought the Ymir to life in 20 Million Miles to Earth (the dragon is a redressed model of the Rhedosaurus from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)). Towards the end, Harryhausen treats us to a marvellous one-on-one sword fight between Sinbad and a skeleton, a sequence that proved so popular with viewers that he would later pitch seven of the skeletal warriors against Jason and his Argonauts in the 1963 film.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was the first of the heroic fantasy films that Harryhausen worked on after a string of science fiction movies (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, It Came from Beneath the Sea (1953), Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956), 20 Million Miles to Earth) and it felt like he’d finally found the genre that best suited his talents. Freed of the need to feature his monsters in real world settings, he was able to let his imagination run riot and the result is his best film to date. He would still make one more film notionally set in an identifiable “real” world, The Valley of Gwangi (1969) and one more science fiction film, First men in the Moon (1964) but the bulk of the rest of his work would be set in equally unreal environ, be it the Arabian Nights settings of the other two Sinbad films, the world of Greek mythology seen in Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans (1981), the literary adaptations The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960) and Mysterious Island (1961) or Hammer’s prehistoric fantasy One Million Years B.C. (1966).

There were some great films still to come, some more impressive monsters, but The 7th Voyage of Sinbad remains one of the best films to carry the Harryhausen name, a colourful, action-packed action adventure that guarantees a monster or other bit of fantastical weirdness every few minutes, some amusingly over-the-top performances (add Danny Green as the leader of the mutineers to the list of worst offenders) and a terrific score from Bernard Hermann, the first of several he’d write for Harryhausen films. It’s a little gem, exactly the sort of thing you should be pointing out when you pronounce “they don’t make ’em like that any more.”