Classic on Celluloid

The Three Worlds of Gulliver (Morningside; Columbia). Dean Jonathan Swift of Dublin Cathedral, who in 1729 made "a modest proposal" that the children of the poor should be fattened like cattle and then eaten by the rich, might well be wickedly amused to hear that Gulliver's Travels, his epic of disgust for men and all their works, survives as a charmingly fantastic just-out-of-the-nursery tale that has delighted generations of the little Yahoos he detested. Satirist Swift would, however, hardly be amused by this film, which with commerce aforethought, scissors his plot and ruthlessly modernizes his ironic allegory of Lilliput and Brobdingnag into a monster movie freckled with psychiatric footnotes. But the dean is dead, and the little Yahoos will love it.

By exploiting almost all the cinema's techniques of trompe l'oeil, a daring special effects man named Ray Harryhausen has produced a celluloid illusion in which men and monsters, giants and midgets merge without a seam. Unfortunately, though, there are ragged lines in the script--which might be described as accelerated Swift. The dean's fans will, for instance, get a nasty turn when they discover that Gulliver (Kerwin Mathews) has a scantily clad girl friend (June Thorburn). And they may feel even worse when the hero tells her, in ponderous Jungian prose, that "the giants are inside us" and that mankind could be rescued from these vast unruly forces only by an un-Swiftian sentiment called "love."

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