For Eyes Only

By RICHARD CORLISS

CLASH OF THE TITANS Directed by Desmond Davis Screenplay by Beverley Cross

Since Excalibur cut its swath through box offices this spring, every movie producer with high ideals and $10 million has come up with the same surefire formula: make a hit from a myth. At superficial glance, Clash of the Titans would qualify as the cycle's first ripoff, and a pallid one at that. It proceeds at a pace that must seem stately to tots reared on TV cartoons and the current batch of Saturday matinee-type features. It rarely ascends into exhilaration or slumps into camp. The direction of some actors is pedestrian, if not oafish. But as a lavish vehicle for the talents of Effects Wizard Ray Harryhausen, Clash offers delights to the eye and spirit of every moviegoing adult who has wanted to revisit the dreams of his youth.

In an austere silver temple that looks like the court of Krypton, Zeus (Laurence Olivier) plays with clay figurines, brings them to life, sends them through labyrinths of adventures, sentences them to spectacular deaths. Now he is pondering the fate of Perseus (Harry Hamlin), Zeus' son by one of his many extramarital manifestations. Shall Perseus realize his destiny as champion beastslayer and husband of fair Andromeda (Judi Bowker)?

It is a story as old as Olympus, and it provides Harryhausen with the opportunity to work his stop-motion magic. The creatures he animates are wonders of laborious craft and individual character. They move like demons and dragons and homunculi out of the dark sleep of the past.

Harryhausen's Medusa has a serpentine grandeur as she coils and strikes to avenge the wrongs men and the gods have done her. When Perseus finally severs her neck, cherry tapioca blood oozes out. And from the blood giant crabs and maggots form.

The entrance of the Kraken, a giant sea beast, is a melodramatic marvel: out of a typhoon of churning sea, one huge hand slithers over a rock, then the second hand --then a third and a fourth!

Harryhausen has made do with much less. Because of budget restrictions, the monster octopus in his 1955 horror film It Came from Beneath the Sea had only five arms. It may be that in Clash of the Titans Harryhausen was inhibited by the upscale cost and cast (Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom, Burgess Meredith, Flora Robson). Too much time is spent plodding through the plots with actors who seem ill at ease playing in a film whose glory is its special effects. They are glorious indeed. And that is reason enough to see Clash of the Titans. The onscreen manipulator of men's fates may be Zeus, but behind the screen is the true titan: Ray Harryhausen.

--By Richard Corliss

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