Jack the Giant KillerRating:
Release Date: 04 September, 2001 Retail Price: $4.95 OUR Price: $4.95 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: |
Jack the Giant Killer Reviews
Generally sharp DVD
The DVD is free of blemishes and is quite colorful; however, some images are pale, no doubt due to the aging of the original materials. This is especially apparent in composite shots where the models look bright but the backgrounds don't. Probably the best this film is going to look.
"Special Place of Honor"
MGM/UA/s PREVIOUS release (VHS and Laser Disc) of "Jack the Giant Killer" was, in fact,the ORIGINAL NON-MUSICAL version (thank god), even though the box described it as "Complete with musical songs..". If the current version IS the musical, AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS;...it is trash! However, if it is the original NON-musical version, then buy and enjoy it!
Yes, producer Edward Small deliberately imitated Harryhausens' "7th Voyage of Sinbad" (which Small had actually turned down in the mid-50's; when "Sinbad" went on to reap huge profits, Small was kicking himself and thus set out to produce his "own" version). Yes, the animation isn't as polished as Harryhausen's......yes, the production values were not as high... But "Jack" is still something that Harryhausen films could never be....ENGAGING on a human level...fresh, quick-moving, genuinely enchanting. The crude animation, in a way, adds to the charm of the film, which manages to capture the essential fantasy, fairy-tale world in a way which Harryhausen's humorless, heavy-handed approach could not.
Kerwin Matthews is, as always, sincere and engaging, Torin Thatcher is more controlled than in "Sinbad", Dayton Lummis is a cool King Mark, Barry Kelley is a hoot as Sigurd the Viking. Don Beddoe...always a fine, understated actor, here performs wonders of subtlety and telling characterization while stuck inside a giant prop bottle. Even Robert Gist, who portrayed "Hal" (Jack Buchanan's side-kick) in "The Band Waqon" turns up briefly as the ill-fated ship's captain. And, of course, my FAVORITE character actor of all time...the underrated, forgotten WAlter Burke plays Garna, Pendragon's henchman, in his usual skilled way (Anyone ever seen him in the episode of "Ben Casey" called "The Men Who Raised Rabbits?"-he's superb). Only Anna Lee's "witch" scene is embarrasingly bad, as is the bulk of Judy Meredith's Princess Elaine (she was Frank Sinatra's main squeeze at the time the principal photography was done (Summer, 1960).
Yes....the music of Paul Sawtell is no match for Herrmann's "7th Voyage" score, but it is rousing, tuneful and, in the case of the mechanical doll dance, absolutely enchanting. The final harpy scene (designed and animated by Jim Danforth) is first-rate, the Wah Chang-designed giants are bizarre and fantastic, the witches, who due to complications during filming were never realized on screen as the designers intended, are still cool in a child-like, imaginative way (a "Fish" witch?..a "Bunny" witch?...a mini-Godzilla witch with a harp-like mouth that emits a gale-force wind....? ).
And those rockin', swaying' KNights of the Dragon's Teeth, always my favorite sequence and, as director Nathan Juran said, a scene which "didn't contain one dollar's worth of special effects" (!)....just stop & start the camera, explode some powder, march in those Knights, and add Sawtell's mechanized music....voila! .....another simple, exciting fantasy sequence that keeps the film bubbling along.
Yeah, I know it ain't Citizen Kane.....but "Jack The Giant Killer" gets my "Special Place of Honor" award; I saw it on its first release when I was 11, and it became the final, yet most endearing example of cinematic magic (next to "The Wizard of OZ")that I was ever to experience as a child.
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