MYSTERIOUS ISLAND'........FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM......

Mysterious Island (1961)     Film composer Bernard Herrmann gifted the movie universe with two legendary collaborations........one with Alfred Hitchcock ("The Man Who Knew Too Much", "Vertigo", "Psycho", "The Trouble With Harry", "North By Northwest" and "Marnie")......

             ........and the other with stop-motion special effects master Ray Harryhausen ("7th Voyage Of Sinbad", "3 World Of Gulliver", "Jason And the Argonauts".....and this little gem we're posting about today...)

               For those of us who grew up in the pre-CGI era, Harryhausen's three-dimensional animated creatures were wondrous to behold, jaw-dropping mythical creations who roared, hissed, squawked and strutted on real landscapes, interacting with flesh and blood actors.  In short, waking dreams made real.

               No composer was ever better suited with supplying Harryhausen's menagerie of monsters with the perfect musical accompaniment.  Unlike many of his contemporaries, Herrmann didn't smear his music on to a film like a thick layer of mayonnaise. Precise and exacting in his scoring, he composed striking themes that almost scientifically matched the real yet slightly unreal, stuttering movements of the stop motion beasts.

               In each individual sequence, the blending of a Harryhausen monster with Herrmann music becomes a kind of a spectacular dance number, a symphonic ballet for behemoths, if you will.

               "Mysterious Island", taken from the Jules Verne novel, has a fairly simple set-up.......an odd assortment of castaways find themselves on the island refuge of no less than Captain Nemo. Nemo functions as their hidden, secret benefactor while they encounter the literally enormous results of his biological tinkering with the island's wild life.....

                And these experiments include, along with Bernard Herrmann's indelible music for them a giant crab, a riotously multi-colored giant tropical bird, equally enlarged bees and underwater, a rather pissed off, tentacled cephalopod.  Cue the richly scored thrills 'n chills.......

                Always one of the BQ's forever favorites, the film maintains the simple values of heroism and high adventure that were the hallmark of films made by Harryhausen and his producer Charles H..Schneer.  Even as they headed into the turbulent, ever-changing world of the 1960's and beyond, Shneer and Harryhausen's films espoused the old fashioned decency of bygone eras.

                 Maybe that dates films like this, but we don't care.  When the classic artistry of Ray Harryhausen and Bernard Herrmann came together......you had timeless cinema. And that, to us, is worth 5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.