By Fred Blosser

Released in 1962, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad advertised itself as “The greatest adventure story ever produced.” The title encouraged its target audience—eleven-year-olds who could wrangle the cost of a ticket from their weekly allowance—to anticipate that The Magic Voyage of Sinbad would be a sequel to Columbia Pictures’ hugely popular production, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Ray Harryhausen’s groundbreaking special effects in the 1958 movie had lingered long in playground discussions. But The Magic Voyage of Sinbad had nothing to do with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or Harryhausen. Instead, as a classic case of B-movie promotion, it was actually an edited, dubbed, and retitled version of Sadko, a 1953 fantasy film produced by Mosfilm, the U.S.S.R.’s state-owned movie studio. Sadko was one of several Soviet-made science fiction and fantasy movies bought and edited by Filmgroup, an independent company owned by the Corman brothers, Roger and Gene, to pass as Hollywood productions in the early 1960s.

For a company like Filmgroup that operated on a thin economic margin, obtaining, packaging, and ballyhooing a foreign picture as an American B-movie was a cheaper and surer alternative to producing its own. It was also virtually foolproof in those long-ago days before social media, when small-town ticket-buyers were unlikely to catch on. The Cormans hired Francis Ford Coppola, then a 23-year-old trying to get a foothold in the business, to write the voice-over narration and dialogue for the American version. This consisted mostly of turning the hero, named Sadko in the original Soviet film, into the brand-name Sinbad. The basic storyline remained intact.

In The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, the adventurous captain (played by “Edward Stolar,” really Russian actor Sergey Stolyarov) returns home to exotic Copasand with only his harp to his name. His last voyage was prosperous, but he gave away all of his goods, even his ship, to needy people he met along the way. Now back in Copasand, he finds the city changed since his last visit, and not for the better. The people are “dressed poorly, and [seem] hungry and tired,” while the greedy oligarchical merchants who run things are “richer than ever,” as the narration discloses. This political jab at capitalism and exploitation of the masses probably passed over the heads of most youngsters. And anyway, in whatever culture, aren’t merchants in fairy tales and folk legends usually grasping and predatory?

Dispirited by the poverty of Copasand, Sinbad decides to restore harmony and equity by sailing across the sea, finding the legendary “Bird of Happiness,” and bringing it back with him. The complacent merchants regard him as a troublemaker and have no intention of providing the wherewithal for a ship. Sinbad makes a wager with them. If he can catch golden-finned fish from the harbor, they must agree to open their storehouses, share their goods with the poor, and enable him to build a ship for his quest. If he loses, he’ll forfeit his head. “Everybody knows there are no golden-finned fish in the harbor,” the oligarchs gloat, certain they have the deal in the bag; one of them even brandishes an executioner’s axe in anticipation. But Sinbad succeeds, thanks to Morgiana, Neptune’s daughter, who has a crush on him. Sinbad’s crew unlocks the warehouses, but there isn’t enough to go around for everyone, so the need for a voyage to restore “happiness” remains.

The quest takes Sinbad and his crew first to the north, where they fight off an attack by barbarians, for whom “happiness is killing,” and then to India, where he’s assured that the Bird of Happiness, also called the Phoenix, resides in a tower jealously guarded by the king. The Phoenix has the head, face, and neck of a woman atop the body of a large bird. Sinbad is in for disappointment when he finds that the Phoenix has a different definition of happiness than he does, just like the barbarians at his last port of call. Hers is based on feeling good by abdicating responsibility instead of using it to benefit others. The creature lulls the captain and his men to sleep with a soothing song, but Sinbad rallies and they escape.

Eventually a storm drops the captain into the underwater kingdom of Neptune, where the God of the Sea and his wife are a plump, humorously bickering couple like Ralph and Alice Kramden. Mrs. Neptune is infatuated with a melancholy tune Sinbad sings, and she wants to keep him there indefinitely as the palace singer, but Sinbad escapes on a sea horse with Morgiana’s help. In Copasand, the mariner admits he’s returning without the Bird of Happiness, but he enlightens the townsfolk on what he’s learned about the true meaning of happiness. Happiness is finding joy in what you have. In the original Soviet version, his lesson was intended to assure audiences in bleak circumstances in the 1950s U.S.S.R. that they weren’t so bad off. If your apartment in Moscow was cold, cramped, and threadbare, at least you had an apartment. The take-away message for American viewers may have been the same as Dorothy’s discovery at the end of The Wizard of Oz, that there’s no place like home.

Where The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad offered a showcase for Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion cyclops, dragon, and sword fighting skeleton, the effects devised for Sadko/The Magic Voyage of Sinbad were the meticulous work of Alexander Ptushko, a director sometimes referred to as the Walt Disney or George Pal of the Soviet Union. There were no stop-motion creatures in Ptushko’s portfolio of illusions. Instead, he worked wonders with double-exposures, puppetry, time-lapse, tricks of perspective, mattes, and other techniques that moviemakers have used since the infancy of cinema (although hardly at all if ever these days, CGI having largely taken their place). As such, combined with Ptushko’s lavish sets, the special effects are fully as accomplished as the same techniques used by Disney and Pal in Hollywood’s rare excursions into big-budget, family-oriented fantasy movies of the time like tom thumb (1958), Babes in Toyland (1961), and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962). If small-town audiences in 1962 were able to get past the absence of stop-motion, they may have appreciated Ptushko’s charming fairy-tale ambiance left basically undisturbed by Filmgroup.

The Magic Voyage of Sinbad currently streams on Shout!TV in a print credited to Retromedia Entertainment, apparently from a 2005 Retromedia DVD. Retromedia’s product appears to have been sourced in turn from an older television print with less-than-optimal visual quality for modern TV monitors. The low-resolution image may not bother nostalgic viewers who first encountered the movie on local TV matinees as kids in the 1970s. For those who want a crisper version, YouTube offers a fine print from much better elements, as well as the original version of Sadko, helpfully subtitled in English.

Note: A Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that spoofs The Magic Voyage of Sinbad is widely available on the internet. The episode, originally broadcast on August 14, 1993, also uses a blurry second-generation copy of the movie to heighten the jokes by Servo, Crow, and the other MST3K gang at the film’s expense. If you’re under 40, you may need a lexicon to understand the wisecracks, which are mostly based on now-obscure ‘90s pop culture references. (The MSTK3K version can also be found on YouTube.) 

(Fred Blosser is the author of "Focus on the Spaghetti Western #1:The Films of Tony Kendall". Click here to order from Amazon.)