(1973, dir. Gordon Hessler)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
52-week film challenge, film 41

This was the second of the Columbia Sinbad movies, a revival of sorts following the first one, 1958’s The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. While it would really be nice to someday get a mainstream Sinbad movie where the lead was played by an actual Muslim from the actual region in which these stories are set, John Phillip Law charismatically embodies the qualities of the heroic wayfarer, unlike his successor (my review of Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger is here).

As mentioned there, for the month of November I’m reviewing movies that feature actors who also played the title role in the TV show “Doctor Who.” While Tom Baker may have one of the longer filmographies of that select group of actors, there are only a handful of films where he had such a large role, and this one is a personal favourite.

What’s great about this film is that, while it is a little slower-paced that modern films in terms of setting up the story location, major characters, and conflict, it is well-directed and tightly edited to to ensure that every scene in the film has a purpose that serves the overall story — the main failing of Eye of the Tiger, in my view.

In this tale, we find Sinbad just doing nothing in particular at sea, when along comes a strange flying creature with a shiny bauble. One of his men injures the creature via bow and arrow, causing it to drop the shiny item — a strange piece of jewelry that looks like some kind of puzzle part. Sinbad decides to wear it as a necklace, despite warnings from his crew.

That night, he was strange dreams, including a disguised but ominous man calling his name, and a sequence involving a dancing girl with a tattoo of an eye on the palm of her hand. A storm comes out of nowhere to knock the ship off course, taking them to the land of Marabia, where Sinbad encounters the ominous man, who turns out to be the evil magician Koura (Baker).

Koura demands the puzzle piece back, but Sinbad escapes with it into the city, where he meets the Grand Vizier (Douglas Wilmer), who wears a golden headdress/facemask to hide his disfigured face (from an earlier attempt by Koura to take over Marabia). The Vizier has a matching piece of the jewelry, but there is a missing third that, when matched with the other two, forms a map to the Fountain of Destiny, on the lost continent of Lemuria.

Those who can bring the three pieces back to the Fountain will receive youth, a “shield of darkness” (invisibility), and “a crown of untold riches.” Sinbad agrees to help the Vizier find the third piece, but unbeknownst to them, another of Koura’s flying homoculuses has seen and heard their conversation, and related it magically to Koura’s castle. They discover and kill the homoculous, but the race to Lemuria is now on.

Koura is no ordinary magician; he is steeped in the black arts, and calls upon the forces of darkness for his magic — and each time he does so, the darkness takes some of his life force, visibly aging him in small or significant ways, depending upon what Koura calls for.

In a later scene, Koura is desperate to avoid crashing on some rocks that Sinbad knows how to navigate around, and casts a spell to bring the figurehead of Sinbad’s ship to life, so it can steal the map and bring it to Koura. This is, as you might expect, a big “ask” of magic, and when the (terrific) sequence is over, his assistant Achmed (Takis Emmanuel) is shocked to see that Koura is much visibly older.

The chase continues through a series of interesting set-pieces, and the third bit of the jeweled map does at first fall into the right hands — following a magnificent bit of Harryhausen work as Kourna animates a statue of the six-armed god Kali to win over the natives, with the statue fighting Sinbad’s main crew simultaneously — but Koura steals it and takes the completed ornament to the Fountain, where he appears to win the day (going so far as to receive the youth that was promised, which restores him from the very old man he has had to become to try and stop Sinbad).

Koura also receives the shield of darkness, which prevents Sinbad’s attempt to steal the completed ornament back, but Koura makes the fatal mistake of hiding inside the fountain, where his shadow can be seen, and is then killed by Sinbad before he can claim the third prize. Sinbad thus wins the crown of many riches, but chooses to give it instead to the Vizier, where it restores his face and melts away his mask, making him the new Sultan. Now free to marry Caroline Munro’s Margiana, Sinbad and his friends sail off for Marabia.

As I mentioned in my review of Eye of the Tiger, that film could be edited way down to reduce the padding and come out a much more exciting 90- to 110-minute film. Golden Voyage proves this theory by being much tighter and faster-paced, and clocking in at … 105 minutes.

Once you accept the (excellent) stop-motion effects work, the movie just carries you along on its quest with a rich set of characters, obstacles, and — let’s face it — cleavage (courtesy of Ms. Munro). It’s also worth noting the film’s b-plot — a merchant who enslaves Margiana begs Sinbad to take his drunken, useless son on the voyage to make a man of him, in exchange for Margiana and 400 gold coins.

Initially operating strictly as comic relief, the son Haroun (Kurt Christian, who would go on to play one of the villains in Eye of the Tiger) does complete his story. By the end of the film, he is a keen sailor who loves the thrill of adventure.

Even by today’s standards, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is still an enjoyable Saturday afternoon adventure, anchored by Law’s credibility in the Sinbad role, the judicious use of comic moments to move the story along, and in particular Baker’s strong performance as Koura (so much so that it led “Doctor Who” producer Barry Letts to cast him for the title character in early 1974).

Baker delivers both on the evil the part requires, and his own powerful charisma to rivet attention on Koura without ever stealing the spotlight away from the story. Yet, he still gives us a markedly different performance here than he would bring to the more heroic Doctor, where he created the first truly “alien” incarnation that remains one of the all-time favourite takes on the character. It’s a pity he didn’t get the chance to do more movies, but at least in one of them he got to play Rasputin — yet another definitive interpretation, in my view.