THE MEDUSA TOUCH
ON 12 JUNE 1981, TWO HEROES went whip-to-sword at the American box office. Their respective movies represented not just competing styles of heroism – one noble and toga-clad, the other morally ambiguous in a junglebattered leather jacket – but rival eras of filmmaking, the old guard of cinematic magic flexing against the new.
Raiders Of The Lost Ark may have been rooted in the breathless serial storytelling of the 1930s but it teamed George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the geeks with the golden touch who had redefined the blockbuster with Star Wars and Jaws. Clash Of The Titans, meanwhile, offered the timeless appeal of Greek myth and the stop-motion sorcery of Ray Harryhausen, who had spent a 40-year career chasing the wow he’d felt on first glimpsing King Kong in 1933.
Raiders won that opening US weekend, spawning a franchise. Clash – though ultimately making more money in Europe – would prove to be a swansong, a final hurrah for Harryhausen’s inimitable genius.
But it was so much more than an unplanned farewell to the screen. “It’s an anomaly,” says John Walsh, trustee of the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation and author of Harryhausen: The Lost Movies. “It was by far the biggest film Ray had ever attempted in terms of story, in terms of effects, in terms of ambition, in terms of budget, location, casting and everything.”
Beverley Cross, a, had itched to bring the myth of Perseus to the screen for a decade. “I had the idea for in 1969 while I was living in Greece, on an island called Skiathlos,” he recalled. “It’s very close to Seriphos, the island where legend has it that Perseus, the son of Zeus, was washed ashore in a trunk.”
