Ray Harryhausen is master of film monsters

Harryhausen turns 90 next week, and this milestone is being fittingly celebrated. On Saturday, a BFI/Bafta tribute night at BFI Southbank, hosted by John Landis and featuring video messages from James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and Nick Park, kicks off a series of screenings of his films. And on his actual birthday next Tuesday, June 29, the London Film Museum’s splendid exhibition of his creations opens to the public.

Kudos is due to the venue for conceiving and arranging it. It is not a huge show, since most of Harryhausen’s titans and tyrannosaurs were only 18 inches high. But there are wonderful things: the phenomentally detailed and expressive dinosaurs from Valley of the Gwangi, the crab carcass that Harryhausen
re-articulated with a metal skeleton for Mysterious Island, the figures from his Fifties fairytales that look as if they could step straight into a present-day Tim Burton film. And one of those battling skeletons — created for the first of Harryhausen’s three Sinbad films in 1958 — still wickedly grinning.

Where a model has been lost it is represented by a bronze sculpture that, along with illustrations and storyboards, showcase Harryhausen’s skill as an artist. There’s a larger-than-lifesize Medusa to startle kids who have seen the small working model and scary footage of her round the preceding corner. Each display case for the smaller figures comes with a screen showing them in action, or featuring their modest creator talking about them. The show deftly and briefly locates his place in the history of special effects and three-dimensional animation.

Sometimes the decayed state of the models tells its own evocative story of what low-budget genre film-making was like. The latex skin of a Tyrannosaur he made for an unfinished film in his teens (inspired by Willis O’Brien’s stop-frame models for 1933’s King Kong) has rotted to reveal the sophisticated metal armature. The giant octopus from It Came From Beneath the Sea (1960) only ever had six legs for budgetary reasons, and is now a glowering head: its limbs were recycled as dinosaur tails. Harryhausen’s model of Raquel Welch, complete with fur bikini, for 1966’s One Million Years BC, has aged less well than the real thing.

Harryhausen was working with perishable materials in an unsentimental era but it’s right that he should be recognised with a show like this. Like the early film noir directors, he used iffy material as his springboard to create some truly memorable film sequences. Special effects indeed.

Ray Harryhausen: Myths and Legends is at the London Film Museum from next Tuesday, 020 7202 7040, londonfilmmuseum.com. For details of Saturday’s Bafta and BFI tribute, or other screenings, see bfi.org.uk or bafta.org

Ray Harryhausen: Myths & Legends
London Film Museum
Riverside Building, County Hall, Westminster Bridge Road, SE1 7PB