Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Jason and the Argonauts arrives from 1963 with a golden fleece, a bronze giant, and seven skeletons born of dragon's teeth, and it asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to be thrilled. Don Chaffey directs with brisk economy, Ray Harryhausen animates his creatures one painstaking frame at a time, and Bernard Herrmann supplies a score with no strings at all, just brass, percussion, and heroic fanfare. The concerns here are heroism, prophecy, and the correct way to open a plug in a giant's heel. The film is a product of its era in the most literal sense: an all-white British and American cast stands in for the heroes of Greek myth, and nobody involved appears to have given the matter a moment's thought. This is not a failing so much as a historical fact, like the painted backdrops and the matte lines.

Medea, played by Nancy Kovack, is a high priestess of Hecate who heals the wounded and springs Jason from a dungeon, which grants her a measure of agency rare for the period. She is also a romantic attachment and a plot device, won over by the hero and useful chiefly for her access to the fleece. That earns the film a modest nod and no more. Elsewhere the ledger is stark. No racial themes, no economic critique, no environmental sermon, no interest in the body or in the mind's varied wiring. The gods on Olympus dispense the occasional lesson about virtue and obedience, but these are the moral reflexes of myth, not the pointed instruction of a lecture.

To watch the picture now is to watch an adventure with no pretensions, as the critics said at the time, and the phrase holds up. The skeleton battle remains a marvel of patience and craft, seven warriors clattering against three men on a rocky shore, and it carries no argument and no thesis. The film wants to entertain children on a bank holiday, and it does. We classify it accordingly, with respect and without alarm.",