Retromedia has paired the Americanized versions of two of Ptushko's films on this entertaining disc. The Magic Voyage of Sinbad is top-billed, but it is the slower of the two. In it, our hero "Sinbad" returns from a voyage to find that his homeland is depressed and corrupt. He endeavors to put together a crew and retrieve the mythical Bird of Happiness to revive the village and its people. By all accounts, a young Francis Ford Coppola was responsible for the Americanized script and re-editing. Whether it is Coppola or Ptushko at fault, the result is overly episodic, with long passages between occasional bursts of very imaginative and impressive fantasy sequences. The best bits: Sinbad/ Sadko's encounter with a water nymph; the capturing of a magical and luminescent fish; an impressively mounted battle scene along a beach; an elaborate climax set in Neptune's undersea lair; and a non-special effects sequence in which a villager grapples with a real bear! This Americanized version of the film also employs narration to fill in some of the many story gaps. The original Sadko has been released on its own DVD by Ruscico and Image Entertainment, in an apparently beautiful restoration. It is probably miles ahead of this transfer, which is very soft and afflicted with unstable or faded colors throughout most of the print.
The B-side of the DVD contains the literally-but-still-deceptively titled The Day the Earth Froze. Re-edited from Sampo, this film is more lively than its co-feature, and also benefits from a darker fairy-tale tone. Based on a collection of Finnish folk songs called The Kalevala, the story tells of another depressed village. The inhabitants await a sign that their blacksmith may forge a Sampo - a mill that magically dispenses gold along with flour and salt. An evil witch from the North Pole, Laoki, wants a Sampo too, so she kidnaps the blacksmith's sister, Annikki. The girl's brother and fiance then proceed on a mission to rescue both Annikki and the Four Winds, which Laoki has also imprisoned. Like Sadko, this film again features several startling fantasy set pieces. Laoki's abduction of Annikki, for example, is a very visually arresting scene in which she sends a black shroud into the breeze - the shroud drifts long and far and comes to rest as the sail on the mast of a boat Annikki is sitting in, whisking her away. One of the perils the witch has in wait for our heroes is a field of snakes. In another elaborate scene, the blacksmith forges a fiery red horse to trample the snakes. Late in the game, the film drags a bit as Laoki steals the sun from the village, but for the most part there is always something of interest onscreen. As with the other feature on the DVD, the picture quality of The Day the Earth Froze suffers from maddeningly shifting colors and a soft image.
The extras on the disc are sparse and consist of a Black-and-White trailer for The Day the Earth Froze and a stills gallery. Interestingly, the gallery features the American movie posters and lobby cards for both films, so one can see the ad campaigns that were engineered to disguise these charming folk tales for the matinee crowd. Seemingly, as long as the distributor could tout the word "Color" on the advertising, it didn't quite matter what the source material was. It is all too easy to imagine the kid dropped off by Mom to see a rousing matinee featuring a cool sci-fi adventure called The Day the Earth Froze, only to be confronted with a weird costume drama/fantasy featuring dubbed actors dressed as Russian peasants!
As they are, though, the films can be enjoyed on several different levels. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang had a crack at both The Magic Voyage of Sinbad and The Day the Earth Froze during the course of that series, and lacking their input here, one could easily supply their own snarky commentary track if desired. Taken at face value, though, these drastically Americanized versions of Sadko and Sampo still contain some amazing fantasy sequences that the altered contexts only partially dilute.
For more information about The Magic Voyage of Sinbad/The Day the Earth Froze, visit Image Entertainment. To order The Magic Voyage of Sinbad/The Day the Earth Froze, go to TCM Shopping.
by John M. Miller
