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THREE-WEEK RETROSPECTIVE OF THE GREAT JAPANESE DIRECTOR COMMEMORATING 110th ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH & 50th ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH AT FILM FORUM, JUNE 7-27

A 3-week, 36-film festival celebrating the great Japanese director YASUJIRO OZU (1903-1963) - a complete retrospective of his extant films - will run at Film Forum from Friday, June 7 through Thursday, June 27. The festival, presented with support from Japan Foundation, commemorates the 110th anniversary of Ozu's birth and the 50th anniversary of his death.

Although his career spanned thirty-five years, Yasujiro Ozu only achieved acclaim in the West after his death, perhaps because of his status as Japan's most honored director - with six Kinema Jumpo "Best One" awards (Japan's Best Picture Oscar equivalent) - as in spite of it. Throughout most of his career, he worked in the shomin-geki genre, simple stories about simple people, his favorite themes: families, fathers, the remembered joys of college life, none of which he himself had experienced.

His filming style was among the most eccentric and austere in world cinema: little-to-no camera movement, the total absence of fades or dissolves - straight cutting from scene to scene only, the unvarying camera angle - always from a low angle; the use of unpeopled "still life" shots as bridges between sequences; creating in its three-dimensionality, in its sense of other life lived beyond the screen frame, even beyond the film's own duration, a sense of plot islands floating in a sea of life, informed by the benevolent world-view of one of the most idiosyncratic and greatest of filmmakers.

Ozu was born on December 12, 1903 in Tokyo. An unruly boy and indifferent student, Ozu's education did not go beyond middle school. At age 20, after a failed attempt as an assistant teacher, he was introduced by his uncle to the head of the Shochiku Film Company, where he was hired as an assistant cameraman. Within four years he'd make his directorial debut and become a prolific director for the studio, turning out 35 silents (many of them lost) before making his first talkie in 1936. Ozu's silents spanned a number of genres, including family and student comedies (I Was Born, But..., Days of Youth, I Flunked, But...); romantic melodramas (Woman of Tokyo, A Story of Floating Weeds); and gangster pictures (Walk Cheerfully, Dragnet Girl and That Night's Wife). Ozu's twelve extant silents (plus fragments of otherwise-lost films) will be screened in the series, each with live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner.

Although talkies were introduced in Japan as early as 1931 (four years behind Hollywood), Ozu continued to make silents until 1936, making him one of the world's last silent film directors. Undoubtedly his most famous silent film is I Was Born, But... his very first Kinema Jumpo winner, about two boys - the younger played by Ozu child great "Tokkankozo" - who go on a hunger strike when they see their dad Tatsuo Saito toadying to his boss (in the 1950s, Ozu remade it in color as Ohayo). Ozu's first sound film, Kagamijishi, a short subject about the Kabuki-za troupe in Tokyo, is also his rarest. It will be shown in the series in a 16mm print imported from Japan.

In 1937, Ozu was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army and spent the next decade in and out of the military working in the film propaganda department. Upon returning to Tokyo in 1946, he rejoined the film industry, directing the masterpieces he's best known for today, among them Tokyo Story, Late Spring, Floating Weeds, and his final film, An Autumn Afternoon. He died on December 12, 1963 - his 60th birthday.

Film Forum's OZU festival opens on June 7/8 (Friday/Saturday) with Late Spring, which "inaugurated Ozu's majestic late period: it's here that he decisively renounces melodrama (and, indeed, most surface action of any kind) and lets his camera settle into the still, long-take contemplation of his gently drawn characters" (Dave Kehr).

Late Spring was Ozu's first film featuring Setsuko Hara, the great actress who would star in five more of his films. Co-starring with Hara - as her absent-minded professor father - is actor Chishu Ryu, who was in more of the director's films than any other actor: 52 in all. The first entry in the Ozu/Hara "Noriko" trilogy (followed by Early Summer and Tokyo Story), Late Spring was Ozu's first post-war Kinema Jumpo winner. Although Hara's three "Norikos" are distinct, unrelated characters, they're linked primarily by her characters' status as single women in post-war Japan.

Tokyo Story, described by Donald Richie as "so Japanese and at the same time so personal, and hence so universal in its appeal, that it becomes a masterpiece", portrays the generation gap in post-war Japan as an elderly couple (Chishu Ryu, who was only 49 at the time, and Chieko Higashiyama) are shunted aside when they visit their children in Tokyo, and are befriended only by their daughter-in-law, continually-smiling Setsuko Hara. Tokyo Story was voted the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound's 2012 Directors' Poll and has appeared several times on the BFI's "Greatest Films" poll, most recently ranking as #3 in 2012.

All films will screen in archival 35mm prints (except the extremely rare Kagamijishi). The series is dedicated to the memory of the person most responsible for introducing Ozu to the West: film historian, novelist, curator and filmmaker Donald Richie, who died this past February 19 at age 88. Film Forum will host a memorial tribute to Mr. Richie on June 26 at 11 a.m.; the public is welcome on a first-come, first-served basis.

For more information, links and showtimes, visit www.filmforum.org

If there's one thing film fans love more than movies itself, it's movie trivia. Turner Classic Movies has now brought the ultimate movie trivia game to mobile with the brand new TCM Movie Trivia app. Now available for iPhone, iPad and iPod in the Apple iTunes store, the beautifully designed app is free to download and play, with in-app purchases and rewards available to unlock more exciting quiz packs.

With the TCM Movie Trivia app, fans can test their classic film knowledge and learn more about their favorites by answering hundreds of fun and challenging questions about classic movies, actors and actresses. Questions cover a wide variety of genres and topics, including Pop Culture Cinema, Musicals & Romance, Tough Guys and Behind the Camera. Many types of questions are featured, including multiple choice questions, image recognition, image sequencing, mix-and-match, fill-in-the-blank and more.

Among the many other features of the TCM Movie Trivia app, players can start and stop anytime with the pause function. They can also compete against friends and other players through Apple Game Center integration. In addition, players can share scores with friends and family through social media.

Based on the just-concluded 2013 Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs, I'd highly recommend making plans now to attend the 2014 edition. This annual four-day retreat into the alluring darkness of film noir -- held, paradoxically, in the sun-drenched desert oasis of Palm Springs, Calif. -- is hugely enjoyable, relaxed, low-key fun. Yet it's also of serious interest to fans and scholars alike. Of the twelve films shown this year, in a 72-hour period from Thursday night, May 16, through Sunday afternoon, May 19, six featured extraordinary special guests engaging in Q&A following the screenings, and almost all the films were shown in crisp 35mm prints, on a large screen at the comfy Camelot Theater. Even the popcorn was good.

The festival has been held every May since 2001, when it was founded by Palm Springs resident and writer Arthur Lyons. Lyons died in 2008, but the festival has continued strongly with leadership from film historian Alan K. Rode (producer and host of the festival since 2008), veteran casting director Marvin Paige, Palm Springs residents Ric and Rozene Supple, and the San Francisco-based Film Noir Foundation, which also presents annual noir festivals in Hollywood, San Francisco and Chicago.

The opening-night movie was Three Strangers (1946), written by John Huston and Howard Koch and originally intended as a quasi-sequel/follow-up to Huston's earlier The Maltese Falcon (1941). But in the end, only two actors from Falcon appeared in this film -- Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet -- resulting in a movie that has a bit of the look and feel of Falcon but stands on its own. The most interesting connection is actually the presence of Geraldine Fitzgerald, who was originally offered the part of Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, ultimately played by Mary Astor. In Three Strangers, Fitzgerald plays a femme fatale who comes pretty close to the manipulative, double-crossing, villainous Brigid, thereby giving a sense of how she might have come across in Falcon. As Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller said, Mary Astor may have been superb, but based on Three Strangers, "Geraldine Fitzgerald would have been the ultimate Brigid O'Shaughnessy." Fitzgerald certainly is superb here, and the movie, directed atmospherically by Jean Negulesco, is well worth a look next time it plays on TCM. The fable-like story concerns the intersecting lives of three strangers who share in a winning lottery ticket, and the film has the feel of an anthology movie with its separate stories that eventually overlap. One of its themes is greed, anticipating Huston's next film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).

Following the screening, Muller interviewed director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the son of Geraldine Fitzgerald, who found out late in his life that his father was Orson Welles (though he suspected it from an early age). It was the result of an affair when Fitzgerald was part of Welles' Mercury Theater. Lindsay-Hogg recounts all this and more in his memoir, Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age. He also aptly described Peter Lorre as "the acting equivalent of a baseball pitcher who throws a knuckleball. You never know where it's going to end up. He was one of the most eccentric actors God ever created. And one of the best."

Day 2 of the festival began with Alias Nick Beal (1949), much more of a rarity and an outstanding rediscovery. It's a Faustian, allegorical tale of DA Thomas Mitchell declaring he'd sell his soul to the devil in order to put away a local mobster. Well, the devil shows up to collect -- in the form of Ray Milland -- and proceeds to underhandedly manipulate various characters, including a wonderful Audrey Totter, whom he wins over to his side with clothes, jewels and a swanky free apartment. Director John Farrow, who turned down The Great Gatsby (1949) with Alan Ladd in order to make this picture, provides gorgeous atmospherics, with Milland emerging out of the fog in the darkness and mysteriously popping up in all sorts of evocative sets. The supernatural element isn't too heavy-handed, but as Eddie Muller pointed out, Farrow's Catholicism made him especially good with issues of sin and guilt. Muller also noted that while he will be hosting a night of film noirs on TCM this June that were written by screenwriter Jonathan Latimer, Alias Nick Beal was unable to be included -- meaning that for the time being fans can only catch it at festivals like this one.

Mary Ryan, Detective (1949) can really only be called marginally "noir," but it's a 68-minute slice of good fun as Marsha Hunt plays a young, perky detective who goes undercover to bring down a shoplifting ring. It was designed to be the first of a series of films that would star Hunt as Mary Ryan, but her subsequent McCarthy-era blacklisting significantly dimmed her career. Speaking with Alan K. Rode after the screening, the 95-year-old actress, charming and beautiful as ever, said she had no regrets, and held the house as she relayed stories from the studio era. At one point, Rode said, "At Paramount in the '30s, you worked with people like John Wayne" -- and Hunt deadpanned, "There were no people like John Wayne," drawing a big laugh.

One of the most frightening and disturbing movies ever made, Try and Get Me! (1950) was recently restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive with funding provided by the Film Noir Foundation. The restoration played earlier this year at the San Francisco and Los Angeles film noir festivals, as well as at the TCM Classic Film Festival, and in Palm Springs it again filled the house and unnerved the audience with its tremendous power. Written by Jo Pagano and based on his novel The Condemned, the Cy Endfield-directed drama stars Frank Lovejoy and Lloyd Bridges as a criminal duo whose eventual capture leads to an unrelenting outpouring of mob violence that has not lost one ounce of its horror. It's also a still-topical comment on the power of the media to rile up the public with a simplistic, ill-informed take on an actually far more complex reality. The film performed badly at the box office and deserves to be far better known today. Hopefully, the restoration will help accomplish just that.

Following Try and Get Me! was Edge of Doom (1950), creating a one-two punch of grim, downbeat, pitch-black drama like no other. But for fans of film noir, that's a good thing! Edge of Doom is not as viscerally gut-wrenching as Try and Get Me!, but it is a literally darker film overall. Farley Granger spends the movie walking around New York (in reality downtown L.A.) mostly at night in a film that rarely sees the light of day. Granger's mother has died, and on his quest to secure a grand funeral for her, despite his impoverished circumstances, his fury at the world results in his accidentally killing a priest. And now he is on the run from the law. In the first-rate supporting cast, Dana Andrews plays another priest, Paul Stewart plays a neighbor in Granger's tenement, and Robert Keith is superb as a police captain. In a smaller role is Joan Evans, who was present to speak after the screening with film historian Foster Hirsch.

Evans remembered that director Mark Robson was focused more on the technical production than on the actors, and she and Hirsch discussed at length the involvement of Granger and producer Samuel Goldwyn, who had discovered Evans and cast her in three pictures. Edge of Doom was the only film noir that Goldwyn ever produced; he bought the novel at the insistence of his wife, who liked the story's affirmation of the Catholic faith. But he never really liked the movie. And Farley Granger detested it. "He had a special animosity for it," said Hirsch, "and never said a kind word about the film or Goldwyn. He said, 'This film drove all our careers to the edge of doom.'" Nonetheless, Granger's intensity sustains our interest, and the film casts a significant spell. Upon its initial release, Edge of Doom was a disaster; the downbeat material was not well-received, nor did Granger's many female fans appreciate seeing their hero in such a grim tale. Goldwyn pulled the film, scrapped half of it, reshot and reshaped the story, added a little romantic subplot with a character played by Mala Powers to try and appease the female fans, and made the overall story somewhat less depressing -- but upon rerelease the picture still flopped.

Day 3 kicked off with High Tide (1947), a Monogram gem whose recent restoration by UCLA was also funded by the Film Noir Foundation, and continued with the fellow poverty-row title Strange Illusion (1945), a low-budget gem from director Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour [1945], Ruthless [1948]). Appropriately labeled by Alan K. Rode as "Hamlet on steroids," it stars 21-year-old Jimmy Lydon as a young man who has a strange dream (or, yes, illusion) that an unknown man is walking with him, his sister and his recently widowed mother -- and that this man is taking over the family and had something to do with the father's death. The man turns out to be Warren William (in one of his final films), who with his psychiatrist and business partner (Regis Toomey) does seem to be up to no good, and bits and pieces of Lydon's dream start to come true. This loose (to put it mildly) adaptation of Hamlet boasts intriguing style and visual flourishes from Ulmer, and is well worth a look.

Jimmy Lydon, who is about to turn 90, took the stage afterward and engaged in a freewheeling, energetic discussion of his career. He related how he learned on the job both on stage and in film, out of necessity because he was at the time the only breadwinner in his family of nine. "I got star billing in the first picture I ever made [Back Door to Heaven, 1939] and I didn't know anything about picture acting!" he exclaimed. Mentored and signed by the great director William K. Howard, Lydon was the only child actor at RKO for a spell, and used his time there to educate himself in all aspects of filmmaking, and later became a successful producer. As an actor, Lydon gave Elizabeth Taylor her first screen kiss, in Cynthia (1947), and scored as the title character in the long-running "Henry Aldrich" franchise at Paramount. Lydon revealed that he still to this day gets a dozen fan letters a month asking only about Henry Aldrich, with one or two actually addressed to Henry Aldrich!

Following the fine boxing noir Champion (1949) starring Kirk Douglas, Day 3 ended with Murder, Inc. (1960), a brutal remake of The Enforcer (1951) set in the world of 1930s organized crime. It stars Peter Falk in an Oscar-nominated screen debut, as well as Stuart Whitman, who was on hand to speak about his career afterwards.

The final day began with the first-rate The Suspect (1944), a near-perfect "period noir" from director Robert Siodmak that for some reason has fallen off the radar over the years, especially in comparison to his far better-known noir titles like The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949). Charles Laughton stars here in one of his own favorite movies as Philip, married in turn-of-the-century London to a wife from hell like none other, Cora (Rosalind Ivan). Philip tries hard, and genuinely, to make things work with Cora, but she is too horrible a human being to even consider budging an inch. So the lonely Laughton meets and starts an affair with the young and sweet Mary (Ella Raines), and it's a huge accomplishment that Bertram Millhauser's screenplay makes Mary's love for the older, rotund Philip eminently believable. When Cora finds out about the affair, and threatens to bring down not only Philip but Mary's reputation, too, Philip turns to the course of action that characters in film noir tend to turn to -- murder. But that is hardly the end of this compulsively engaging movie. If ever there was a movie in which the audience wants a character to commit murder, and still roots for him all the way, even as he digs himself in deeper, The Suspect is it. And while movies in the "post-Code" era had only a limited number of ways of handling murderers, The Suspect is so skillfully devised that the ending still feels satisfying.

Another Robert Siodmak picture from the same year followed: Christmas Holiday (1944), starring Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly. One of the most unusual movies in all of noir, from its title to its unlikely casting, Christmas Holiday is a genuine, rarely-screened curiosity that pits Gene Kelly as a gambler married to innocent Deanna Durbin; living with them is Kelly's domineering mother (Gale Sondergaard, in another bit of weird casting). When Kelly ends up in jail, Durbin becomes a singer in a bordello (yes), where she meets a soldier stranded on his furlough, and relates her story to him via flashback. Past catches up to present for the final climax. The framing device with the WWII soldier may have been a key reason this film resonated with audiences; it tied the story to their direct present-day experiences and mindsets, yet still allowed them to enter another world within the movie that had nothing to do with World War II. The bulk of the movie therefore became, in a sense, poignant escapism both for the soldier hearing Durbin's story and for the film audience.

This was touted as Durbin's first adult role, and she is given the chance to sing two songs here, though neither drives the plot. This is no musical. Watching Kelly in a rare straight, sinister role is fascinating. He is convincing, even as he moves through the frame with dancer-like precision. It was six years before he'd be cast in another drama, Black Hand (1950), and it's a pity he didn't get many more such opportunities. Present after the screening for a Q&A with Alan K. Rode was Kelly's widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, who said her husband told her he had thought this Somerset Maugham novel to be unfilmable. He didn't want to do the picture but had no choice, as he was loaned to Universal to make it in exchange for Turhan Bey, whom MGM wanted for Dragon Seed (1944). Deanna Durbin, in fact, specifically asked Universal to acquire Kelly for this part. And in the end, Durbin would cite Christmas Holiday as her favorite film while Gene Kelly would cite it as among his least favorites! He joked that the film's commercial success was due to the fact that "everybody thought it was a musical with me and Deanna Durbin."

Mrs. Kelly also spoke eloquently about Gene Kelly's overall career, revealing that he wanted to be remembered most for his innovations behind the camera: his choreography, his directing, and his accomplishments in placing dance on screen in new and innovative ways. Mrs. Kelly, who is writing a biography of her husband, has been traveling the world in recent months presenting a one-woman show about his life and career, complete with film clips and actual props from his films, and there seemed to be great interest from those assembled in bringing the show to Palm Springs. (More information about the Kelly shows can be found at www.genekelly.org).

After one more show -- John Huston's masterful heist drama The Asphalt Jungle (1950) -- the festival was put to bed for another year. The audiences throughout the four days were fantastic -- extremely respectful, quiet and attentive during all the screenings. All the films were sold close to capacity, but one never felt rushed or uncomfortably crowded. The spacing between start times was just enough to grab a snack or meal if one wanted to see all the offerings. In all, this was a professionally produced four-day festival providing great value for its cost, and classic movie fans planning a trip to a future edition will not be disappointed.

For more information about the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, go to arthurlyonsfilmnoir.ning.com.

By Jeremy Arnold

DICK DINMAN SAYS GOODBYE TO JONATHAN WINTERS (Part One): The first of three shows saluting the innovative comedic brilliance of the late Jonathan Winters opens on a serious and poignant note as Jonathan reveals to producer/host Dick Dinman in unflinchingly candid detail his rough upbringing with an alcoholic father and loveless mother, his first major successes, his self-imposed stays in mental institutions on two separate occasions and his rebirth and rediscovery in the all-star comedy classic IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD.

DICK DINMAN SAYS GOODBYE TO JONATHAN WINTERS (Part Two): The late, great Jonathan Winters has producer/host Dick Dinman in stitches as he hilariously shares his experiences playing two roles in the bizarre comedy about the funeral business THE LOVED ONE, as well as his less than enthusiastic take on modern comedy and the political scene (which includes his spot-on impression of then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Dick recalls his somewhat embarrassing first in-person encounter with Jonathan.

DICK DINMAN SAYS GOODBYE TO JONATHAN WINTERS (Part Three): Producer/host Dick Dinman's tribute to the late Jonathan Winters concludes as Jonathan discusses his friendship with the producer/director (Stanley Kramer) who saved his career, reveals his love for painting as well as his disdain for certain individuals whose art appreciation is suspect, his wariness about those who loudly "come out of the closet", his love of the state of Maine, and the type of individual that scares him the most.

The award-winning DICK DINMAN'S DVD CLASSICS CORNER ON THE AIR is the only weekly half hour show (broadcast every Friday 1:00-1:30 P.M. EST on WMPGFM) devoted to Golden Age Movie Classics as they become available on DVD. Your producer/host Dick Dinman includes a generous selection of classic scenes, classic film music and one-on-one interviews with stars, producers, and directors. To hear these as well as other DVD CLASSICS CORNER ON THE AIR shows please go to the online archive.

A towering figure in the history and evolution of motion picture special effects, Ray Harryhausen created some of the most memorable creatures ever to stalk, slither and sail across movie screens in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. A tutelage under effects pioneers George Pal and Willis O'Brien inspired Harryhausen's own stop motion animation, which gave vivid life to aliens and monsters of myth in such iconic fantasy and science fiction films as "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953), "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" (1958), "One Million Years B.C." (1966) and "Clash of the Titans" (1981). Harryhausen's imaginative work would later serve as inspiration for generations of filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, James Cameron and countless others, all of whom paid tribute to him in their own fantasy film exploits.

Born Raymond Frederick Harryhausen in Los Angeles, CA on June 29, 1920, he was an avid reader of science fiction as a youth. His fascination with animation grew from a screening of "King Kong" (1933); he could not fathom how the giant ape moved, as he knew it was not a man in a suit and it moved too freely to be a puppet. Harryhausen soon learned that the secret behind the film was stop-motion animation, the process whereby a model is photographed one frame at a time, with minor adjustments between shots; when the footage is projected at normal speed, the model appears to move on its own. Harryhausen was so entranced by the technique and with its pioneer, Willis O'Brien, who almost single-handedly provided the effects for "Kong," that he set out to try it himself. His father encouraged him by building a studio for him in the corner of the garage, and his mother donated a coat to provide fur for a model of a bear. Harryhausen purchased a movie camera and began fooling around. By his late teens, he started taking night courses in motion picture photography at USC, where he learned about special effects, matte shots and multiple exposures. He also enrolled in art classes, studying sculpture and drawing, in part to ensure he had another career to fall back on.

He need not have worried. Harryhausen combined strong technical expertise with a natural talent for understanding movement and behavior. In 1940, he embarked on a special project; what was to be a full-length film entitled "Evolution," consisting entirely of stop-motion animated animals. The scope of the project eventually overwhelmed Harryhausen, who was also dissuaded when he saw Walt Disney's "Fantasia" (1940) and determined it was useless to continue. However, he did show some of his work to director George Pal, who hired him right away to work on his "Puppetoons" shorts. During World War II, Harryhausen was drafted into the Army Signal Corp, where he used his animation skills to make training films. After he was discharged at the end of the war, he returned to his home studio, where he made a short film, "Mother Goose Stories" (1946), which he sold to an independent producer for enough money that he could continue on to several additional short fairy tales, including "The Story of Little Red Riding Hood" (1949), "Hansel and Gretel" (1951) and "The Story of King Midas" (1953).

Harryhausen's career then took a big step forward when he contacted his hero O'Brien, with hopes to break in to the business. O'Brien was impressed with his work, hiring him to work as his assistant on another film about a giant ape, called "Mighty Joe Young" (1949). Written and directed by the same creative team as "Kong," the fantasy-drama, about a giant African ape who follows the girl he loves (Terry Moore) to America, featured more complex special effects than "Kong," and O'Brien's role as supervisor was to sort out the various problems that arose with the animation, while Harryhausen executed the majority of the actual effects. Though not regarded with the same level of admiration as "Kong," "Mighty Joe Young" was a box office hit and earned an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

Harryhausen worked sporadically for the next few years, as projects started and stopped, and he returned to his studio to continue working on his fairy tale projects in the interim. He then met producer Charles Schneer, and began a fruitful relationship that would last several decades. The re-release of "Kong" in 1952 kicked off a monster movie craze in Hollywood, and Schneer and Harryhausen began production on a feature titled "The Monster Beneath the Sea," which borrowed heavily from the plot of "Kong." Upon hearing that Harryhausen's friend, fantasy author Ray Bradbury, had sold a story to The Saturday Evening Post about an aquatic dinosaur that is summoned to the surface by the song of a fog horn, they quickly convinced Warner Bros. to purchase the rights to the story. Bradbury's short tale, "The Fog Horn," became the nucleus of Harryhausen's first effort as a solo animator, Eugene Lourie's "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms." An effective monster movie about a four-legged dinosaur (a fictitious species called a Rhedosaurs) awakened from Arctic hibernation by nuclear tests run amok in New York City, the film was a massive success for the studio, and Harryhausen's creature wowed audiences with its lifelike movements. The Rhedosaurus was a test run for his new technique, which combined images by projecting live action elements onto a miniature set, in front of which models were animated, with still another layer of live action matted onto the foreground, effectively sandwiching the models in the frame. The process, which eliminated the use of an expensive optical print, was later known in his color efforts as "DynaMation."

The success of "Beast" led to more science fiction work for Harryhausen, and he delivered some of the most indelible images of the genre's boom in the 1950s. For Columbia's "It Came from Beneath the Sea" (1955), Harryhausen created a colossal octopus that terrorized San Francisco, and in one startling sequence, pulled down the Golden Gate Bridge. Amusingly, the film's budget-conscious producer, Sam Katzman, only allotted enough money to animate six of the creature's arms, resulting in what Harryhausen later dubbed a "hextapus." In "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" (1956), Harryhausen unleashed a fleet of deadly UFOs on Washington D.C., which laid waste to the American military and in one jaw-dropping scene, brought down the Washington Monument. And in "20 Million Miles to Earth" (1957), Harryhausen created a lizard-like alien from Venus - dubbed the Ymir in press materials - that wreaked havoc in the streets of Rome before facing down soldiers in the Coliseum. As in all of his films, the show-stopper in "Earth" is a battle between the Ymir and a rogue elephant, which would set the tone for future monster rallies in his subsequent efforts.

Harryhausen also re-teamed with his mentor Willis O'Brien for a sequence in the 1956 feature-length documentary "The Animal World." Producer Irwin Allen had given O'Brien little time to conceive the film's opening, which was set in prehistoric times, and so the veteran called on Harryhausen to help him complete the eight-minute scene, which became the high point of the entire picture. All of Harryhausen's work had been in black and white, and he was reluctant to make the jump to color because of the difficulty in maintaining proper color balances with the DynaMation process. Producer Schneer convinced him otherwise for their next effort, "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" (1958), and the results earned him not only his greatest film success of the 1950s, but a four-year contract with Columbia to produce more epic fantasies. Although somewhat stodgy (from a script and acting standpoint) by modern standards, Harryhausen's work is nothing short of spectacular, and includes some of his best-loved creations, including a fire-breathing dragon, the two-headed monster bird known as the Roc, a snake woman (inspired by a belly dancer he saw in Beirut), and a combative Cyclops who grapples furiously with the dragon. The film was later cited by Dennis Muren, head of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, as his inspiration for a career in special effects.

Harryhausen continued to amaze with his subsequent Columbia efforts, which included "The Three Worlds of Gulliver" (1960) and the Jules Verne adaptation "The Mysterious Island" (1961), which added a massive crab, an industrious honey bee, a giant mollusk and a prehistoric bird to his menagerie. But it was his next film that elevated Harryhausen to legendary status. "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963) featured some of his most complex and challenging work to date, including the seven-headed serpent the Hydra and Talos, a giant bronze statute that comes to life to battle Jason and his men. However, both paled in comparison to a lengthy sequence in which a band of skeletons rise from the ground to wage a pitched sword battle with Jason. Completed by Harryhausen solo over a four-month period, it was a feat never again attempted by another animator, and rarely surpassed in any special effects-driven film.

Sadly, neither "Jason" nor his next effort, an adaptation of H.G. Wells' "The First Men in the Moon" (1964) was a box office success, leaving Harryhausen to freelance for the remainder of the 1960s and early 1970s. England's Hammer Films hired him to contribute some impressive dinosaurs to their remake of "One Million Years B.C." (1966), which scored largely on the strength of its leading lady, Raquel Welch, who appeared a fur bikini throughout the picture. Its success brought Harryhausen back to America for "The Valley of Gwangi" (1969), a personal project storyboarded by Willis O'Brien about a dinosaur discovered in Mexico during the early years of the 20th century. Though Harryhausen's work was typically top-notch, the film was buried by Warner Bros. on the bottom of a double bill and ultimately missed its target audience of young adults.

Harryhausen bounced back in the early '70s when Schneer convinced Columbia to revive Sinbad for a pair of new feature adventures. Shot in Europe for a remarkably low sum of money, "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1973) was a worthy successor to "Seventh Voyage" and offered a dazzling array of creatures, including a club-wielding centaur, a tiny demon created from the blood of the film's chief villain played by Tom Baker, whose performance earned him his celebrated stint as "Doctor Who" (BBC, 1963-1989; 2005- ), and a seven-armed, sword-wielding statue of the Hindu goddess Kali that evoked both Talos and the skeletons from "Jason." Its success was followed by another hit, "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" (1977), which featured among its monstrous cast a giant walrus, a huge wasp (shades of the bee from "Mysterious Island"), and a cave-dwelling troglodyte that fought to the death with a saber-toothed tiger.

But gradually a new generation of visual effects artists, including stop-motion animators who had entered the business after seeing Harryhausen's work, emerged onto the scene, resulting in less emphasis on the work of a single artist for effects-driven movies. Undaunted, Harryhausen launched into a new film, "Clash of the Titans" (1981), which drew its storyline from the Greek myth of Perseus. Originally a modestly budgeted effort, MGM poured money into the film to hire an all-star cast, which included Burgess Meredith, Maggie Smith, Ursula Andress, Claire Bloom and a magnificently bearded and bewigged Laurence Olivier as Zeus. Their presence, however, was eclipsed by Harryhausen's creations, which included the winged horse Pegasus, a snake-headed Medusa, and a towering sea creature called the Kraken, which bore a distinct facial resemblance to the Ymir. Although a decent success at the box office, "Titans" convinced studio executives that Harryhausen's stop-motion technique was a costly and time-consuming process, especially when compared to more elaborate work done in recent special effects-driven films like "Star Wars" (1977). Faced with disinterest by Hollywood as a whole, Harryhausen and Schneer retired from filmmaking in the early 1980s.

However, he remained far from inactive in the decades that followed. He released several books devoted to his work, and supervised the release of his films on VHS, laserdisc and DVD. His work was honored with a 1992 Lifetime Achievement Oscar by the countless filmmaking professionals who had been influenced by his films. The award kicked off a renewed interest in his work and Harryhausen toured festivals, museums and colleges with his films and models, leaving a trail of sci-fi geeks, both young and old, waiting breathlessly to both meet him and hear him speak. He even returned to filmmaking in a limited capacity. In 2002, several filmmakers collaborated to help him finish "The Story of the Tortoise & the Hare," the fifth and final of his fairy tales, originally begun in 1952. The film won a 2003 Annie Award, and inspired Harryhausen to return to producing with surprising vigor for a man in his eighth decade. In 2005, he not only oversaw the release of a two-DVD set that compiled all of his non-feature efforts, but he also released colorized versions of his black-and-white films (citing that they were always intended as color pictures) and began work on a new series of short movies; this time based on works by Edgar Allan Poe. Harryhausen also worked on a colorized release of "Kong" director Meriam C. Cooper's "She" (1935), and furnished the artwork for a series of comic book sequels to some of his greatest film efforts.

(Courtesy of TCM Database)