The Magic Voyage of Sinbad (1953)

This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is a Russian film that is titled Sadko and was repackaged as a Sinbad film for its release in the United States. Which means a whole lot of people are going to profess their love for it despite the fact the film is not really all that good. The lead in this film is a blond dude who likes to play his harp and give speeches. He also looks nothing like Sinbad the sailor as the only thing the two heroes have in common is their beards. I guess their was no other hero the United States distributor could think of when they were translating this from Russian to English. It is kind of like how they repackaged a few of the Italian hero Maciste as Hercules, but those two had way more in common than this guy and Sinbad. As I stated I do not find this film all that good, but as with many Russian films from the communist era, people are going to claim it is golden and rave about it. It is no better than films made here from this era and at times it is much worse, but hey, it's Russian it has to be good! To be fair, once they finally go sailing the film picks up a bit, but to get to that point is torture as one must endure speech after speech from our hero! Seems they spent the entire budget on the India scene too as it is the best looking and done part in the film. After that you get to watch the men 'sail' in front of an obvious screen, a storm batter an obvious model ship and a strange puppet show underwater! The story has Sadko returning to his native home where the merchants are apparently not sharing their wealth. So Sadko does this and that to try and get the merchants to finance his trip to find the bird of happiness which they scoff at. He plays his harp at a lake which gets the attention of Neptune's daughter and she tells him she will give him golden fish. He makes a deal with the merchants, if he catches said fish they will give him their wares and if he fails they can behead him. After more stuff like this, they finally launch they expedition and the movie finally takes off as they battle vikings and then make their way to India all to find the bird of happiness. Sadko even ends up in Neptune's crazy undersea kingdom.This film was featured on the riff show Mystery Science Theater 3000 and it made for a funny episode. Once again though the laughs did not come at a good pace until the trip was finally in full swing. It just takes so long for Sadko to get ready to go anywhere! However, once they do get a move on it is a much more enjoyable film and episode. The highlight being the undersea kingdom as it is full of a lot of wacky stuff, though that one creepy bird was pretty wacky too. My favorite part though was when the pigeon somehow made it to Sadko while he was underwater and Joel asked, "How does that happen?" So, no, this film is not really all that good. Perhaps it is better in its native language, but I do not think restoring the original Russian version is going to make those speeches any more exciting or make the effects during some of those later scenes any better. Seriously, if it is Russian, it does not mean the film is automatically good. I think the film they riffed, The Magic Sword which was American was a better film than this one was and it had better effects too.

This film is beyond description......Yeah, it's that bad!Let's put it this way, if Ed Wood had been making films in the Soviet Union and had had a big budget.........Ta daaaaa! "Sadko" would likely be the outcome.This film in it's original Russian format was overly talky - even for a Russian film...The dubbed version just goes on and on and on....Yakkety yak.......Some of the most inept rewrites I've ever heard/seen.....Lotsa' boring goody goody Soviet propaganda messages here....Especially in the opening part of the film with the nasty guys with all the goodies are keepin' it from all the deserving poor....Awwwwww! Enter Sinbad/Sadko and woosh! The nasty types head for the hills and Sadco/Sinbad sees to it that all the goods are properly distributed among the poor.......How quaintly soviet!Sadco sets off on a quest that takes him 'round the world in search of goodies to bring back to all those deserving peasants .......He meets the "uber budgie" in the form of a half bird/half woman.......Rather creepy looking.....Kind of like sitting through the end of Tod Browning's "Freaks" for the first time, but not as satisfying.The highlight (if you can call it that!) of the film is when Sadko comes up against a couple of totally twisted Hindu cats that look like a pair of New York drag queens - oh pleeeeeezzzzze! These clowns wear enough makeup to make Tammy Faye Baker Blush, in addition, their dialog is an absolute riot......It's as if the voice/over guys thought the same about their appearance and actions and played them to the campy hilt.Overall the film seems to meander in such a way that screams: "lookit all the money we spent on this gem, praise Lenin!" Big scenes, sprawling vistas would make a nice travelogue if it weren't for the plodding script and banal dialog....I can't imagine those drones with MST3K even wasting their so-called "talent" on this one, it doesn't need any embellishment. As Jay Sherman of "The Critic" fame was known to say: "It stinks!"Robert Hill

It's interesting that whether people liked or disliked this film seems to vary depending on whether it was seen in the original Russian, or the English version. It's NOT based on Sinbad, but on Russian folktales.Did anyone else notice the similarities to "Alexander Nevsky"? Specifically, the hero gathering a band of stalwart Russians (mostly drawn from the peasant or working classes) to defeat a ruling elite. There seemed to be many cinematic homages to Eisenstein as well.

_Sadko_ is a masterpiece of cinematic fantasy - there doesn't seem to be one frame that doesn't enthral, and the recreations of medieval Ukraine and India are unsurpassed by any other historical/fantasy film. The dubbed American version, _The Magic Voyage of Sinbad_, is a bit of a travesty, but I recently saw the complete Russian version with subtitles at a Ptushko retrospective which was going around the country, so it may soon be possible to finally get the real thing on video.