The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was one of several US productions shot in Spain, and director Nathan Juaran gives some fascinating insights into what it was like making films in that country in the fifties in an interview in Issue #30 of Psychotronic.
… We shot that in Barcelona. There’s a bog body of water there, kind of a bay, and they have a lot of ships tied up along that bay, and one of them was a tourist attraction. Santa Maria, one of Columbus’s ships. It was a replica. It wasn’t a real ship. It was made for the tourist trade, and therefore had no keel. It had a cement bottom, but it didn’t act like a real keel. We had intended at one point to take that ship out to the open ocean to shoot the storm sequence, when the ship with Sinbad in it was supposed to be passing the sirens. So on our way to the breakwater, to get to the open sea, a liner came in and we were struck by the bow wave of the liner; so much so that we nearly capsized. The Spanish Commodore was out of his mind. He said stop the ship. Back to the harbour, the ship will never leave the harbour again and so on. So they towed us back to our spot and tied us up with a ship on either side of us with sails, and there was a line overhead carrying cold buckets on cable. You couldn’t shoot that way. You couldn’t shoot the sky without seeing another ship nearby, no matter what angle. It was almost impossible.
So there we were. The producer was very worried about what we were going to do. He ordered the fire department of Barcelona to come down to the pier, and they got a big wind machine and I ordered a big… like a big fishing pole with a big white flag at the end of it. It took a long time to get this organised. And I had this good, talented man who was a kind of stunt director [Italian Enzo Musumeci Greco], who I entrusted the pole, and I said: “Now look, I want you to keep this thing like the mast of a ship that was in a storm. Get the rhythym of it and don’t vary it.’ I told the man on the camera to watch that white flag, and when it went one way you were to go the other, and keep the movement exactly with the white flag. And then we had the fire department watch the flag, so they’d knowwhen to turn their hoses on and get the spray of the ocean. We had a wind machine also watch that white flag, and then the prop men would know when to throw things across the deck at one time, then throw them back again when the ship went the other way.
So we were all organised, and I couldn’t see any reason why we couldn’t shoot it. So we tried a take. Got the cameras up to speed, at the first take the water from the waves came up over the deck, the man in charge of the wind machine stepped back to avoid getting wet and stepped right into the propellor, into the machine. We heard three distinct slaps as the propellor hit his leather jacket. He fell down, I hollered cut, everyone ran over to see what they could do for him. The propellor made little marks on his back but didn’t even pierce his skin…
Couple of other interesting things about The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. It was partially filmed in Manzanares el Real in Madrid, where a huge amount of Italo-Spanish westerns were shot, and the cast includes a number of European character actors way down the credits. Notable among these are Portugese actor Virgilio Teixeira, who I’m guessing spoke English, as he often appeared in international, primarily English speaking productions (ie A Man Could Get Killed, Return of the Seven, The Fall of the Roman Empire).
Another interesting fiugure in the cast is Nino Falanga. Falanga was a Neopolitan and former rowing a swimming champion for Italy. He also appeared in several TV shows and films (including The Tenth Victim), before becoming a rather well-konwn caricaturist, rather like a kind of Italian version of Rolf Harris. He seems to have specialised in doing caricatures as part of a nightclub act, and gained the reputation of being “The World’s Fastest Cartoonist” and “The artist who evolved cartoon-drawing into Showbiz.”
Also worth noting is that Eugenio Martin, who later became one of the best filmmakers of Spanish B-Movies, is credited as assistant director. I’ll come back to stunt director Enzo Musumeci Greco in another post…