It would be churlish to censure Jason and the Golden Fleece – as this was called during its production – for any infidelity to Apollonius of Rhodes’ original third century BC text Argonautica. Indeed who is to say that Appolonius himself was faithful to the tale’s oral origins? Like William Morris’ 1867 novel The Life and Death of Jason, the text’s repeated interpolation is merely a ruse, allowing the odyssey’s thematic to be reiterated: that the quotidian obstacles within life are the eddy of Fate’s wake. Or as Ray Harryhausen’s sublime stop-motion animation illustrates, Fate falls in the form of an iron statue called Talos: providence as graceful, magnificent, yet saddening as the colossal wreck of Ozymandias’ statue. And anyway, can you really criticise a film whose locations were scouted by a one-eyed boatman called Boris the Bulgarian?

Whilst not the product of the happiest of shoots – director Don Chaffey stated he disliked producer Charles Schneer more than an ingrown toenail – the film remains the pinnacle of the peplum fantasy genre. Not even Mario Bava came close to creating the tonal complexity of that ill-boned nightmare called the Hydra’s Teeth sequence. By taking his iconic skeleton from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad to its existential apogee, Harryhausen depicts life as a terpsichorean death waltz in broad daylight: a Henry Fuseli nightmare choreographed by Hermes Pan. That the scene does not care to ameliorate the viewers’ fears of their own form’s fragility stands testament to the subtleties of Harryhausen’s craft, and how they elevate the script’s thematic limitations. Only Hayao Miyazaki has come close to Harryhausen’s decentrising of anthropocentricity, and his humble acceptance that there are larger forces at work – both within and without. Ray Harryhausen: as much a poet as Shelley, as much a God as Zeus. You make our bones sing.