Jason and the Argonauts

Jason and the Argonauts (1963) is Don Chaffey's adventure fantasy you can watch online on iFILM. It retells the Greek myth of a sailor who gathers a crew of heroes to chase the Golden Fleece.

Jason sails home to Thessaly to reclaim a throne taken from him, but first he must bring back the Fleece from the edge of the known world. He launches the Argo, fills it with the finest fighters of Greece, and heads out to sea while the gods of Olympus shove mortals around like pieces on a board. In his path stand the living bronze giant Talos, a seven-headed hydra, and an army of skeletons that claws its way up out of the soil. Todd Armstrong and Nancy Kovack lead the cast, with Honor Blackman and Niall MacGinnis as scheming deities.

The film's heart is Ray Harryhausen's frame-by-frame animation. The closing skeleton duel took months to shoot and still astonishes. Bernard Herrmann's score gives it a tense, almost ritual pulse. A benchmark of pre-digital adventure cinema. Stream Jason and the Argonauts (1963) online on iFILM.