ON 12 JUNE 1981, TWO HEROES went whip-to-sword at the American box office. Their respective movies represented not just competing styles of heroism – one noble and toga-clad, the other morally ambiguous in a junglebattered leather jacket – but rival eras of filmmaking, the old guard of cinematic magic flexing against the new.
Raiders Of The Lost Ark may have been rooted in the breathless serial storytelling of the 1930s but it teamed George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the geeks with the golden touch who had redefined the blockbuster with Star Wars and Jaws. Clash Of The Titans, meanwhile, offered the timeless appeal of Greek myth and the stop-motion sorcery of Ray Harryhausen, who had spent a 40-year career chasing the wow he’d felt on first glimpsing King Kong in 1933.