The Golden Arrow (1962)

The Golden Arrow is a 1962 Italian Arabian Nights adventure/romance directed by the usually reliable Antonio Margheriti.

I guess, given the release date, that I was expecting something with more of the flavour of the wonderful Italian peplums. What you actually get is something rather blander and more wholesome. It’s like freshly baked bread, if you like freshly baked bread.

The first thing that strikes the viewer is that the plot seems very familiar indeed. That’s because the plot is essentially that of the magnificent 1924 Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad with a few bits from the very very fine 1940 British remake as well. Both those movies are a whole lot better than this one.

Hassan (Tab Hunter) is the leader of a band of thieves. Their latest caper is the kidnapping of the beautiful princess of Damascus, Jamila (Rossana Podestà). She will bring a rich ransom. In the course of the kidnapping Hassan finds himself competing in a contest. Jamila is the heiress to the principality - the man who marries her will become sultan of Damascus. The various suitors for Jamila’s hand must each try to draw a golden bow and fire a golden arrow. The man who can do this is destined to marry Jamila and become sultan. Hassan claims to be an obscure foreign prince. He succeeds in firing the arrow but he is disqualified when it is discovered he is a mere thief rather than a prince. The golden arrow disappears.

Hassan carries Jamila off but he’s too much of a nice guy to stick to the plan. He is overwhelmed by her beauty and sweetness and returns her unharmed, without the ransom.

Jamila has three main suitors, none of whom please her. She stalls for time by setting them a new contest. They must each bring her an extraordinary gift. She agrees that she will marry the man who brings the finest gift.

The three suitors set off in search of rare magical items.

Meanwhile Hassan has acquired three strange comrades who literally just appeared out of thin air. Perhaps they are djinns or celestial messengers. They want him to find that golden arrow and marry the princess because it is his Destiny - he is in fact the rightful sultan.

This movie certainly looks sumptuous and expensive. It may not have been that expensive but the Italians could make a modest amount of money go a long long way. Some of the special effects are pretty decent. The flying carpet looks reasonably convincing. Others are not so good. The sets look terrific. The movie was shot in Technicolor and in the ’scope aspect ratio. The location shooting is very impressive.

Tab Hunter does seem a bit out of place, a bit too all-American. I guess it’s plausible that the princess could be swept off her feet by his blond California surfer guy good looks. His voice was dubbed in both the Italian and English language versions so his performance is difficult to judge but it is obvious that he lacks the charisma and the loveable rogue quality that Fairbanks brought to the role. Rossana Podestà is very pretty and looks the part of a sweet good girl princess.

The chief villain is the vizier Baktiar (Mario Feliciani) who wants to keep power in his own hands. He’s the movie’s major weak link - he just isn’t sufficiently sinister and menacing and he’s pretty dull.

This movie has a Disney family movie wholesomeness and tries to be too whimsical. That is perhaps an unfair judgment since it does give the impression of being aimed at a young audience. There’s nothing here to upset the kiddies. Hassan’s pursuit of Jamila is very chaste. The violence is very very mild indeed.

There are some fine visual moments but a bit more action and excitement would not have gone amiss. This is the kind of movie that offers a full-scale battle scene in which nobody actually gets hurt.

Sadly this movie lacks the craziness and inspiration that Antonio Margheriti brought to his best movies. There’s too much lame comic relief. The chemistry isn’t quite there between the two leads, mostly because Rossana Podestà looks like an Arabian Nights princess and Tab Hunter looks like a refugee from an AIP beach party movie.

We don’t get enough of a sense that the princess is ever in any real danger.

It’s not terrible and it’s reasonable undemanding entertainment and if you treat it as a kids’ movie it’s not bad. But it looks lovely so it’s recommended, with reservations.

The Warner Archive Blu-Ray is of course barebones but the transfer is excellent.

Sumurun (1920)

Sumurun is an early (1920) Ernst Lubitsch film. He was the director and co-writer. It’s included in Eureka’s Lubitsch in Berlin boxed set.

These very early Lubitsch movies will surprise people who only know his later Hollywood work. Lubitsch’s early interest was very much in fantasy. Some of the movies in this boxed set are quite bizarre, with an exaggeratedly artificial storybook style. Sumurun is a slightly more conventional Arabian Nights-style fantasy/adventure/romance.

It was based on a six-act pantomime by Friedrich Freksa.

Sumurun (Jenny Hasselqvist) is the favourite of the old sheikh’s harem women but she’s fallen in love with a handsome merchant. The shiekh is very cross with her. He’s even considering separating her head from her shoulders.

Meanwhile a group of minstrels is on its way to the city. The troupe includes a dancer named Yannaia (Pola Negri). They encounter a famous slave trader who thinks that the spirited girl dancer would make a fine addition to the sheikh’s harem.

On arrival in the city Yannaia attracts the attention of the sheikh’s vain but good-natured son.

Lots of plot complications and romantic intrigues ensue. It’s difficult to keep up with the number of romantic triangles that intersect with each other. Romantic and sexual triangles - sex is a major driving force in this movie.

The leader of the minstrel troupe is a hunchback who nourishes an unrequited love for Yannaia. The hunchback is played by Lubitsch himself.

There are all sorts of ruses used to gain entry to the harem. The slave trader wants to sell Yannaia to the sheikh and she’s maybe not entirely averse to the idea of being a harem girl (they do live lives of fabulous luxury) although she’d prefer to share the bed of the sheikh’s son rather than that of the old sheikh.

The movie takes its title from Sumurun but Sumurun as a character is rather overshadowed by Yannaia, and although Jenny Hasselqvist is very good she’s certainly overshadowed by Pola Negri’s bravura performance. But then almost any actress would have found herself overshadowed by Pola Negri. She’s in fine sexy form here and she’s playing the seductress with every man in sight.

Paul Wegener is suitably cruel and forbidding as the old sheikh.

The tone is all over the place. At times this is tragedy, at other times cheerful bedroom farce. The tragic tone is not quite what you expect from Lubitsch, and then suddenly the movie switches to broad comedy.

This movie is perhaps less experimental than other films in this set such as The Doll and The Wildcat (Die Bergkatze). It takes place in what is obviously a totally imaginary fairy tale world but it doesn’t draw attention to its own artificiality to the same extent. Lubitsch was playing around with different approaches from one film to another, looking for just the right approach for his purposes.

It looks great. The spectacular sets are very Arabian Nights in influence but they lack the engagingly bizarre fascination of the sets in other early Lubitsch movies. It’s all done on the grand scale and looks like a great deal of money was spent on it. On the whole it was money well spent.

Sumurun doesn’t quite come off. The tonal shifts are too extreme and too sudden. But these early Lubitsch films are undeniably fascinating. He was prepared to try anything. And he tried some things that very very few directors since have dared to try. That’s enough reason for me to give Sumurun a highly recommended rating.

Eureka’s DVD transfer is tinted and this is a movie that absolutely has to be seen in a tinted print. The tinting in silent movies takes a bit of getting used to. It was a unique aesthetic of its own, totally different from either colour or black-and-white cinematography. I believe there’s now a Blu-Ray version of this set.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

The Thief of Bagdad, released in 1924, is the greatest of the 1920s Douglas Fairbanks swashbucklers. It’s one of the greatest swashbuckling adventure movies of all time, and in my opinion it’s the greatest Hollywood movie of the silent era. Fairbanks considered it to be his best movie, and he was right.

It was not the huge box-office bonanza that had been hoped for. It’s an ambitious demanding movie and audiences looking for pure escapist entertainment found it a little bewildering. It has long provoked conflicting critical assessments, but then great works of art tend to do that.

There have been many movies since that have been inspired by the Arabian Nights but none have surpassed the Fairbanks film.

By 1924, in the wake of box office blockbusters such as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922) Fairbanks was a huge star. He had a great deal of creative control. He conceived, produced and wrote his 1920s swashbucklers and had major input into every aspect of these films. For The Thief of Bagdad he was also lucky to have very talented collaborators. Raoul Walsh directed and William Cameron Menzies was the art director. But there is no question that this is Fairbanks’ movie. The idea was his and the movie is his vision. He supervised every aspect of the production. Fairbanks was very much an auteur, possibly the outstanding example of a producer-star as auteur.

Fairbanks plays a thief in Bagdad. The Caliph’s daughter is to be married but her husband has not yet been chosen. Three of the greatest princes in the known world have arrived as suitors. They are not merely keen to marry a beautiful princess. Marriage to the princess will make the successful suitor master of Bagdad one day. One of the suitors, the Prince of the Mongols, intends to take Bagdad by force if his suit is unsuccessful.

The princess is superstitious and believes that the man who first touches the rose-tree beneath her window is the man she should marry, and she knows that her father will accept her choice of husband.

The thief sees an opportunity to enrich himself. He steals expensive clothing and presents himself as a fourth suitor, the prince of an entirely mythical land. Of course when he meets the princess he genuinely falls in love with her. And of course his imposture is revealed and he is whipped for his presumption.

A holy man tells him that he must earn the right to the princess’s hand by undergoing a series of quests. If he succeeds then he will surely be enable to marry the princess.

The princess, in order to buy herself time (she dislikes the other three suitors intensely) proposes a quest for the suitors as well. She says she will marry the man who bings her the most fabulously valuable gift. The suitors set out to find suitable gifts which naturally must have magical properties.

The princess has a spy in her midst, a treacherous slave-girl (played by Anna May Wong) who serves the Prince of the Mongols.

It’s a fine story but it’s the way Fairbanks unfolds the story which is entrancing.

In 1924 techniques for moving the camera did not yet exist. F.W. Murnau and his cinematographer Karl Freund are usually given the credit for inventing these techniques in Germany at around this time although the truth is slightly more complicated. In the case of The Thief of Bagdad it doesn’t matter. There are many ways of bringing a sense of movement and dynamism into shots without moving the camera and both Fairbanks and Walsh were keenly aware of the importance of avoiding a static feel. With a star like Fairbanks that was easy. The man was a human dynamo who never stopped moving. If he did stop moving he had the ability to make you think he was about to burst into action again any second.

All the cast members are constantly in movement. Also utilised is the very effective technique of having things happening simultaneously in different parts of the frame. The editing is also lively and very modern. While Walsh must be given some credit it is clear that his job as director was simply to help Fairbanks realise his vision.

One of the most impressive things about this movie is the extraordinary sense of scale that it achieves. You know the sets cannot possibly be that big and yet you find yourself believing that you’re seeing enormous palaces and vast caverns. And in fact the sets really were enormous - the biggest ever built in Hollywood. The movie is extraordinarily successful in achieving a genuine sense of a fantastic world of unreality, a world in which you believe even while acknowledging its unreality. This really is the Arabian Nights brought to life.

The look of the film was heavily influenced by Léon Bakst’s designs for Diaghilev’s ballets, especially Scheherazade.

When watching movies from this period you have to remind yourself just how new was the technology of motion pictures. Motion pictures were being made in the late 1890s but in 1924 the feature film as we know it was only a decade old. Taking this into account the special effects in The Thief of Bagdad work pretty well. How well the special effects work is unimportant. It is the beauty and grandeur of the images and the soaring imagination required to create those images that is breathtaking.

It’s interesting to compare this movie to Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), made in Germany the same year. Fairbanks had been impressed by Lang’s films, especially Destiny. Fairbanks set out to surpass the German masters, and to a certain extent he succeeded.

Fairbanks brings power and manic energy to the rôle of the thief but also extraordinary grace. He is like an athlete and a dancer rolled into one. Julanne Johnston is both sweet and clever as the Princess. Most reviewers focus quite a bit on Anna May Wong but while she’s fine she has no more than a minor supporting rôle.

The Eureka Masters of Cinema release includes the movie on both Blu-Ray and DVD, with various extras. The transfer is excellent and most importantly it preserves the tinting. Tinting was an important technique is silent film and Fairbanks used it to perfection.

Fairbanks was one of the grand masters of cinema. The Thief of Bagdad is very highly recommended indeed.

Sinbad the Sailor (1947)

Sinbad the Sailor is a 1947 RKO swashbuckler and the studio decided to spend some real money on it. It’s in glorious Technicolor and looks stunning. And it stars Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Maureen O’Hara.

The tales of Sinbad were among the most entertaining in that fabulous collection of eastern tales, The Thousand Nights and One Night (more commonly known as the Arabian Nights). The Arabian Nights became a major inspiration for swashbuckling adventure movies and there have been countless Sinbad movies. What’s surprising is that pretty much all of them are worth seeing.

Sinbad is a great sailor, trader, explorer and adventurer. We also get the impression that he is an accomplished and inveterate liar. But a charming one.

Sinbad and his sidekick Abbu board a fine sailing ship which was headed for the rocks and certain destruction. The ship’s crewmen are all dead. Sinbad intends to claim the ship by the law of salvage. But someone else wants that ship, a woman. A beautiful woman, although (as we will soon discover) possibly a dangerous woman. She is Shireen (Maureen O’Hara).

Sinbad found a chart on the ship, which he believes will lead him to the fabled island where the lost treasure of Alexander the Great can be found. He also notices a design on the window of the captain’s cabin which matches a medallion he has worn for years. Sinbad is convinced that he must have this ship and must find the lost island.

A major theme of Islamic folk tales is destiny, or kismet. Sinbad believes he has found his kismet.

He’s fascinated by Shireen and tries to convince her to go with him. She vanishes and he heads for a port renowned as a heaven of villains and cut-throats. He has a suspicion that he will find Shireen there. And she is part of his kismet.

Whether he can trust Shireen is an open question. It’s unlikely. She is ambitious and avaricious. Of course Sinbad is pretty ambitious and avaricious as well.

The problem is that Sinbad has lost that chart. It’s possible that Shireen knows how to find the island, but she thinks that Sinbad knows. The villainous emir who owns Shireen thinks Sinbad knows. I’s possible that whoever does know how to find that island doesn’t know that he (or she) has that knowledge.

Sinbad, Shireen and the emir all want Alexander’s lost gold. There’s going to be lots of intrigue and we can expect some double-crosses.

We also expect action and we get plenty of that.

The great swashbuckling stars were of course Douglas Fairbanks Sr, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power and Stewart Granger. Douglas Fairbanks Jr played only a handful of swashbuckling roles but he played them so well that he certainly deserves to be added to the list. He seems to have picked up a few valuable lessons from his father - in a swashbuckler never be afraid of going over-the-top. You just can’t be too melodramatic in these sorts of movies. And nobody could overact like Douglas Fairbanks Jr when he was in the right mood. As Sinbad he is certainly a rogue, maybe even a bit of a scoundrel at times, but he is the stuff of which heroes are made. In this movie he’s all manic energy.

And obviously you can’t go wrong with Maureen O’Hara as the female lead in a swashbuckler.

The standouts among the fine supporting cast are Anthony Quinn (as a deadly scheming emir) and Mike Mazurki. Not to mention Jane Greer in a bit part. Especially good is Walter Slezak as Melik, a clever barber who is probably quite untrustworthy but definitely useful.

Unfortunately Sinbad gets a comic relief sidekick, George Tobias as Abbu. He’s annoying but just about bearable.

This is a Sinbad story without magic or monsters which gives it a very different feel compared to the later movies with their Ray Harryhausen special effects. Sinbad does have a reputation as a magician but he’s really just a clever illusionist. This is a straight adventure film rather than a fantasy.

The Warner Archive DVD is barebones but looks terrific.

Sinbad the Sailor is a fine lively swashbuckler. The main reason to see it is Douglas Fairbanks Jr at the absolute top of his game. He really is superb. Highly recommended.

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

At least five directors (including Michael Powell) worked on the 1940 British production The Thief of Bagdad but this movie is like Gone With the Wind - it’s an example of a movie made by a producer as auteur. The producer in this case being Alexander Korda, and there was no more colourful and ambitious figure in the British film industry than the Hungarian-born Korda.

This movie is of course an Arabian Nights adventure/fantasy/romance.

We start with events that offer hints of strangeness and that leave us a little uneasy. A woman from the imperial palace is talking to a man about a princess, a princess who sleeps. We get the impression that this sleep is not a natural one. The woman is Halima (Mary Morris). The man is Jaffar (Conrad Veidt) and we will soon learn that he is the Grand Vizier. Halima invites a blind beggar to accompany her to the palace.

The blind beggar tells his story in flashback. He was not always a beggar. Once he was a king. And his faithful dog was not always a dog, but a small boy and an inveterate thief. The boy’s name was Abu.

The beggar had been King Ahmad, and he ruled Bagdad. He was served by his Grand Vizier Jaffar, but he was not well served by him. Jaffar in fact was the real ruler. It was a brutal unpopular rule but the people blamed King Ahmad rather than Jaffar.

Jaffar devised a fiendish plot to get Ahmad out of the way but it was more than just a power grab. There is also a princess, the daughter of the Sultan of Basra. Ahmad and Jaffar both love the princess. The princess of course loves Ahmad. There are three magical spells at work. One spell has put the princess to sleep. She can only be awakened by the man she loves. The other spell, cast by Jaffar, robs Ahmad of his eyesight. His sight will be restored when Jaffar holds the princess in his arms. Ahmad does not want his sight restored if that will be the price. The third spell turned Abu into a dog.

This is a movie with lots of magical elements and they’re handled in an interesting way. The princess’s father, a kindly but foolish old man, loves mechanical toys. He has a huge collection of amazingly clever toys. They’re so clever you could easily mistake them for magic. Jaffar is a genuine sorcerer and his specialty is creating mechanical toys that are actually magical rather than mechanical. Such as an amazing flying horse. And a much more devious toy which he will employ in a very sinister manner.

Ahmad is determined to save the princess from a fate worse than death (marriage to Jaffar) but he’s not really sure how to go about it. He and Abu tend to blunder about, but fate lends a hand. There is a prophecy. Of course the prophecy can’t possibly have anything to do with a mere young ragamuffin of a thief like Abu, or can it? And Abu has a stroke of luck. He discovers a bottle washed up on the beach, a bottle that contains a genie. Discovering a genie can be very good luck but you have to be very very careful with genies. The genie does offer to help Abu steal the All-Seeing Eye from a gigantic statue of a goddess, and that will certainly help.

And naturally there’s a magic carpet.

This is a movie that is very special effects-driven, which was still pretty unusual in 1940. Some of the effects work superbly, others not so well, but what Korda was attempting with this movie was something very ambitious indeed, in fact more ambitious than anything done in movies up to that point. Even when the effects are a bit iffy they’re still fun.

The settings, the props, the costumes, are all spectacular. It looks like a very very expensive movie which is exactly what it was. Alexander Korda was always prepared to spend real money on his movies.

John Justin as Ahmad is the ostensible hero of the movie with June Duprez as the princess being the leading lady but in fact it’s Conrad Veidt as the villain and Sabu as the hero’s sidekick who get top billing. Which is absolutely just. The movie belongs to them. Conrad Veidt is a marvellous villain. He’s suitably ruthless and sinister but he is also human. He is motivated by the desire for power but most of all he is motivated by love. His love for the princess is genuine. It’s the kind of love that could redeem a man, but the princess does not reciprocate his love. Jaffar is perhaps to some extent a tragic villain. He gains everything that he thought he wanted but without the love of the princess it ends up meaning nothing.

Sabu is bursting with vitality without ever becoming irritating. You can see how a genuine friendship developed between Ahmad and Abu.

This is not just a remake of the 1924 Douglas Fairbanks movie of the same name. Both are great movies, both are visually stupendous, but each can stand on its own merits.

The 1940 Korda version combines adventure, fantasy, humour, romance and even horror (the giant spider) and it gets the mix just right. You can find holes in the plot, some of the special effects don’t quite come off, but there’s so much movie magic here that minor flaws can be overlooked. It’s a movie with energy and charm, and heart.

The 1940 version has had a number of DVD releases (my copy is the Region 4 release from Madman) and Network in the UK have released it on Blu-Ray.

The Thief of Bagdad is a real feelgood movie. Highly recommended.

Kismet (1944)

Kismet sounds like it’s going to be tremendous fun. More of a fairy tale than an Arabian Nights tale although it has the Arabian Nights setting. It stars Ronald Colman as a beggar in Bagdad, but he’s not just a beggar he’s Hafiz the king of the beggars. At night he dresses as a prince.

The young Caliph likes to dress up as well. He disguises himself as a humble gardener’s son so he can wander about the city and find out how the people really feel.

While he’s disguised as the gardener’s son he meets Hafiz’s daughter Marsinah and they fall in love.

For her whole life Hafiz has been making plans for Marsinah. He wants her to marry a prince. He schemes endlessly to bring this about.

Hafiz gets mixed up in the power struggle between the idealistic young Caliph and the wicked Grand Vizier. Hafiz talks his way into the Grand Vizier’s palace and convinces that worthy and his whole household that he is a prince from a distant corner of the empire. Hafiz is an accomplished and shameless liar and this is part of his plan to give Marsinah what he imagines she wants - marriage to the most powerful man in the empire.

But first he’ll have to get rid of the Grand Vizier’s current mistress, the formidable Jarmilla (Marlene Dietrich).

So we have lots of people pretending to be something they’re not which should provide plenty of laughs and plenty of opportunities for romantic complications.

And it does work, sort of. After a fashion. Almost.

One problem is that Hafiz clearly lives entirely in a world of fantasy. He can be very amusing with his shameless lying and impostures but it also makes him kind of creepy and pathetic.

A much bigger problem is that we’re supposed to be rooting for the idealistic young Caliph in his power struggle with the wicked Grand Vizier. We’re supposed to want the heroine to end up marrying the handsome young Caliph. But there’s just no way we want any girl to end up with that dishwater-dull pompous nonentity of a Caliph. We just know that a woman would have a much happier life with the wicked Grand Vizier because he’s a really fun guy, he’s witty and amusing, he adores women and pampers them and indulges them.

The other problem is that Hafiz tells everyone how spectacularly beautiful and talented his daughter is and we’re apparently supposed to believe that a connoisseur of women such as the Grand Vizier would be stunned by her. But the truth is that Marsinah is a whiny bore and Joy Ann Page’s performance is just dull dull dull.

So I found myself really wanting the bad guy to win. I was really hoping that something totally horrible would happen to the hero, the young Caliph, like maybe being sold into slavery.

I suppose in a way I could get behind the idea of the Caliph and Marsinah marrying because they’re such dreary sanctimonious characters and it would be poetic justice for them to make each other’s lives miserable.

The movie looks quite impressive but it lacks the vitality and the wit and the sparkle that this type of movie needs. It needs to be faster. It needs more energy. Marlene Dietrich livens things up a little but she’s not given enough to do and she’s not permitted to be wicked enough to make things interesting.

Generally speaking I adore these Arabian Nights movies and I just love adventure romance mixed with comedy in an exotic setting. The 1944 Kismet is, sadly, the dullest movie of this type that I’ve encountered so far. It just doesn’t come to life.

To see this sort of thing done well check out Arabian Nights (1942), The Desert Hawk (1950) or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944).

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944)

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is a 1944 adventure romance from Universal, starring Maria Montez. It was shot in Technicolor so this is no B-movie. By Universal standards (they didn’t have the kind of money that MGM or Paramount would have thrown at a production like this) it counts as a lavish costume epic.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the movie has very little (in fact almost nothing) to do with the original story Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (which is of course one of the tales of the Arabian Nights). The movie turns the pauper Ali Baba into the son of the Caliph of Baghdad and it turns the band of cut-throats, thieves and murderers into courageous freedom fighters against the evil Mongols (who do not appear in the original story at all). This allows the writers to add some clumsy wartime propaganda about the crusade for freedom and democracy.

In the movie version the Mongols have captured Baghdad and slain the Caliph. The Caliph’s son Ali escapes. Wandering through the countryside he sees a band of robbers emerge from a cave. The leader of the thieves utters a magic word and the stone portals of the cave close. Once the thieves have ridden off Ali uses the magic word to open the portals again and finds a cave overflowing with treasure. In the original story Ali proceeds to rob the thieves of their treasure but that would make the hero of the story a thief himself and that was obviously not acceptable in a 1944 Hollywood movie.

So instead Ali (renamed Ali Baba by the thieves) persuades the thieves to join him in freeing the land from the wicked Mongols, thus ensuring that freedom will triumph.

Ten years later Ali Baba (now played by Jon Hall) is the de facto leader of the band of thieves and freedom fighters.

The plot gets going when the thieves decide to kidnap the betrothed of the wicked Mongol Khan Hulagu. What Ali doesn’t know is that the lady in question is his childhood sweetheart Princess Amara (Montez).

Amara is Arabian and secretly hates the Mongols and of course she doesn’t want to marry Hulagu. Her father (the treacherous brother of the murdered Caliph) has forced her into it.

There are usual adventures and complications that you expect in a swashbuckler, with Ali and Amara not recognising each at first and not realising that they are destined to be together, no matter the cost.

Director Arthur Lubin handles the action scenes reasonably well. The film slows down a little in the middle.

It soon becomes obvious that this is more of a Robin Hood movie than an Ali Baba movie. The Mongol Khan can be seen as either the wicked Prince John or the equally wicked Sheriff of Nottingham, Princess Amara is obviously Maid Marian and Ali Baba is even more obviously Robin Hood (with the Forty Thieves being Robin’s Merry Men).

I must say that I’m very fond of Maria Montez. No-one is going to claim she’s a great actress but she has the fieriness and the exotic beauty to be perfect for this sort of rôle in this sort of film. Montez was Spanish (although born in the Dominican Republic) but that wan’t going to deter Hollywood from casting her as an Arabian princess. Spanish, Arabian - it was all the same to Hollywood. And in a way they were right. What they needed was an actress who could be exotic and Montez could do that with ease.

This movie reunites Montez with Jon Hall, her co-star in Arabian Nights (also an excellent adventure flick) and Cobra Woman (which is great fun). He’s not Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power but he was OK as a cut-price adventure hero and it’s Montez’s star power that carries the movie anyway (and yes, in this genre she really did have a certain star power).

Turhan Bey is good as Amara’s slave. Kurt Katch is a fairly effective villain as Hulagu. Andy Devine (with his distinctive voice) provides comic relief without being too irritating and without distracting from the adventure and the romance which is what the movie is all about.

I should mention that the opening credits are done in a very clever way.

My copy of the movie is the old Universal Backlot Series DVD which looks very good. There are now both US and UK Blu-Ray releases which I’m sure look even better.

Personally I prefer Arabian Nights with its more interesting visuals and its fairytale atmosphere. Montez also starred in the extremely interesting Siren of Atlantis which is also a bit more interesting than this one.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is still a well-mounted second-tier swashbuckler. Recommended.

Arabian Nights (1942)

Arabian Nights was Universal’s first attempt at a blockbuster movie made using the three-strip Technicolor process. It was a major hit on release in 1942 and it spawned several follow-ups set in the world of Islam. Of course a Universal blockbuster was not going to have the budget of an MGM blockbuster but Universal were very good at making cheap movies look classy and visually arresting.

To say it’s based on the classic tales of The Thousand Nights and One Night is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. Inspired by these tales might be closer to it. Loosely inspired. In fact producer Walter Wanger cheerfully admitted that it was to a large extent a western with camels. That’s true up to a point, but it has the atmosphere and exoticism of the East and that atmosphere was a major factor in its success.

John Rawlins directed. He was a competent B-movie director and this is one of his few really major productions.

The Caliph Haroun-Al-Raschid (Jon Hall) has put down a revolt by his wicked brother Kamar (Leif Erickson). Kamar wanted his throne but more than that he wanted the dancing girl Scheherazade (Maria Montez). And Scheherazade (listed incorrectly in the credits as Sherezade) does not want to a dancing girl. She wants to be a queen. Kamar was captured but escapes and Haroun-Al-Raschid, badly wounded, is saved from death by the acrobat Ali ben Ali (Sabu). He is nursed back to health by Scheherazade.

Now Haroun-Al-Raschid has to find a way to survive and eventually regain his throne, and of course he has now fallen in love with Scheherazade. They both end up being captured by slavers and have the usual adventures. Kamar is determined to find Scheherazade and he’s willing to go to any lengths to do so. There’s lots of palace treachery, and Haroun-Al-Raschid Scheherazade have lots of narrow escapes. The faithful Ali and a motley assortment of carnival types prove to be vital allies.

Maria Montez was already carving out a niche for herself as a B-movie queen when Arabian Nights turned her into a bona fide star. Montez was a Spanish actress (although born in the Dominican Republic) and her exotic beauty was her major asset. Some might be unkind enough to say it was her only asset but while she was no great actress she was quite adequate for the kinds of rôles she played. In fact she was absolutely perfect for such rôles.

Jon Hall was a bit exotic as well, being half-Tahitian. He was pretty much a male version of Maria Montez - very limited as an actor but a competent adventure movie leading man.

Sabu was the first Indian actor to become a major movie star in the West. And he became a very big star indeed, initially in big budget adventure films for Alexander Korda in England and then in Hollywood. Sabu’s major asset was that he was not only remarkably athletic, he could also act.

The supporting cast has its share of exotics as well, including the Viennese-born half-Turkish half-Jewish Turhan Bey, another actor ideally suited to these sorts of pictures.

The cinematography by Milton R. Krasner (who later won an Oscar and photographed  some pretty spectacular epics) is a definite bonus. The art direction is also excellent. I love the pool in the harem - it looks like a kind of fantasy Club Med.

Of course this being the 40s there has to comic relief, which is provided by Aladdin (constantly looking for his lost lamp) and Sinbad (constantly boring people with his stories of his adventures as a sailor). Casting Shemp Howard (of the Three Stooges) as Sinbad the Sailor is something that could only happen in Hollywood. Since this is clearly a movie intended to appeal to family audiences one can’t complain too much about the comedy.

The Universal Cinema Classics DVD looks splendid. The only extra is an introduction by Robert Osbourne.

Arabian Nights is a B-picture with a bigger budget than usual and that’s why it succeeds. It has the charm of an adventure B-picture but it looks fairly impressive. It’s quite content to provide spectacle and harmless entertainment. It’s not trying to tell us anything profound about the human condition. As well as being commercially successful it picked up four Oscar nominations.

Arabian Nights is a entertaining blend of action, comedy and romance in a romantic fairytale setting. Highly recommended.