Year:  1954
Rating: 7.0

---

This was an unexpectedly wonderful Technicolor bauble full of swashbuckling sword fighting, more dancing girls than a Rockette show, glittering glamorous costume changes that puts Bollywood to shame and colors so searing that you need to protect your eyeballs. Especially from the cobalt blue eyes of the leading man that felt like an alien from another planet. This only runs 67 minutes so I guess it fell into the B film world, but it just looks so lavish and everything is so gorgeous that it could be mistaken for an A film if you didn't look too closely at all the matte paintings in the background. Probably sets borrowed from another film as exotic films taking place in the Orientalized dream vision of Hollywood were pretty popular back then. It is a pop explosion of color and some 60 years later has a campy corny quality about it that brought smiles to my face.


The cast is fine though at the time none of them were stars. The leading man is Jeffrey Hunter with the cobalt eyes but he wasn't to hit stardom till he co-starred with John Wayne in The Searchers two years later. Debra Paget usually got stuck playing ethnic types for some odd reason as she too had blue eyes and played American Indian maidens a few times, Indian Indians a few times, she was Lila in The Ten Commandments and an Egyptian Princess in this film. Michael Rennie is a bit of a cult figure now due to The Day the Earth Stood Still but that didn't mean much back then. None of these actors even remotely look comfortable in this period film - Hunter doesn't even try as he looks like he just stepped out of a beach movie with a cocktail in hand and Paget goes with the tighter more revealing the clothes the better theme. I wasn't complaining. Though the film did not do all that well at the box office, Paget in her dances and skimpy clothes got some attention from the male audience and she received baskets of fan mail. Apparently, the role was initially suppose to go to Marilyn Monroe which would have been even more spectacular. And let's not even mention Jack Elam and Lee Van Cleef as resistance fighters.


But this absurdity just fits perfectly in a film that gets everything wrong from a historical perspective. It is 1254 and the Muslims have just beaten the Crusaders once again at the Battle of Al Manurah in Egypt. Hunter is the son of the Caliph in Baghdad and wanders into this hokey ancient Egyptian fantasy set where you expect Cleopatra to come walking out swaying her hips but Egypt has been Muslim for 500 years and not too long ago run by Saladin and recently taken over by the Mamluks (slave warriors who were to rule Egypt for about 300 years) and yet the Princess is praying to Isis (the God, not the terrorists) and she and her hand maidens are dressed in a manner that would have gotten them arrested on 10th Ave 20 years ago. It is all totally ridiculous but who cares - it looks so good. And is just dumb fun.


A Shaman is keeping the King all doped up and craving more and has invited Rama Khan (Michael Rennie) and his Bedouin army to take control of the city. Every time someone says Bedouin they spit it out like sour milk. Debra Paget is an Egyptian Zorro - a dancing girl at night leading the underground rebellion and a demure Princess who takes a lot of baths in the day time. She is able to get to the bazaar at night by swimming through a secret tunnel and then back. Paget gets wet a lot and we are thankful for that. Hunter takes on the army of Rama Khan with a bunch of beggars and a dwarf and a Princess with a good overhand serve. I am a sucker for these old Technicolor adventure films and this one hit the spot. Unfortunately for Hunter's character who is on his way back to Baghdad at the end of the film, the Mongols were to conquer that city in 1258. So only four years with the Princess before the hordes came!