Bagdad
                      
Director: Charles Lamont
Year:  1949
Rating: 6.0
Maureen O'Hara was made for Technicolor or perhaps Technicolor was made for Maureen O'Hara. Her flaming red hair, red lips and green sparkling eyes fairly jump out at you in this piffling Arabian adventure tale. With those characteristics she naturally plays a Bedouin Princess! Perfect casting. But I don't care how absurd that is or much of the rest of this film - she is spectacular in a series of high fashion exotic and revealing costumes designed by Yvonne Wood who should have gotten second billing right after O'Hara. What every good Bedouin Princess has in her tent. But to be fair, her character Princess Marjan is just back from being educated in England and clearly the West has corrupted her - she refuses to wear a veil and sings at a nightclub (could not find out if that was O'Hara really singing in a very throaty style - she sang in The Quiet Man). And at one point she dances around a fire entertaining the troops. Let's say director Charles Lamont took a few liberties with Bedouin culture. That is what Hollywood glamour back in those days was all about.



She returns from her sojourn only to find out that her father and much of the tribe have been murdered in a betrayal by a group called the Black Robes and she is determined to discover who is the head of the Black Robes and kill him. Running the city of Bagdad is the Turkish Pasha (the Ottomans had conquered that territory) who is played by one of the great screen villains - Vincent Price. Price is a little less insane here than many of his later performances - just kind of shifty and sleazy with an eye closed the entire time and malice dripping from his lips like bitter honey and slapping anyone who annoys him. But every time he looks at O'Hara, you expect him to melt to the ground in lust and admiration. Not a lot of alabaster skinned red-headed beauties in Bagdad at the time I would guess.



The titular hero shows up - a Prince as well of another tribe but pretending to be a camel driver. He is played by Paul Hubschmid but billed as Paul Christian. The name change may have been due to the fact that Germans at the time were not exactly popular and he was quite German having acted in a number of films in Germany through the war - but he moved to Hollywood a few years later. Sort of a Douglas Fairbank Jr type (who O'Hara had starred with a few years previously in Sinbad, The Sailor), he is quite adequate in the film. But he pales next to O'Hara who is ravishing x 10.




I had forgotten how much I like her - so many good films that she has been in - the films with John Wayne, Esmeralda in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the mother in Miracle on 34th Street. It has been ages since I watched her in anything. Can't let that happen again. Paul Hubschmid was to go back and forth between the German and American film industries - he was the hero in the Fritz Lang German films The Tiger of Bengal and the Indian Tomb and back in Hollywood The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and as Johnny Vulcan in The Funeral from Berlin (one of my favorite spy films).