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).