From the Cheap Seats – The Magic Carpet Ride

One of the greatest difficulties for those of us who write about film is how to evoke fun. It’s a lot harder to adequately describe the simple pleasures of a well-made entertainment than it is to dissect symbolism and subtext in a half-baked art-house pic. It’s not, as some folks think, that critics have a downer on amusement, just that it’s hard to fill you word-count if the only thing you have to say about a film is how much you enjoyed it.

This thought occurred while watching the newly released DVD of Sinbad the Sailor. It’s wonderfully entertaining, bulging with colour and adventure and all that jazz, but how does one convey that in a review? (If you have last month’s catalogue to hand, or visit the website, you can find out exactly.)

Perhaps historical context might help: Sinbad is one of the highest points of Hollywood’s brief cycle of Oriental fantasies, a series of almost indecently enjoyable swashbucklers conceived to cash in on the huge success of Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad.

Clearly the movie gods are pleased with us because another of that cycle was also released last month: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, a glorious Technicolor romp every bit the equal of Sinbad and featuring the greatest star of ‘exotic’ pictures, the lustrous Maria Montez.

A one-time model, Miss Montez was an indelible presence; although Ali Baba is not her greatest work (that would be Cobra Woman, still criminally unavailable in this country), it’s ample demonstration that she is much more than the camp icon posterity currently recalls her as. (Montez is, incidentally, one of the very few film stars with an airport named after her: Maria Montez International Airport is in her native Dominican Republic.)

These films were very much a product of their times, not just because they have European and American actors playing Middle Eastern characters. The 1940s was, for all too obvious reasons, the pinnacle of escapist filmmaking when a taste for the exotic was indulged as never before. These films were a magic carpet ride away from the sharp realities contained in newsreels.

The world has changed since then; modern viewers might find some interesting subtexts the filmmakers could not have intended – Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, for instance, concerns a small cadre of fighters loyal to the previous administration who stage an insurgency against an invading power. In Iraq. Hmm. It even ends with the triumphal unfurling of an Islamic flag in a way certain to give certain of our more bellicose statesmen the howling fantods.

(Aside: perhaps it’s those current difficulties in and around the Middle East that have led to a contemporary hunger in escapist entertainment – surely one of the great selling points of Avatar was the exotic new world it painted, exactly the same promise that Hollywood’s Orientalists made to their audience all those years ago, albeit on rather more restricted budgets.)

These films are comparatively little known; look how long it’s taken them to reach DVD. Yet they would not disgrace themselves if played on a triple bill with The Thief of Bagdad. They are, for want of a better description, colossal fun. And sometimes, that’s the highest praise there is.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2010 at 6:09 pm and is filed under From the Cheap Seats, Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.