The Thief Of Bagdad (1940)

Jaffar Takes

The Thief Of Bagdad
UK/USA 1940 
Directed by Ludwig Berger, 
Michael Powell & Tim Whelan
London Film Productions
Imprint  Blu Ray Zone B

Please note: One day before publishing this review, I discovered I'd already reviewed this movie 16 years ago. However, this is a more detailed account of it and, it turns out, my tastes must have changed a lot over the years... I take less prisoners with this one. I will leave both reviews up in the index so you can take your pick but, this review is how I feel about this movie now. 

So the second movie of Imprint’s beautifully restored box set of The Thief Of Bagdad films is the 1940 version produced by Alexander Korda. This was my father’s favourite film but, alas, it arrived too late for him to look at it one last time. But I wanted to watch it again to try and figure out if I was missing anything from previous viewings. I’ve never felt this was a truly great film but, my dad did so...

Yeah. Okay... this is about the best way yet to see this landmark and rightfully respected film adaptation, purporting to be sourced from certain stories in the varous tales (and titles) of the 101 Arabian Nights. And it’s a fine film, to be sure. It looks amazing although, some of the effects, with it being the first colour film to employ blue screen techniques, look a little dated and wobbly to me. I say this after loving the effects work on the Douglas Fairbanks version, which I reviewed here. 

I find this version a little slow though but, the narrative has an interesting structure in that it flashes back from a little way into the story to tell how the former king, played by the quite charming John Justin, was made blind by the evil Jaffar, played by Conrad Veidt. And also why his friend, the actual thief of Bagdad, played here by Sabu, was turned into his seeing eye dog, again courtesy of the antagonist. 

We learn that Jaffar needs to find these two to restore the consciousness of the love interest, played by June Duprez and how, after the film catches up with itself and this happens, the former king and thief are again outcast and trying to find a way to get back to Jaffar, while Jaffar murders the young lady’s father, played by Miles Malleson (who also helped write the movie) in their absence. This involves mostly Sabu in adventures featuring a djinni (played with a large personality by Rex Ingram), a giant spider battled on its web, a blue all-seeing eye as a crystal and a purloined flying carpet. But there’s also a mechanical, Pegasus-style flying horse and a multi armed automaton of a blue skinned lady with murderous intent. 

And it’s fine with the actors all very good and charming but, alas, I did feel it a little slow and less adventuresome than I would probably have liked. But it’s not without its many good points, not least of all being the magnificent score of Miklós Rózsa... which will probably call to mind many of that composer’s other scores, including one with a similar soundscape, being his score for the later movie The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed by me here). Sinbad actually gets a mention in this movie but, alas, we don’t quite get to meet him in this particular tale. 

Now the film tends to jump around a bit with, it seemed to me, scenes which could have been in there left to the imagination. I am putting this down to a constantly changing script and trouble during filming (the primary director was the great Michael Powell but, as you can see, three directors are credited). Also, the film started off being shot in Great Britain but, it was during The Blitz so the production had to relocate to America some way through. Sabu had grown a couple of inches in the interim period between shoots so, all of his scenes had to be reshot again in the US. You can often tell the scenes which were shot in each location because, in the scenes shot on set in America, the women all have their blouses tightly buttoned up to the top where, in continuity defying fashion, the UK scenes are a lot looser with the way the costumes are worn on the ladies in question. 

It’s leisurely but it’s still a bit of a romp and it obviously struck a chord with my dad when he first saw it (he watched it at least once a decade I think) and I’d still recommend it to friends to watch this version. But that’s me just about done on this one, I think. Other than to reiterate that this new restoration of The Thief Of Bagdad on Blu Ray looks absolutely superb (and that might well be why some of the effects work looks a bit clunky I suspect... it probably wasn’t supposed to be seen this sharp on technology this good). So if you are a fan of this film... this is currently the best iteration of it to buy... although I suspect there will be a US and UK restored version arriving on their respective shores before another decade has passed. 

The Hound Of The Baskervilles

Boneward Hound

The Hound Of
The Baskervilles
UK 1959 Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

An overly comic book like ‘horror font’ is writ largely against James Bernard’s typical Hammer Horror sounding score, announcing the start of the famous studio’s production of what is probably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound Of The Baskervilles.

The film stars three stalwarts of Hammer films for this version of the classic... Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes, André Morell as Dr. Watson and Christopher Lee as Henry Baskerville, the young heir to the Baskerville fortune who is now living under the shadow of the family curse of the hound, after the recent death of the previous owner of Baskerville Manor. Cushing would, of course, play Holmes a few more times after this production in unrelated films and a TV show (as would Christopher Lee at least once) and Lee and Cushing are a great Hammer double act after they’d faced off as adversaries (of a sort) in the studio's first Frankenstein and Dracula movies (they would do it again four months later in the Hammer production of The Mummy). Morrell, however (one of the great TV incarnations of Professor Quatermass) did not apparently get on well with Lee and tended to avoid him on set.

The film starts with a ludicrous and almost unwatchably bad retelling of the Baskerville legend before finally bringing us up to present day... well, present day Victorian period... for the rest of the story, which is much better and far more entertaining than the first ten minutes or so of the movie. Now, it’s been a very long time since I read The Hound Of The Baskervilles (at least two decades) and, even with all the many movie adaptations of this particular story in the Holmes canon (this is the first to be shot in colour), I really couldn’t remember that much about the original tale. Even so, although it tends to hint the main plot points pretty well, as far as I can dimly recall a smattering of the events of the original, it seems to add its own deviations and explorations, presumably to pad the running time to feature length.

For instance, there’s a wonderful moment early on in the film where Baskerville survives an assassination attempt, thanks to Holmes, after someone has put a tarantula in one of his boots. I honestly don’t recall this scene being in the original... but it’s an entertaining moment, nonetheless.

The film rambles along agreeably at its own pace with top notch performances by all and sundry including a very naturalistic and relaxed performance by Lee, which sees him more subdued to the plot rather than his presence dominating the scenes he’s in... which is interesting. There are also fine turns by Marla Landi as the, possible, love interest for Lee’s character and Miles Malleson... well, just doing what he usually does and having his doddery old, likeably confused, Miles Malleson moments.

Regrettably, although Cushing does a fine Holmes and plays him in a most energetic, almost manic manner, he doesn’t don a fiendishly clever disguise with which to fool both the other characters and the audience as, say, Basil Rathbone might have done in his Holmes adventures. I’m convinced Cushing could have pulled off one of those master disguises in this though, if given half a chance. Also, it’s nice to see André Morell not, like many of his predecessors in the role, portraying Watson as some kind of a buffoon but as someone who Holmes has chosen to have as his companion in crime solving because he actually brings something to the party. Much as I love old Nigel Bruce’s decidedly foolish, comic relief version of Watson opposite Rathbone (and I still champion Bruce as the best), it’s nice to see the character being treated with a little more respect here.

The direction is nice and there are some nice frame designs, with Fisher favouring some unusual angles from high above the action in several scenes. Also, he makes great use of emphasising the depth of the shots through the use of different planes enhanced by foreground objects. For example, the one riveting moment in the ‘legend prelude’ is where a lady is hiding behind an arch in some ruins. The actor looking for her is in the main parts of the left of shot with the arch and her up close in the foreground right of the frame. Similarly, when the director pushes the depth again in a forest scene, the branches and leaves of a tree in the foreground of a shot mingle in with all the trees in the background to make a foreground centre space which you didn’t realise was farther away than the leaves on the tree on the right until a character walks behind them.

One very odd choice in two parts of the movie on the same set, out on the moors by a ruin, is to have the light coming from behind some structures shining a bright, almost fluorescent green like suddenly Mario Bava had somehow turned up on the set that day to perform the same task. It looks fantastic, of course, but there seems to be no natural way that lightning scheme could have come into play in the natural setting and it looks a bit ‘at odds’ with the rest of the shots in the movie.

I don’t have much more to say by way of this review other than to add that some of Bernard’s score to Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula, reviewed here) is also apparently tracked into the movie too. If you’re a fan of any of the actors in this one, especially those in their capacity as Hammer veterans (although they weren’t quite that yet at this stage of their career), then this version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles is definitely one to add to your watch list. Three years later, Fisher would re-team with Lee for his own portrayal of Holmes in the West German/French/Italian krimi movie Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace (aka Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes) which I will be reviewing soon for this blog very soon.