The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

No, this is not about Saddam Hussein.  The Thief of Bagdad is an early special effects fantasy, most of it ripped from the pages of the altered Arabian Nights.  You’ll see sultans riding horses that fly and deposed kings commanding genies and surfing the sky on flying carpets.  These fanciful stories came from the Persian tales in Arabian Nights — just as with Disney’s Aladdin — which were combined with the starker Arab tales to get the 1001 Nights that Brits and educated Americans knew by the the eighteenth century.

It’s ironic, then, that this is a tale about Bagdad and Basra, when so many of its narrative elements are Persian.  We lump Iran and Iraq in the “Axis of Evil” these days, but we forget they massacred each other in a long war in the 1980s.  But a big difference to people on that side of the world is no difference to us on this side of the world, where we are free to label all those places over there “Oriental” and call it a day.

They wouldn’t make a movie like this today.  Not while we’re occupying one-third of the Axis of Evil and antagonizing and being antagonized by another third of it.  The Thief of Bagdad is way too fanciful.  Instead, they’ll be making Three Kings and sentimental humanist tearjerkers about war and loss for at least another decade.  So enjoy what The Thief of Bagdad has to offer.

What it offers, as Roger Ebert argues, is well-employed special effects.  But we disagree with Roger.   Any event can happen in this movie because no event is out of bounds.  The plot can go wherever the writers desire; it just happened that they desired it to feature a mountainous, flying genie and a deadly, Dodge-Ram-size spider.  It could’ve been a flying spider and a deadly genie, but the king still would’ve gotten his girl and his kingdom back in the end.

What The Thief of Bagdad really offers is brightly colored costumes, sets, and matte paintings.  They are everywhere, in every scene.  We’ve seen few movies that look like this.  The best word for it is eye-popping.  Not that we are violating our general movie rule, which is that style is not to trump substance.  But style is the chief reason to watch The Thief of Bagdad, the plot being pedestrian.  Though it is “imaginative,” too, whatever that means.

The DVD features a commentary from Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese, who wax nostalgic about Thief of Bagdad ‘s wondrous imagination.  This sentiment does nothing but date Coppola and Scorcese.  Kids today, who have consumed heavy doses of CGI-filled blockbusters, will not find some of this movie’s phony-looking effects breathtaking. That includes us.

The commentary is merely a showcase for Scorcese to tell us that he’s seen every movie ever made, which we’d call a tremendous waste of time if his job didn’t involve moviemaking.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 7 (we guess, but who knows)