Country: USA, Language: English
Year: 1944, Runtime: 87
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1, Certificate: PG
Director - Arthur Lubin
Genre: Adventure
All the excitement of the Arabian Nights is orchestrated in this thrilling tale of romance, revenge and high drama. Orphaned as a young child and adopted by a band of notorious thieves, the now-grown Ali Baba (Jon Hall) sets out to avenge his father’s murder, reclaim the royal throne, and rescue his childhood love Amara (Maria Montez) from the clutches of his treacherous enemy. A lavish adventure classic, co-starring the great Andy Devine, and filmed in glorious Technicolor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is presented for the first time for home viewing in the UK in a stunning restored high-definition transfer.
NEWYORK TIMES REVIEW
The general perception of the Technicolor costume adventure movies that Maria Montez and Jon Hall made for Universal in the early 1940's is that they were pure escapist entertainment, intended to make people forget for an hour or so about the Second World War and the general world situation. And generally that is true about them -- they were mostly no "about" much more than having fun for 90 minutes or so amid pretty sets with lots of action and some pretty women in exotic outfits. But watching Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, one has to wonder if even here the screenwriter, Edmund L. Hartmann, was able to totally get away from the day-to-day reality around him. The opening Mongol invasion of Bagdad and the murder of the old Caliph (Moroni Olsen) while trying to set up a government-in-exile without thinking of the German and Japanese conquests and occupations of various nations that would have been going on at the time; additionally, the fact that the old Caliph is murdered with the help of a traitor in his own noble ranks -- a "quisling" in the term coined during World War II -- wouldn't have been missed by audiences at the time. Further, the screenplay very specifically paints the forty thieves as heroes who have gone from being criminals to an active resistance force against the occupying Mongols -- indeed, at the denouement, their invasion of the palace is greeted as a day of liberation by the people of Bagdad. The movie walks a strange tightrope, casting about veiled topical references of that sort, even as is otherwise sufficiently tongue-in-cheek to cast Andy Devine as a desert bandit. Obviously, Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves was sold as -- and mostly intended as -- light entertainment, but just below that glitzy Technicolor surface were some fascinating allusions to the real world. None of this stops Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves from being immense fun -- it is, even if the "fun" isn't totally escapist in nature -- and it's great to look at as well, even 60 years on; Universal has apparently kept preservation-quality source materials on this and Hall and Montez's other Technicolor costume romps. And this particular entry in that group of movies also contains one very instructive clue to the morays and censorship of the time in one scene, in which the hero meets the heroine bathing at an oasis -- the makers seem to have been forced to insert a particular shot that is there for no other reason then to make it clear that she is not totally naked when he sees her.
~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
Panoplied in gaudy Technicolor and replete with beauteous slave girls and a princess, hard-riding villains and a handsome sword-swinging hero, "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," which thundered into the Palace yesterday, is a Hollywood version of a tale told centuries ago by a lady anxious to keep her head. Sheherazade, Burton tells us, had to spin her yarns for her bored lord's entertainment or else her fate was death. The producers, who used the bare skeleton of the story and also may have had entertainment in mind, have entertained, but have lost their heads in the process. This item, it turns out, is nothing more than another in the recent line of spectacular fast-moving Westerns set in the storied Near East.
Accoutered in oriental finery from burnoose to sandal and astride blooded chargers, the cast crashes its way through the story, which deals with the efforts of Ali, son of the Caliph of Baghdad, to regain his throne from that arch-villain, the Mongol conqueror Hulagu Khan. In embellishing this fiction the author has seen fit to employ the fanciful detail of the original and more. There is, of course, the cave which opens to that magical phrase, "Open sesame," the forty thieves and the forty jars, a treacherous Grand Vizier, comic opera thieves who really are Robin Hoods to the distressed Baghdad citizenry, and, finally, Jon Hall and Maria Montez as Ali and the resplendent princess to whom he has been betrothed since childhood.
The principals, including Kurt Katch as the Mongol leader, Turhan Bey as a faithful slave, Frank Puglia as the Vizier and Fortunio Bonanova and Andy Devine as the thief chieftain and his lieutenant, have entered into the spirit of the film by indulgently playing their roles in the grand manner. And indulgently is how "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" should be viewed.
A.W.
Production Credits
Director - Arthur Lubin
Screenwriter - Edmund L. Hartmann
Cinematographer - George Robinson
Editor - Russell Schoengarth
Special Effects - John P. Fulton
Producer - Paul Malvern
Cinematographer - W. Howard Greene
Composer (Music Score) - Edward Ward
Art Director - Richard H. Riedel
Set Designer - Ira S. Webb
Set Designer - Russell A. Gausman'
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