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Arabian Nights

A near carbon copy of The Thief of Bagdad in tone and material, but without that film’s artistry and fantasy, Arabian Nights is Saturday matinee through-and-through, but a little too sluggish for its own good. Which isn’t to say that it’s bad, but it’s more half-formed. Too many characters get lost in the shuffle, or are brought in for easy name recognition but never paid off in a satisfactory way.

Arabian Nights is a grab-bag of elements, tossed together, and thrown in with low-comedy and high-production values. The story concerns two brothers (Leif Erickson and Jon Hall) warring over their kingdom, Scheherazade (Maria Montez), street magician and acrobat Ali Ben Ali (Sabu), Sinbad the Sailor (Shemp Howard), and Aladdin (John Qualen). The hodge-podge ensemble of characters from the tales never quite coheres, with Sinbad and Aladdin being prime opportunities for Universal to unleash it’s mega-budget and movie-magic on fantastical characters and special effects like they often did with their movie monsters, but forsaking that in favor of pratfalls and easy gags. It’s a missed opportunity.

Where Arabian Nights excels is in the production and costume designs, and its use of Technicolor. This is a movie drunk with bright, lurid colors. Each frame is a piece of pop art waiting to burst forth from the confines and assault our eyes. I mean that as a high compliment. The jewels sparkle, the various colors look like daydreams come to life, and the entire thing is remarkably well-preserved for a film of its age.

The sets and matte paintings create another imagine place, one in which a vast Arabian kingdom seems to have assembled itself from disparate parts of others. Numerous fairy tale films do this with their imagined European kingdoms, and this one is treated no differently. At times the multi-cultural cast seems a little lost, towered as they are above the vast production. Only Sabu seems comfortable in these settings, as Jon Hall is painfully generic, and Maria Montez is prone to somnambulistic vamping.

A little bit more fantasy would only have helped this film, but its minor escapist charm is pleasing enough. It knows it’s light-hearted, and plays to those strengths more often than not, but it still shows its age in many places. Too many of the supporting players feel like they’re reading off of cue cards, numerous nubile female players are offered up as cheesecake and nothing more, and two-thirds of the leads are a wash. It’s a very minor charmer, the kind of film you watched on a bored, rainy Sunday afternoon when nothing else is on.
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Added by JxSxPx
8 years ago on 17 August 2015 21:23