Mar
12
A Thousand and One Nights (1945)
March 12, 2010 | |
film that’s played with a wink and a nod.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
An attractive looking but buffoonish satire on the Arabian Nights
directed by Alfred E. Green (”Top Banana”/”Dangerous”/”The Jolson Story”)
and written by Richard English, Jack Henley and Wilfred H. Petitt. The
handsome Hungarian-born actor Cornel Wilde makes for a pleasing Aladdin,
despite looking like a fool in his Oriental zoot suit, in his first starring
role. Wilde made the 1936 U.S. Olympic fencing team and spoke six languages,
which gives him a leg up for his dashing role in this silly escapist romantic
fantasy film that’s played with a wink and a nod. What Wilde can’t do very
well is sing, so his singing voice is dubbed by Tom Clark.
The plot is set one thousand years ago in Arabia. It has the Aladdin,
a crooning vagabond, falling in love with the sultan’s half-naked beautiful
blonde daughter, Princess Armina (Adele Jergens), and attempts to win her
heart with the help of a jealous redheaded vamp-like genie named Babs (Evelyn
Keyes). Phil Silvers plays Abdullah, the anachronistic modern jive-talking
comical sidekick of Aladdin, who is also a pick pocket. The ending has
the thoroughly obnoxious Silvers singing in Frank Sinatra’s voice in a
harem of appreciative fans. Rex Ingram, who played in The Thief of Baghdad
(1940) as the giant Djinn, has a cameo as the giant. Dennis Hoey not only
played the good sultan Kamar Al-Kir but his evil twin brother Prince Hadji,
and played both without any particular distinction. Philip Van Zandt plays
the Grand Wazir, Abu-Hassan, who conspires with Prince Hadji to overthrow
the sultan. He had better lines in The Three Stooges episodes.
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The laughs are hard to come by and are more unintentional than intentional.
It was nominated for Oscars for Art Direction (Stephen Goosson, Rudolph
Sternad and Frank Tuttle) and Special Effects (Lawrence W. Butler and Ray
Bomba), the only two features of the film that had any worth. Columbia’s
lavish and lively production had great Technicolor and elaborate sets on
the lot, which to a certain degree cover up for its inability to tell a
good story.