What We Treasure, and Why?

The Thief Of Bagdad (1940) Was Someone's Happiest Memory

Name quick a most popular and influential pageant from the 40's, one that set then-youth upon clouds of joy. Ask author Alan Barbour, if he were still here, and the answer would be Korda's The Thief Of Bagdad. Barbour was viewing child of a decade when new sensations were buttressed by returning hits from the 30's. He saw them all, repeatedly, and wrote memoir that was A Thousand and One Delights, just one of a brace of books that walked down his memory lane. If you want first-hand recall of what moviegoing was like in a truest Classic Era, here it is. Trouble for us moderns is no one from back then telling their stories on the internet, being too old, or too departed, to participate in online discussion. Eyewitness testimony from later dims by the day as well. How long before we can't find anyone who saw The Day The Earth Stood Still when new, with exit of those who saw NBC's March 1962 broadcast premiere close behind. What do we achieve for recount of youth but confession of age and sand seeping from hourglass of memory? It's humbling then to read Alan Barbour and know what it was to grow up in a real Garden of Eden. He wrote prolific (fanzines, photo/ad collections, plus the books) until premature passing in 2002. Barbour called The Thief Of Bagdad a supremely high adventure, its Technicolor a summit of the process. He would see the show over and over whenever theatres brought it back, which was evidently often through the 40's. So how come we forgot what a trend setter The Thief Of Bagdad was?

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There was a book written about The Thief Of Bagdad in 2004. Co-author Malcolm Willits had a memorabilia shop on Hollywood Boulevard. He was born in 1934, so probably rode Korda's magic carpet early on to whatever revivals came his neighborhood's way. Question, then, to all: What single film, if any, would you devote book-length effort to? I could think of fifty titles easier than one, though the doing would require true, if not obsessive, commitment. Was The Thief Of Bagdad better suited to an earlier generation of fans? You could say that about any Classic Era favorite, being it's true of them all, but I don't hear The Thief Of Bagdad being praised at the level of a King Kong or The Adventures Of Robin Hood, two with which it has elements in common, though really, there is nothing else like The Thief Of Bagdad, other than a silent version Douglas Fairbanks did in the twenties. Follow-ups and imitators would be rife, and last right into the sixties. Most immediate trade on The Thief Of Bagdad were the six Maria Montez-Jon Hall adventures, the first of which set a pattern and was hat-tip enough to include Bagdad's Sabu among Universal's contract-starry cast. It wouldn't be long before spoofs led the way, crowds after the war more inclined to laugh at lamps that gave wishes and camels as conveyance (look at A Thousand and One Nights for extreme 1945 example).

Sex was safer-served with all else so divorced from reality. Domestic tilts at Arabian Nights were diminished more than helped by harems heaped with starlets, none invested in the spirit of exotic fantasy as June Duprez was in the 1940 trend-setter, but then, the British wouldn't condescend to exotic content the way we later would. Crudity of Bagdad special-fx can be overlooked in the face of effort so sincere, and what US copy-cat had Conrad Veidt as evilest of viziers? June Duprez was decades-later interviewed by another lifelong devotee of the film, John Kobal, who cherished The Thief Of Bagdad from first seeing it amidst postwar rubble of his English boyhood. Kobal's account is as vivid a picture of filmgoing as I've ever read, as told in preamble to his visit with Duprez in the 1985 book, People Will Talk. He's disappointed when she elects not to recall The Thief Of Bagdad in glowing terms. It was a job from which June Duprez moved on (and not to success in Hollywood, which made Bagdad that much easier to forget). Include Kobal then, among Thief Of Bagdad disciples who would write stirringly of impact the movie had. Like with Alan Barbour and Malcolm Willits, the bloom would not fade with passage of years. Again, are there such films that register so strongly, or permanently, for those of us younger? I tried sampling The Thief Of Bagdad through 40's eyes, advantage mine thanks to HD broadcast on TCM, but what am I saying? --- they got three-strip Technicolor on 35mm nitrate, and imagine what that would have looked like.

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Whatever impression The Thief Of Bagdad made when new (there was $1.1 million in domestic rentals) was redoubled when a next generation got hold of it in 1947. Strategy was not unlike Disney's with backlog, every seven years adequate to let a next audience gestate and begin buying tickets. The Thief Of Bagdad was as evergreen as any live action feature, and proved as much with extended runs and 1947 boxoffice to rival whatever was new at the time. Alexander Korda had leased a group of his features to "Film Classics," a thriving postwar reissue mill. The Thief Of Bagdad would pair with The Jungle Book, another Technicolor-ful flight of fantasy. These two, as with The Four Feathers and Drums (US re-title of UK's The Drum) were richer canvasses than the norm, deeply felt by those lucky enough to thrill with them in theatres. Regrettable coda to this was a following year's surrender of the Korda group to television, among first deals made for major features seen at home and for free. Twenty-four titles were leased to New York's WPIX, and they could peddle the lot as well to other stations nationwide ("approximately 13 television areas" were identified as possible customers). Technicolor that had distinguished many of the Kordas was lost to arid B/W on tiny tubes. Showmen would not thereafter want The Thief Of Bagdad or others thanks to Judas act of the Brit producer in letting the enemy have them. Here was where The Thief Of Bagdad began to lose its standing, except in hearts and minds of fan-ship that would become writer/historians. We have The Thief Of Bagdad on a Criterion DVD and various Blu-Rays from Region Two. I haven't looked to see which is best.