The Thief of Bagdad (1924 film)
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The Thief of Bagdad (1924 film)
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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"It’s said that the sets for this dazzling Arabian Nights fantasia ranged across more than six acres of Hollywood sound stages. A monument to spectacle directed by Raoul Walsh and starring the inimitable Douglas Fairbanks, The Thief of Bagdad is a thrillingly bombastic epic of American silent cinema."
— MUBI's take
The Thief of Bagdad is a 1924 American silent adventure film directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Douglas Fairbanks, and written by Achmed Abdullah and Lotta Woods. Freely adapted from One Thousand and One Nights, it tells the story of a thief who falls in love with the daughter of the Caliph of Baghdad. In 1996, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Why It Rocks
- By the 1920s Douglas Fairbanks was among the most popular male stars in movies due to his American characters having a "can do" attitude and brawny athleticism. In this film he portrays Ahmed, a thief and uncommonly rambunctious commoner, with a performance that is fearlessly extravagant and hugely endearing for its self-delight.
- He's also shown to be incredible at pulling (often very difficult) stunts, and he's shown leaping, swaggering, and dancing through the streets of a Bagdad that clearly knows the thief, Ahmed, and finds him dangerously entertaining. At one moment he climbs a magician’s magic rope, then levitates on a balcony while stealing a quick meal. At another he eludes his pursuers by scampering over the backs of worshippers at prayer. At all times he’s a prodigy of motion and a delighted witness to his own one-man show.
- Fairbanks seems to have had several inspirations for the film, such as Paul Leni’s Waxworks on a visual level, the fantasy films by Maurice Tourneur (at the time one of the more respected directors in the industry) on a narrative level, and several themes and characters from One Thousand and One Nights.
- Silent films at their melodramatic worst can distract modern audiences with pointless intertitles, and being over reliant on "tell, don't show". But this film is a model of narrative clarity, with little need for elaborate titles, and no need at all for what we’d call a “backstory,” a dutiful detailing of how the hero came to be who he is and why he’s doing what he does. It’s understood that Ahmed steals because he’s a thief and that he steals with such style and verve because he has a virtuoso’s gift and loves to use it. (In one cheerfully gratuitous gesture he stands on his head and shakes all of his newly purloined coins from his pockets.)
- It’s also easily understood that the thief, having stolen the princess’s heart, can keep it, and prevail over his royal rivals, only by going on a journey of spiritual transformation. And it's an incredibly memorable journey, as anything that can be imagined can be put on the screen. The astounding and innovative visual effects in the fairy-tale included: the Valley of Monsters, a smoke-belching, fire-breathing dragon in Caverns of Fire, an underwater spider, a golden apple of the sun, an all-seeing crystal eye, a cloak of invisibility, a Flying Pegasus Horse, the famed Magic Carpet, and armies mystically arising from the dust.
- Incredible set work from William Cameron Menzies, one of the most influential visual artists in the history of the motion picture medium and first man to earn the title of production designer. It brought film audiences to a new level of imagination and fantasy, and displayed legendary design with its massive palace sets. First and foremost, his sets were enormous. These environments were notable for their verticality — palace chambers that reached toward cloudless skies, palace gates that rose and fell within soaring chevroned walls. (Keep in mind, this was long before the silver screen stretched itself wide to compete with TV.) More than that, though, Menzies’s designs were works of artistic distinction that caught and held the eyes of moviegoers who may have cared not at all about art but who responded to the power of his sweeping lines. Sometimes, the film provides exotic creatures or swarming troops (real animals and real troops, not glibly digitized phantasms) but there’s rarely any clutter. Bold graphic elements — a diagonal slash of a stairway, a vertical string of giant beads along a huge cubist face — enhance the strangeness of a world in which Ahmed struggles with his fabulous adversaries.
- The film knows how to balance its tone as both comically energetic and mysteriously lyrical with the time calls for it.
- As a cynical, swashbuckling thief, Douglas Fairbanks finds plenty of time for shameless fun: riding the rails, as it were, of a palanquin into the palace; peering down at the princess from a vantage point atop a tree in her garden; pitching from the back of a bucking horse into a royal rose bush. (The thief has no way of knowing that by touching the bush’s magic petals has confirmed himself as his beloved’s only legitimate suitor.)
- Once Ahmed gets religion, however, once he plunges into his perilous tasks, the pace turns slow and dreamlike and the hero is often dwarfed by the stunning scenery.
- The Art Deco-styled Arabian Nights fantasy, the first major visual effects epic in American film-making history, and it even had a lasting influence on other fantasy tales
Bad Qualities
- Sometimes Fairbanks would became so enamored of the set that he often compromised the dramatic tension of the story in order to spotlight them.
- For a film so basic that Walsh reduced it to “thief, princess, emir, arch-rival prince,” The Thief of Bagdad turned out to be a vast, sprawling story filled with digressions and narrative deadends.