TiVoPlex
TiVoPlex for December 20 2011 through December 26 2011
By John Seal
December 19, 2011
Sunday 12/25/11
2:45 PM Encore Family
The Bellboy (1961 USA): Oy, I’m recommending a Jerry Lewis movie. It must be a bad week. This time the gurning goofball plays a mute bellboy at a fancy Miami hotel, where one of the guests is...Jerry Lewis, also playing himself. Confusion and mildly amusing comedy antics ensue. This one’s strictly for Jerry’s kids. I know you’re out there.
Monday 12/26/11
11:15 AM Turner Classic Movies
The Thief of Bagdad (1940 GB): The Thief of Bagdad is an Arabian Nights fantasy writ large and in Technicolor. Co-directed by Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, and Tim Whelan, it was produced by London Films, the company founded by Alexander and Zoltan Korda after they emigrated from Hungary to Britain in the early 1930s.
Work on the film began in London in 1939, but the challenges of wartime compelled the Kordas to relocate production to Hollywood. The Thief of Bagdad debuted in British cinemas on December 19, 1940, and must have been a most welcome distraction indeed. (If distraction could be found at all: opening night coincided with a massive air raid on London, during which the Luftwaffe plastered the city with tens of thousands of incendiary bombs.)
The film stars Sabu - an Indian teenager discovered by Korda when he was shooting Elephant Boy in Mysore in 1937 - as Abu, a cheeky street urchin who will steal anything that isn’t nailed down. Jailed for theft, Abu finds himself in the same dungeon as a blind beggar named Ahmad (John Justin). Ahmad is the rightful king of Bagdad, but has been usurped by wicked vizier Jaffar (frequent movie bad guy Conrad Veidt, perhaps best remembered today as Major Strasser in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca.)
Their prison sojourn is brief, however, as the resourceful Abu has stolen the jailer’s key. The new friends flee south to Basra, where Ahmad is promptly smitten with the beautiful daughter (June Duprez, in a role originally imagined for Vivien Leigh) of a child-like Sultan (Miles Malleson, who also wrote the film’s screenplay and would play similarly dotty characters throughout his long career) - but Jaffar has his eye on the princess as well, and will go to any lengths to win her hand. Abu and Ahmad, naturally, have other ideas.
The Thief of Bagdad is a perfectly cast and beautifully made adventure that transcends its somewhat predictable story. It’s also one of the great technical achievements of cinema. Lawrence Butler’s special effects - including a Kali-style six-armed statue, a flying horse, a giant spider, and a massive genie played with gusto by the great African-American actor Rex Ingram - earned an Academy Award, as did Georges Perinal’s cinematography and Vincent Korda’s art direction.
The film anticipated and surely influenced the extravagant fantasies that Charles Schneer and Ray Harryhausen would produce, such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963) - films which in turn would leave an indelible impression on youngsters like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. For better or worse, The Thief of Bagdad is the great-granddaddy of the summer special effects blockbuster - but try not to hold that against it.
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