Silent movies - The Thief of Bagdad

As pronounced in this post , I have started my silent movie project now, quicker than even I had expected.

For my first movie, I chose "The Thief of Bagdad" starring Douglas Fairbanks sr, directed by Raoul Walsh.
When I wrote about the movie "Sinbad the Sailor" from 1947 with the junior, which is very much regarded a homage to his dad, I said I would watch the 1940 version of "The Thief of Bagdad" next (maybe for another post) and possibly the 1924 silent movie as well. That was before I decided to fight the decline of my attention span and include silent movies in the process. So the "maybe" became a "definitely" although my first attempt was quite feeble. It was a very tired day and I had to abort the mission after 20 minutes because I literally couldn't keep my eyes open to do anything at all except fall asleep within seconds.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
(Anton Grot)

New day, new luck.
There are several versions of the movie on YouTube, restored, unrestored, different resolutions, different music. At first, I chose randomly and ended up with a kind of ethereal and repetitive music which may not have helped me fighting my eyelids.
The second time I had a look around and chose this one with the original Mortimer Wilson score.

2 1/2 hours and much to my own surprise I didn't struggle with it although I'm going to say from the start that the movie didn't need to be that long in my opinion.
I had to take one little break because the cats were at the brink of starving and got very dramatic about it. They would have done great at silent movies (they rarely get really talkative and as they were about to be dying on the spot, their voices had gone completely).
Right after the movie, a short video with Leonard Maltin, well-known and respected film critic, popped up. He said: "'The Thief of Bagdad' is just a glorious film, but sometimes misunderstood because Douglas Fairbanks plays it so big. His gestures are so big that people sometimes laugh at him, and I say 'no no, don't laugh at him, laugh with him, he's doing it on purpose, he's doing it like ballet. ... But everything about that movie is big. The other reason he thought of doing it that way was that he didn't want to be eclipsed by the sets and the special effects. He still wanted it to be a Douglas Fairbanks movie."
That had been my thought. It was like a ballet on screen with Fairbanks as the main dancer who seemed to enjoy himself a lot.

The plot of "The Thief of Bagdad" may sound familiar to you in parts.
Fairbanks is Ahmed, a thief in Bagdad (didn't expect that, did you?) together with a friend. With the help of a magic rope he has stolen in the marketplace, he enters the palace of the Caliph of Bagdad to steal a treasure from there, but when he lays his eyes on the Caliph's sleeping daughter, he falls in love and leaves the palace only with her shoe for a souvenir.
His friend is confused about the shoe at first, but then understands what has happened.

My favorite inter-title.
I wonder what people are going to think if I add
that to my repertoire, maybe for a work meeting -
Nizzy noodle! No idea what it means.

So he tells Ahmed the story of a princess who got "stolen" from a palace after being drowsed (not cool, guys).
To gather entry to the palace, Ahmed and his friend - in stolen finery - join a group of three princes, the Prince of the Indies, the Prince of Persia, and the Prince of the Mongols who really wants to conquer Bagdad. The Princess is supposed to choose a husband among them. Of course it's love at first sight for her when he rides into town.
He climbs up to her room, but finds he loves her too much to go through with the plan and take her away. Before he and his friend can leave the palace, though, the princes are summoned to learn that the Princess chose Ahmed.
Unfortunately, the Princess' Mongol slave recognizes him as the thief from the night before, and understandably being on the Prince of the Mongols' side, she lets him know, just when Ahmed has confessed to the Princess. Ahmed is flogged and supposed to be killed by an ape, but the Princess bribes the guards to let him go.
To delay the wedding with one of the three princes, she has her father send them out and the one bringing the rarest treasure will be her husband.
Ahmed, too, hears of this and sets out himself. With the help of a hermit during his dangerous travel - fire, the deep sea and monsters - he finds a winged horse taking him to a place where a magic chest is hidden under a cloak of invisibility.
The Prince of Persia finds a magic carpet, the Prince of the Indies a magic crystal, and the Prince of the Mongols a magic apple which can heal. He has ordered the slave girl to poison the Princess, so he can heal her and thus win her hand and the throne. To be on the safe side, he has managed to station 20,000 of his men inside the town.
When the princes see in the crystal that the Princess is near death, they take the magic carpet to get to Bagdad where the apple heals her just in time.
Just when the Mongol Prince has taken the throne thanks to his army and orders the wedding to take place immediately, Ahmed reaches Bagdad and uses the magic chest to create an even bigger army which makes the Mongols flee.
Before their prince can escape on the flying carpet with the Princess as suggested by the slave, however, Ahmed, invisible thanks to the cloak, rescues her.
In the end, they fly away together on the carpet.

This is a fairy tale (the subtitle "An Arabian Nights Fantasy" could have hinted it that). So I didn't quite get one review saying it left the viewer lukewarm because she's not a fairy tale person. To be honest, I think if I wasn't, I wouldn't even have tried to watch this.
Then there is of course the question of Orientalism which was to be expected for a story inspired by "Arabian Nights" and made in these times.
In fact there were protests when Fairbanks and his wife Mary Pickford visited Shanghai on a world tour in 1929, due to the controversy about the portrayal of the Mongol Prince (not the only film of the time seen as controversial in China), which then led to Fairbanks declining public receptions.
Here is an interesting article about a collection of "film posters creating an Orientalist fantasy", by the way. This post led me from one big rabbit hole to the next.

I don't know if the reason is that it is a fairy tale, but to me it was not as extreme as for example Gunga Din or The Sun Never Sets.
The villain was Mongol, yes, and I don't know why they chose those three countries for the princes or if they even gave it much thought at all, but he was a conqueror who wanted Bagdad, and real life white conquerors have shown us they could do much worse, so the movie certainly didn't make me think of him and all Mongols as the epitome of evilness afterwards.

Let's go back to talking about "big ballet".
As I said, Fairbanks was the main dancer and acrobat and if you are able to take this as a fairy tale ballet and can get over the expressive overacting of a silent movie - something I had to learn first myself - it's really enjoyable to watch his big arm gestures and "dancing".
So he may have been too old for the part at 41, but without looking at his face you wouldn't have guessed it seeing him jump and climb his way through the movie and through the first part of it even without a shirt (I much preferred his look to huge muscles).

Can you imagine what it must have been like to watch something like this back then? It must have been magical, even to Fairbanks himself whose favorite it was according to his son.
There are reviewers who find the movie aged. I get that silent movies are not everyone's cup of tea, but how can you even compare them to new/er ones?
Another one lets us know that it's obvious all the monsters are fake. Seriously?! So glad he told me!
People, that movie is 100 years old. Of course it's aged and has obviously fake monsters (show me a movie that has real ones, doh) and still it's able to enchant a lot of people, me included.
There was some fine acting, for example from Anna May Wong as the slave - better than the Princess who mostly had to swoon over Ahmed a lot - and Sôjin Kamiyama as the Mongol Prince.
Could the monster fights have been a bit longer and the love-birding a good deal shorter? Yes. Could the army scenes have been a bit shorter? Yes. Even if I know not everyone agrees, - rabbit hole - the movie still didn't put me to sleep, not even Ahmed's inevitable transformation from thief to good person to prove himself worthy for the Princess.
Is it a movie I will want to watch over and over again? No. Do I see myself watching it again at all sometime? Absolutely.

Now let's get to the other big star.
The movie may have been a critical success, but it was not a commercial one because of the costs.
It was one of the largest and most expensive movies made until then costing the incredible sum of $1,135,654.65. I wonder what the 65 cents were for 😉
That is really not that surprising if you look at the sets. They are huge and you wouldn't know that just two years before they started out as Nottingham Castle in "Robin Hood" before production designer William Cameron Menzies transformed them to Bagdad by massively extending them.
You have to see it yourself to get an idea.
I found myself wondering how they made the fabric for the long curtains in the palace and how you wash something like it. I also noticed being fascinated by some of the costumes (possibly not the ones you are thinking of now).

Also there are of course the special effects - not just the fake monsters. I loved the scene with the sea spider, the flying carpet, the little "whirlwind" indicating the invisibility cloak, the effects were so good for that time. I would have loved to be in an audience back then to see the reactions.
Of course you already know that I'm old-fashioned and sometimes prefer those effects to today's super effects even if some come across as a bit ridiculous.

I almost forgot to say something about the music. As mentioned, I chose the version with the original score. Fairbanks had already worked with Wilson on "The Mark of Zorro" and therefore commissioned him to write a score for "The Thief of Bagdad" with the instruction to "make your score as artistic as you can".
In the 80s, the movie was shown with a musical score by Carl Davis based on compositions of Rimsky-Korsakov and you can also find this version on YouTube, but I really liked the original music a lot and I like the idea that this was what the original audience got to hear.

You are probably more tired now from reading this than I was from watching the movie.
So yes, if you are ever game to watch a silent movie, why not try this one?
In the sources I have collected some more articles and reviews on this if you haven't read enough yet and I made it a mix of positive and not so positive ones. In the end, you always have to make up your own mind, anyway.

I also hope you are not scared now to follow me to my next silent movie adventure. The list is growing slowly ...

Sources:
1. Jeffrey Vance: The Thief of Bagdad. An essay on "San Francisco Silent Film Festival" 2013
2. Darragh O'Donoghue: The Thief of Bagdad. On "Senses of Cinema", issue 84, September 2017
3. Kirsten O'Regan: Aladdin to Thief of Baghdad: How film posters created an Orientalist fantasy. On "Middle East Eye", May 15, 2019
4. Reviews of "The Thief of Bagdad" on Letterboxd
5. Kage Baker: Ancient Rockets: The Thief of Bagdad. On "Reactor", August 10, 2009
6. Craig Lysy: The Thief of Bagdad - Mortimer Wilson. On "Movie Music UK", August 8, 2022