The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

I blame J.R.R. Tolkien for the wasteland that is the fantasy genre.

Tolkien was a jealous guy. He looked at the mythologies of the world and thought, "Why don't the English have a compelling, fun mythology like the Norse and the Romans?" Then he thought he'd create one and, thus, _The Lord of the Rings_ was born. But _The Lord of the Rings_ was so good, so influential, that it bent the Western approach to fantasy and locked it into a thralldom to Late Medieval milieus.

So it is that the modern viewer may come to THE THIEF OF BAGDAD unfamiliar with the rich and delightful world of Arabic mythology. This is a world of crystal balls, flying carpets, invisibility cloaks, and winged horses. It's a world of scoundrels and shamans, thieves and kings, djinn and devils. It's a world of Indian princes, Mongol raiders, and Chinese slave girls. It's rich, exciting, entertaining stuff, and it's brought to life wonderfully by Raoul Walsh in 1924's THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, starring Douglas Fairbanks. As the thief, Fairbanks is all muscle tone, mischievous grins, and cheesy '20s moustache. He's also a great deal of fun as the lying, scheming, wholly redeemable man who learns that happiness must be earned. But how does he learn this lesson? By journeying through some of the most exciting and visually impressive set pieces I've seen in any film of any era.

How can silent era, low-tech sets compete with the wonders dreamed up by the Lucases of today? Because when we see them, we know that they're real. People actually made that magnificent papier mache Buddha, that wonderful Caliphate-era palace, those dazzling underground and underwater environments. We don't care that the ship on the storm-tossed sea is actually a cardboard boat among fan-blown sheets, because THE THIEF OF BAGDAD sells that ship, it sells that sea, it sells everything it shows us because such obvious care and craft went into its design and execution.

I love THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, and I love that it reintroduced me to the world of Arabic mythology, a world I'd largely forgotten. This movie is thrilling, it's exciting, it's a flat-out great time at the pictures. Queue it up.

I betcha Tolkien loved it, too.

PS Yes, I know that caliphate-era Baghdad isn't Arabia, but the stories in the film do come from _The Arabian Nights_, so I'm lumping 'em into Arabian mythology anyway.
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