The success was spectacular (it is still a magnificent film) and it opened the gates for a flood of imitators. It developed the fantastic characters (the thief, the sultan, the princess, the genie) and their surroundings (the architecture, the clothes, the magical objects), but wove these into completely new stories, not based on the original film nor the books.
The 1940 movie did not stay very close to The Arabian Nights stories. Well, not a remake, exactly, since there was very little left of Fairbanks’ story, but it shared the title and a number of central themes. You keep waiting for the magic in Fairbank's film, but it only rarely shows up.Last week I wrote about the original The Thief of Bagdad with Douglas Fairbanks. They're as terrifically escapist as can be. Why? Because they're doing wonderful and amazing things in those films. What about Pat Wayne in the finale of Harryhausen's trilogy, Sinbad & The Eye Of The Tiger (1977)? Come to think of it, I also prefer Wayne and that film to this one - by a mile. I'll even go so far as to take John Phillip Law in Harryhausen's 1974 Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. As for me, I'll take Ray Harryhausen's classic Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad (1958) with Kerwin Matthews any day. If this were a silent film, where Jr's type of exaggerated action and motion were called for, his performance would have been more credible. It seemed that Doug wanted to pay homage and emulate the fanciful flair of his famous father, the first and one of cinema's greatest swashbucklers.
It really is stunning, especially when compared with the Technicolor of the '60s or '70s, or worse, with the quality shot on video. It's the vivid Technicolor, which was so prevalent in the 1940s. Try as Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., might, he isn't the star of this unexciting epic.
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