Director Raoul Walsh – whom Fairbanks biographer Jeffrey Vance seeks to downgrade as the film’s auteur 1 – is also at his happiest here. His anti-social antics are for our enjoyment he draws us in with winks, grins, gestures, hesitations and epiphanies. Ahmed is the inventive little tramp (under 5’ 8”) transplanted to the ancient East. This is the closest Fairbanks ever came to the cinema of his friend and associate, Charlie Chaplin. It is the psychology motivating action that gives these early sequences their profound charge. This would be pure mathematics – very enjoyable mathematics – if it wasn’t for the dissolving screen that precedes the sequence and the close-up of Ahmed’s hand grasping the hot food, indicating the thief’s desire and desperation, hunger and appetite. He removes a turban from a sleeping merchant, unwinds it and creates a pulley by throwing it over the balcony, under the sleeper and tying it to a donkey, then finally and blithely hoists himself up. Take the sublime sequence where Ahmed espies food being cooked on a balcony. Here is X and Y, I will make use of these to achieve Z. If we have seen a Douglas Fairbanks film before – which, by the release of The Thief of Bagdad in March 1924, many millions had – we will be looking with heady anticipation for the spatial props (including receptacles, windows, balconies, steps, mounds, tunnels, poles, ropes, drapes) which will soon enable a series of physical astonishments.įairbanks used to plot his films with elaborate charts, and there is something mathematical about the way he lays out the constituents of an acrobatic problem and proceeds to demonstrate how it is worked out. But this street is also a gym or assault course. The establishing shot of the main action in The Thief of Bagdad, rendered as throughout with William Cameron Menzies’ magical combination of spare geometrical architectural forms and lush Art Nouveau detail. Douglas Fairbanks plays Ahmed, a petty but tirelessly inventive thief who operates in ‘A street in Bagdad, dream city of the ancient East’. The first reel provides some of the purest joy the silent cinema can offer. But it must be confessed that The Thief of Bagdad is a lot more fun and engaging when it concentrates on childish things. Of course, this is the subtext of most heterosexist myths. In a film like The Thief of Bagdad, the story is of a child – a 40-year-old child, mind – becoming a man, putting away childish things to enter maturity and prove himself worthy of the woman who has physically and spiritually stirred him. It disrupts the narrative, they protest, and is only driven by commercial imperatives (the action film too commercial?!). Hardened fans of the action movie often deplore the inclusion of a love story.
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