This movie is great fun to watch, like you would expect from a genre movie such as this one. It has all the typical adventurous, action and comedy elements present to make this a great swashbuckling movie. Add to that Douglas Fairbanks in good shape and you have a classic unforgettable genre movie!

Douglas Fairbanks is totally great in this one. He looks, acts, breaths, eats like a real superstar. He handles all of the athletic action in the movie really well. It's not hard to see why this man was THE swashbuckling hero of the '20's.

The movie is really great looking, with many grand looking sets. Really great looking stuff! (though obviously all fake.) Something you would normally expect to see in a D.W. Griffith movie. The movie also has some silly looking but yet great early special effects, toward the ending of the movie.

The story has all the ingredients needed for such a genre movie as this one; an heroic main character, a love interest, stereotypical villains and lots of fun and action. Especially toward the ending the movie starts to become greatly adventurous after a sort of slower middle and good first part. It's of course all rather simple and formulaic but this is also what makes the genre so great. You just always know what to expect. It's good simple fun that's professionally and well made, that's also beautiful to look at.

Also definitely fun to see how much of this movie was later used again in Disney's "Aladdin". Some, mostly action sequences, are obviously almost directly copied.

A great fun movie, from swashbuckling-specialist director Raoul Walsh.

9/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

While the 1940 The Thief of Bagdad is one of my favourite films, this silent film from 1924 is every bit as memorable and has much to offer. Visually, it is spectacular especially in the splendid cinematography and the colourful sets. The story is still as magical as ever, with the action witty and cleverly choreographed with Fairbanks doing his own stunts and doing it so energetically, and the fantasy elements from the magic rope and the winged horse to the underwater sea monsters and the valley battle are enough to enchant you. True, the film is lengthy and may contain a couple of lulls in the pacing, but when Fairbanks, the visuals and the adventure and fantasy elements of the story were so good, this was hardly a problem for me. The characters could be seen as genre clichés, but fun and likable ones at that as well as endearingly performed. Of the performances, faring weakest was Julanne Johnston, beautiful but on the bland side. The rest of the cast more than make amends, with Douglas Faribanks really the epitome of dashing, heroic and charming(made even more so with his trademark smile),Sojin deliciously malevolent and Anna May Wong entrancing. Overall, there are a couple of debits, but the great things overshadow those completely and make for a sensational film. 9.5/10 Bethany Cox

I happened to see The Thief Of Bagdad on a VHS that had a narration by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. He said that of all the films that his father did this was the junior Fairbanks's favorite. Although the senior Fairbanks in closeups might have looked a little long in the tooth to be playing the young thief who wooed and won a princess, he hadn't lost a bit of athleticism that his films were known for.

The Tales of the Arabian Nights was the inspiration for this The Thief Of Bagdad and the more familiar sound version that Alexander Korda produced and shot here in the USA as well due to wartime conditions in Great Britain. Here Douglas Fairbanks essentially plays both parts of the two heroes that Sabu and John Justin play in the Korda version. Fairbanks is the professional thief who can steal just about anything, big or small. When he steals a magic rope and climbs into the Caliph's Palace and beholds the sight of the princess Julanne Johnston, there will be no other woman for him.

But the Bagdad Caliphate is not an upwardly mobile society, not for the poor, but honest and not for a criminal. Still he tries to pass himself off as a prince and he's in competition with three other princes for her hand.

One of them, Japanese actor Rojin is the Mongol prince and if he can't woo the Caliphate in alliance, he'll steal the kingdom with his army which he starts infiltrating in Bagdad. Fairbanks ultimately can't go through with the deception though he charms the princess. She sneaks him out of the palace before what happens to upwardly mobile aspirants in that society happens to Fairbanks.

But holy man Charles Belcher says that Fairbanks has a future with the princess and he's put through a lot of tests before he can wed. And of course in typical bravura Fairbanks style, he puts the Mongols to flight with an army created out of nowhere.

By this time Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith had gotten United Artists up and running as the production company for their films which it was primarily doing in those early days. Producer Fairbanks spared no expense in creating the sets for The Thief Of Bagdad, the sets look like something Cecil B. DeMille or D.W. Griffith might have done. I wouldn't be surprised if Griffith took an unofficial hand here.

The sets were created of course by young William Cameron Menzies in one of his earliest films, costumes by Mitchell Leisen, and the director was Raoul Walsh, all of them getting big boosts in their careers from Douglas Fairbanks. With all that legendary talent in its salad days no wonder The Thief Of Bagdad holds up as well as it does today.

I also must comment on the orchestrations of themes of Rimsky-Korsakov by the London Symphony Orchestra. Theater organs are usually good for silent films, but this one really calls for an orchestra so vast is the sweep of this silent classic.

At two and half hours plus, The Thief Of Bagdad runs longer than most silent films did by far. Still even today it casts a spell over the viewer.