The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

Film: The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

Stars: Douglas Fairbanks, Snitz Edwards, Charles Belcher, Julianne Johnston, Anna May Wong

Director: Raoul Walsh

Oscar History: Predates the Academy Awards

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.: click here to learn more about Mr. Fairbanks (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are back-sorry I missed last week.  Between throwing my back out (getting old sucks, y'all), and not really having any gumption last weekend, and the truly depressing monstrosities that the Trump administration is unleashing on my fellow Twin Cities residents, I was not in a writing mood last weekend (and while my back is getting better, Trump is worse than ever), and missed this.  My hope is still to get back into the swing of things and make up the missing film of Douglas Fairbanks in the next two weeks.  In the meantime, though, we are at least in a similar spot to where we were two weeks ago when we talked through The Mark of Zorro.  In 1924, Fairbanks was continuing to establish himself as the first true action star after a decade in comedy.  His marriage to Mary Pickford, which had started with a quite tawdry affair (Fairbanks was very much still married at the time to his first wife Anna Beth Sully), was now a storybook marriage for the country to gush over, the first true Hollywood super-couple emerging.  And with today's film, we get to the movie that is probably the most critically-remembered of Fairbanks' pictures, a gargantuan movie that is one of the most revered of the 1920's, and was during a small period where Fairbanks star could rival his wife's...though she was always #1 to his #2, something that would become increasingly a problem in the years ahead.

(Spoilers Ahead) Today's film is The Thief of Bagdad, the 1924 version (not to be confused with the Oscar-winning 1940 version starring Conrad Veidt of Casablanca fame).  It features Fairbanks as Ahmed, the thief of Bagdad, who is a rapscallion who has dreams of using a magic rope that he has stolen to pursue even greater fortune when he falls in love with a young princess (Johnston).  She is about to be wed, and he pursues her in disguise as a prince, but when she chooses to marry him, he reveals he is nothing but a commoner.  He is said to be tortured for his treachery, but he escapes, and intends to win the second contest for the princess's (who is now in love with him) hand, to bring back the greatest treasure.  This sets off a long battle with a Mongolian prince, but one that Ahmed will surely win when he gets both a magical carpet and a magical powder that can conjure anything he wishes.  The film ends with him having defeated the evil prince, and getting to marry the princess.

The Thief of Bagdad is renowned today for its incredible production design and groundbreaking trick photography, making items appear "as if from nowhere" and both of these things are, indeed, impressive.  The sets, without the advantage of CGI, recreate through both gigantic scale and in some cases convincing miniatures an Arabia worthy of 1001 nights, and if you just look at this movie for its visual splendor, you get why it's so well-loved.  It looks beautiful, and for audiences of the 1920's, even compared to some of the grand-scale epics that DW Griffith had wrought by then, this is really in a class by itself.

The story itself, though, is way too long, and insanely repetitive.  Fairbanks is fun (I don't know why I had this impression of him as being super stodgy onscreen, as just like Zorro he's very charismatic & sexy in this part as well), and a young Anna May Wong steals every scene she's in as a duplicitous maid, but the rest of the cast is a snore, and the action set-pieces lose some of their sparkle when you have to follow so much plot with surprisingly few title cards to keep you along the way.  The movie's inspiration on future film design (you can literally see how Disney borrowed from this with Aladdin in the castle design), has to count for something, but I'll own that I was bored and wished it had about 30 minutes less of its nearly 150-minute runtime...more adventure, less random asides with the princess and evil prince (that go nowhere).