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209 Chapter 9 “Architecture in Motion” The Thief of Bagdad When Shahrazad ceased speaking, Dunyazad exclaimed,“Oh, my own sister, by Allah in very sooth this a right pleasant tale and a delectable; never was heard the like of it, prithee tell me now another story to while away what yet remaineth of the waking hours of this our night.” She replied,“With love and gladness if the King give me leave”; and he said,“Tell thy tale and tell it quickly.”So she began, with these words. —The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night And so we come to Douglas Fairbanks’s extravagant “Arabian Nights Fantasy .” He takes us to Bagdad, the “dream city of the ancient East,” a brutal and magical place, where horses have wings, carpets fly, and princes, despots, and thieves alike contest for the hand of the caliph’s beautiful daughter. Not just the exotic trappings of Richard Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night are here, but so is its central theme, encapsulated in this quatrain: Seek not thy happiness to steal ’Tis work alone will bring thee weal Who seeketh bliss without toil or strife The impossible seeketh and wasteth life.1 Thief, like a handful of earlier films from the late teens and early twenties —such as imported “Orientalist” fictions of Georges Melies, Joe May’s German serials, and Paul Leni’s Waxworks—constructs an Oriental playground for white audiences on which to project their pleasures “The Imperial Reach” 210 and fantasies.2 Among the ecstatic fans and critics that greeted its New York premiere on March 18, 1924, none was more rapturous than the always reliable Robert E. Sherwood, who considered The Thief of Bagdad as “the farthest and most sudden advance that the movie has ever made.”3 The trick is, as Sherwood goes on to explain, that it somehow makes its wizardry seem probable. If, for example, the thief’s nimble fingers can steal a merchant’s purse, why can they not conjure a rope up into the air? Sherwood’s judgment has, for the most part, withstood the years, and Thief of Bagdad remains “a feat of motion picture art which has never been equaled and one which itself will enthrall persons time and again.”4 Today, however, as will be noted presently, in a few crucial respects, at least, we may view this exotic caravanserai with different eyes and sensibilities . We are prepared to regard it, one of Fairbanks’s finest achievements , not just as a triumph of design and execution, but as the product of that peculiar phenomenon endemic to its time, “Orientalism.” In other words, it has several stories, or “nights,” to relate . . . so we will condense the “1001 Nights” into our own “Four Nights.” Eluding his pursuers in The Thief of Bagdad (1924). The Thief of Bagdad 211 The First Night At the outset, The Thief of Bagdad finds us on familiar territory, for the film’s motto is: Happiness must be earned. Whether we are in New Jersey, Arizona, Mexico, or Bagdad—as a businessman , a cowboy, an aristocrat, or a thief—Fairbanks’s message remains the same, only now couched in an exotic rhetoric: “O true believers, gathered in this sacred mosque, earn thy happiness in the name of the true god . . . Toil, for by toil are the sweets of human life to be found. ” Our Thief, moreover, in the best fairy tale (and Fairbanksian) tradition, will win the hand of a princess and graduate from rags to riches. The main characters of this film represent polar extremes of fairy tale society. On the one hand, we have caricatures of Asian potentates grown fat and lazy from overindulgence and luxury, such as the stout Prince of Persia (one is reminded of the indulgent rich in Fairbanks’s early comedies, by the way) or slimy villains consumed by greed and political ambition, such as Cham Shang, The Great Prince of the Mongols, King of Ho Sho, and governor of Wah Hoo and the Island of Wak. At the other social extreme, we have Doug’s thief, a clever, pragmatic fellow who lives by his wits and is clearly successful at his “profession .” He appears as an appealing and energetic entrepreneur in baggy pants, out for himself, a rather greedy realist who states his philosophy as follows: “What I want-I take. My reward is here. Paradise is a fool’s dream and Allah is a myth. ” In...

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