by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Son of Sinbad, one of Howard Hughes’ personal productions during the seven years
(1948 to 1955) he owned RKO Radio Pictures, and a pretty generic Arabian Nights
adventure but one with some truly weird curveballs thrown at the audience that
probably reflect Howard Hughes’ own obsessions. As is well known, Hughes
maintained a sort of Hollywood harem; he would sign literally hundreds of
attractive, hot-looking Hollywood girls with hopes of breaking into movies, put
them up in motel rooms or small bungalows, maybe occasionally visit them (or
not), maybe actually offer them a minor part in a film (or not), and then
forget about them, leaving them to collect a regular paycheck from his
organization but otherwise do nothing. Son of Sinbad is the sort of movie a man with that sort of hobby
might make — especially if he were also a recluse who was increasingly out of
touch with normal humanity and normal standards of human behavior, and whose
whole idea of the rest of human existence came from everybody else’s movies. Son
of Sinbad was made in 1953, though it
wasn’t released until 1955 (which probably reflects both Hughes’ obsessive
tendency to pick things apart and the reaction of the Production Code
Administration to the many scenes of exotic dancing in this film and the
scantily clad harem girls and other female performers), and it was recently
shown by Turner Classic Movies as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute to
Vincent Price.
Sinbad, son of Sinbad, is played by Dale Robertson, a
rambunctious young scamp (and quite a hot-looking man, especially in the
frequent shots of him shirtless, but for all the attempts of Hughes’ more
recent biographers to “out” him posthumously as Bisexual, Hughes was far more interested in cheesecake than beefcake and the
movie shows it), who’d much rather crash the harem of the Caliph of Baghdad
(Leon Askin) and dally with the harem girls than do anything particularly
heroic. His sidekick Omar Khayyam — yes, that Omar Khayyam — feeds him lines of poetry,
Cyrano-style, to make Sinbad’s wooing more effective. Omar is played by Vincent
Price, who approaches this part with the same double game he would use in a lot
of his horror films (especially the dementedly silly ones he made in the 1960’s
at American International): he rolls his eyes, smiles at the audience and
overacts so relentlessly that to a sufficiently savvy viewer he’s letting us in
on the joke: “I know you don’t take any of this seriously — and I
don’t either!” Sinbad son of Sinbad is
attracted to so many women in the
story it’s hard to keep track of them all — and though some of them are
dark-haired and some of them are blonde, they’re otherwise pretty much built to
the same specifications: lithe, almost boyish and (mostly) small-breasted
(despite Hughes’ much talked-about breast obsession that led him to sign Jane
Russell, one of only two women — Jean Harlow was the other — who passed through
the Hughes machine and became enduring stars) — but the three who stand
out, at least in terms of screen time and billing, are Ameer (Sally Forrest),
Nerissa (Lili St. Cyr, a star stripper whom Hughes signed for the role), and
Kristina (Mari Blanchard, who later signed with Universal-International and
remade Marlene Dietrich’s role in the 1954 version of Destry Rides
Again).
For about the first hour of its
91-minute running time not much happens in Son of Sinbad except Sinbad breaks into the harem, dillies with
one girl, dallies with another, and the action periodically stops for a belly
dance — indeed, there are at least four major dance sequences in the film,
practically enough to qualify Son of Sinbad as a musical even though no one sings (which is
probably just as well) — until an action plot finally develops. It seems
Baghdad is being menaced by the conquering Mongol hordes led by Tamerlane, who
isn’t shown as an on-screen character but his lieutenant Murad (Ian McDonald)
is. Sinbad and Omar have just been captured by the Caliph, who’s threatening to
execute them, but they come up with a way to evade it: they offer to crash Murad’s
camp and steal back the secret of “Greek fire,” a primitive explosive which
apparently really existed; as an imdb.com contributor explained, “Attributed to
the ancient Greeks, it was composed of pitch or bitumen, sulfur, and other
ingredients. It was used in naval warfare and the Romans also made use of it.
With the fall of the ancient Western world, it was temporarily forgotten, but
it was rediscovered by the Arabs, from whom European Crusaders also learned the
method of making it.” Sinbad and Omar are counting on the help of the Forty
Thieves, who have lived in a cave redoubt in the desert since the days of Ali Baba — only it turns out [spoiler
alert!] that the Forty Thieves are women, the daughters of the originals who took over the
family business after Ali Baba had their dads put to death (at least I think that’s what the script said). All of a sudden, this
heavy-duty male-chauvinist fantasy becomes a proto-feminist film, as the
chiffon-clad women take on Murad’s men and, armed with Greek fire — which they
use partly as a sort of primitive bomb (Sinbad takes metal canisters full of
it, attaches them to chains, swings them like bolos and lets them fly at the
enemy) and partly to tip their arrows with so they can shoot flaming arrows at
the baddies.
The staging of the final battle scene is a dead giveaway that the
film was originally shot in 3-D — we get plenty of those flaming arrows aimed
directly at the camera — though by the time Hughes had finished battling with
the censors over the sexually explicit dances he insisted on putting into the
film (Production Code Administration head Joe Breen had ruled the film in
violation of the Code for “indecent dance movements and too scanty costuming”)
two years had gone by, so many rotten films had been released in 3-D that it
was the kiss of death at the box office, and instead Hughes cropped the film to
wide-screen format and issued it as an RKO SuperScope presentation (RKO’s
competitor to CinemaScope after other studios realized that though 20th
Century-Fox had trademarked the CinemaScope name, the basic technology — French
inventor Henri Chrétien’s anamorphic lens, which “squeezed” the image during
filming, and the decoder lens for the projector that opened it up again so the
people looked normal but the frame was twice as wide — was in the public
domain, so any studio could use it as long as they called it something else and could get someone to grind the lenses for them,
which was tougher than a lot of them realized). The Turner Classic Movies print
was obviously from the original 1.33-1 version, since it was framed for that
screen aspect ratio and did not
betray the God-awful framing typical of a wide-screen movie that’s been
panned-and-scanned to fit into the 1.33-1 box of an old-fashioned TV set.
(Modern-day TV sets are at the digital-TV and digital-theatre projection
standard of 1.78-1, and I’ve seen TCM showings on a modern digital TV in which
the top and bottom of the screen disappear — leaving a lot of actors with the
tops of their heads cut off.)
Son of Sinbad was directed by Ted Tetzlaff, a former
cinematographer (his most famous credit in that craft was Hitchcock’s Notorious) who turned director and scored an early hit with The
Window, a 1949 film noir that managed to be quite exciting, unnerving and
properly despairing despite the leading character being a child — and an
obnoxious Disney child, Bobby Driscoll, at that. (Driscoll had starred in Son
of the South and So Dear to My
Heart for the Mouse Machine and, since RKO
was still Walt Disney’s distributor at the time, it was easy for RKO to borrow
Driscoll from Disney for the role.) Alas, Tetzlaff’s directorial career never
took off the way it should have, and for a quite common reason: lack of good
material. Here he got stuck with a script by Aubrey Wisberg (who in the 1940’s
had written some of Universal’s sillier horror films) and Jack Pollexfen (who
would become an independent producer-director specializing in science fiction),
apparently with an uncredited assist on the screenplay construction by one Jeff
Bailey (what, did Howard Hughes catch him talking to a real-life Leftist one
day?), which makes little sense as a movie but is a lot of fun in terms of its
reflection of — and indulgence in — Howard Hughes’ obsessions, even though
Wisberg and Pollexfen seem bizarrely unaware of the campier aspects of their
script and aren’t playing anywhere nearly as artful a balancing act as David
Mathews did in an even cheesier but better Arabian Nights film from 1951, The
Magic Carpet. Still, no doubt Son
of Sinbad gave Howard Hughes what he wanted
— lots of glimpses of nubile female flesh and a chance to amortize at least some of his investment in all those young starlets he had
stashed all over Hollywood — and seen today it’s an amusing movie, and to this
Gay male viewer at least Dale Robertson is fun to look at (despite his
underdeveloped nipples) and to any
viewer Vincent Price ought to be fun to watch, playing with an awareness of the
idiocy of his material without condescending to it: a skill that would keep him
at least a niche-market star for decades to come even though he’d get saddled
with even worse scripts than this!
