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DeLuxe Color is at once put to the test, blue dominates the overture of slave girls and boastful merchants, the better to clash with the marmalade and cherry of the opening titles. As the eponymous scalawag, John Derek contributes to the chromatic riot with glistening bronze swathed in white robes. "I may carry the instruments of a barber, but I have the desires of a prince!" The Caliph's daughter (Elaine Stewart) is a willful terror to her handmaidens, she dismisses her betrothed's gift of a mosque in her honor ("Cold marble cannot make my blood stir") and instead flees the palace in search of the scheming conqueror (Paul Picerni). Pauper and diva cross paths at the oasis, argue over bulky emeralds and get captured by a horde of escaped harem beauties, exchange romantic vows while strung up by the wrists. "One might as well love a storm on the desert. Or an angry camel, or the bite of a spear." A decade after Dieterle's Kismet and just ahead of Minnelli's and giddier than either, a master class by Don Weis in the mise en scène of pleasure. Florid cheesecake is the driving force, an odalisque writhing among torches in a striped tent, the CinemaScope screen panning across boulders to discover flame-haired Amanda Blake as the brigand queen in black bustier and gold lamé gloves. (The undercurrent of bondage erotica springs to the surface with a startling glimpse of a wench getting the soles of her feet whipped.) "Hajji, Hajji, Hajji, Hajji, Hajji Baba" goes Nat King Cole's incantatory refrain throughout this mirage of sweets and poisons, "nothing like this / Nothing like this..." It takes the French to appreciate such hallucinatory sublimity, hence Robbe-Grillet's Arabian Nights. With Rosemarie Stack, Thomas Gomez, Donald Randolph, Laurette Luez, Linda Danson, Kurt Katch, Claude Akins, and Percy Helton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |