Friday, July 20, 2018

THE DESERT SONG (1943)

In 1939 French Morocco, a railroad is being built that will go from the north coast of Africa to the west coast, and the people of the tribe known as the Riffs are being rounded up and used as slave labor to build the railroad. But a mysterious figure known as El Khobar leads a band of rebel Riffs and successfully attacks work sites, freeing some of the enslaved. We soon discover that El Khobar is actually an American piano player named Paul Hudson (Dennis Morgan, at right) who shares an apartment with a war correspondent named Johnny. The movie is at pains to make us know that the villain here is not France itself but the local hotshot Youseff (Victor Francen) who is in league with the Nazis, secretly providing major financing for the railroad to use it for military purposes once they conquer the area. Other characters caught up in the action include night club singer Margot (Irene Manning), shady dealer Fan-Fan (Gene Lockhart), and a French colonel (Bruce Cabot) who is on the hunt for El Khobar but who might be persuaded to switch sides if he only knew the truth about the Nazis.

This is the second of three movie versions made of the Sigmund Romberg operetta, vaguely inspired by the activities of Lawrence of Arabia. The 1953 version is apparently relatively faithful to the play, but this version, by making the Nazis the bad guys, becomes something like a musical version of CASABLANCA, with Morgan in the Bogart role, Manning as a poor man's Ilsa, Francen as the Major Strasser figure, Cabot as Claude Rains' Capt. Renault, and even a Sydney Greenstreet stand-in with Gene Lockhart—and two actors from CASABLANCA, Marcel Dalio (the croupier) and Curt Bois (pickpocket) have small roles here. You can tell the two movies even shared some Moroccan street sets on the Warner Brothers lot.  The film begins well as it sets up the characters, and it always looks great in glorious Technicolor with impressive shots of the Riffs riding en masse through the desert (actually New Mexico), but the atmosphere of exotic mystery and adventure dissipates quickly and we get bogged down in, among other things, ineffective comic relief from Lynne Overman as Morgan's buddy Johnny (this element worked no better in the 1953 version) and lackluster acting from Manning as the leading lady. Even the songs feel weak, with most of them, set in a night club, stopping the action dead. Still, on balance, I enjoyed the film; Morgan makes a sturdy and handsome hero and Bruce Cabot is fine as the colonel who might eventually join Morgan's side. And did I mention the wonderful color (pictured at left)? [TCM]

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