Marco Polo, O Magnífico

If you give this film a chance for the sake of Orson Welles, you will be disappointed. By all means, he is the first actor to appear in the film, but in one scene only. The rest of the film is mainly worth seeing for the sake of Omar Sharif at his most dashing and Anthony Quinn as Kublai Khan - he never failed to fulfill a character.

For the rest of the film, it's a feast to the eyes, and the music is perhaps the best part. The worst part is the script.

They always do that with the Marco Polo story. They never stick to his own book but make just anything up as romanticized as possible to avoid the casual scientific and extremely dry documentary of the book, which tells nothing of the characters but only of facts. The episode of the old man of the mountain is always especially screwed up into any fabulous extravaganza, and especially so here. He was a historical figure and actual leader of the assassins, but for some reason in every new version of Marco Polo they have to do anything to exagerrate his legend as much as possible. Here it is simply made ridiculous, and Akim Tamiroff is the only miscast of the film. They could have turned it into a real horror episode but only make it fall flat in absurdity.

Originally, it was planned to become a great epic directed by the qualified veteran Christian-Jacques with Alain Delon as Marco Polo, and there was nothing wrong with that idea. Unfortunately the project shipwrecked, and this was made instead some years later, still with a mainly French technical crew, but much cut down and shot almost entirely in Serbia.

So it's just another among the number of Marco Polo distorted fantasies, but it's not the worst one. I believe the worst one was the soap opera with Gary Cooper 1938, which was anything but the Marco Polo story. The best one though was the great television series of 1982-83 in eight long meticulous episodes with Ken Marshall, Denholm Elliott as the father, David Warner, F. Murray Abraham and Ruocheng Ying as the ultimate Kublai Khan, which TV-series so far also came closest to at least almost reaching the truth.