Young Marco Polo travels to China to help Kublai Khan fight against rebels, headed by his own son, with a new invention: gunpowder.Young Marco Polo travels to China to help Kublai Khan fight against rebels, headed by his own son, with a new invention: gunpowder.Young Marco Polo travels to China to help Kublai Khan fight against rebels, headed by his own son, with a new invention: gunpowder.
- Princess Gogatine
- (as Lee Sue Moon)
- Alaou's Wife
- (as Virginia Onorato)
- Narrateur
- (uncredited)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe film was started in 1962 by Christian-Jaque with Alain Delon, Dorothy Dandridge, Michel Simon and Bernard Blier. The filming was interrupted due to inadequate funding and was started again in 1963.
- Quotes
Achmed Abdullah: My gift cannot share your couch, my dear friend, but I know how much you love animals.
[he gestures towards a tiger]
Achmed Abdullah: . Does she please you?
The Old Man of the Mountain: Ohhh... a well-matched exchange, worthy of two old friends who trust each other.
Achmed Abdullah: It is difficult to fully trust a friend whose face one never sees. I would consider it a friendly act if you removed your golden mask.
The Old Man of the Mountain: It is a friendly act that I do not remove it. All who see my face - die!
Achmed Abdullah: But your assassins
[gesturing towards them]
Achmed Abdullah: all see your face.
The Old Man of the Mountain: And all die. And go to paradise the moment I tell them their time has come.
Achmed Abdullah: But the women... the women you love, surely you remove your mask for them?
The Old Man of the Mountain: Oh, if you only knew how much it hurts me to lose so many loved ones...!
[he sighs heavily]
The Old Man of the Mountain: Do you still wish me to remove my mask?
Achmed Abdullah: Who me? Did I ask for that? No!
- ConnectionsFeatured in The Movie Orgy (2009)
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.
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Details
- Release date
- Countries of origin
- Languages
- Also known as
- Marko Polo
- Filming locations
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Budget
- $2,500,000 (estimated)
- Runtime1 hour 40 minutes
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 2.35 : 1