The Wizard of Baghdad

I saw this movie as a 7 year old and thought it was great. I was not worried about plot and great acting. As a child I saw it as fun. Pre Harry Potter Magic, good vs evil. If you are going to judge it as an adult, pan it all you want, but if you see it a a film a child might enjoy, you might get a totally different point of view. Your children might enjoy it more than "Citizen Kane" or "On the Waterfront". There are a lot of great movies out there, and I could care less if Dick Shawn's acting wasn't perfect or the script was terrible. I wanted to be entertained and as a child I was. I really don't think this was a movie made for an adult audience. Who cares if you could see the wires or they used co2 to simulate clouds. It was the 60's. Star Wars had not changed the way we looked at special effects. Like the old Flash Gorden Serials or Superman of the 40's. They were what they were, and kids loved them.

I'm sure it's a delight for little children, especially since there is a wise talking horse, a flying carpet, a prince and a princess, and a tiny Aladdin appears for a few moments. I wanted to see the movie because of the lead actor, Dick Shawn, who gave the title of the movie, which I fell in love with when I saw him in "The Producers" by Mel Brooks. The role of L.S.D. - Lorenzo St. DuBois from "The Producers" is one of the greatest comedy roles ever, an absolute delight. But in this Wizard of Baghdad, he's disappointing. Diane Baker, the princess, very young and very beautiful, an actress I have admired in so many other movies (and much better roles), she remains the only reason to watch the film. A star only for her.

I saw this once by accident at a kiddie matinée. I was expecting the spy-comedy fare on the marquee. It was apparent that the scenarist and director were attempting to strike a note similar to the Danny Kaye costume comedies, but without the panache and high gloss. It is revealing about the early career of Dick Shawn that his fey, campy, manic mannerisms were thought to make him a possible successor to Kaye. But Kaye had class that transcended his Borscht Belt beginnings; Shawn never got beyond the tummler you see here.

The production values are of the Low Budget school. The Baghdad setting was a convenient way of making use of all those old Middle Eastern sets and costumes left over from the 40s. The film was no better or worse than Saturday morning TV fare--old Blondie and Bowery Boys comedies, which suggests a real condescension to its audience.

Cheap, shoddy, lamebrained Sam Katzman production (now there's a redundancy) with Dick Shawn a genie assigned to unite two lovers and help them overthrow the usurper who now rules Baghdad. Shawn is an acquired taste, and you won't acquire it by watching him in this. He hams it up to the extreme with his hipster routine (it worked a few years later when he did it in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "The Producers" but it doesn't work here at all) and opens the film doing a painfully embarrassing and flat-out stupid song-and-dance number called "Eenie Meenie Genie," and further embarrasses himself later on in an even more idiotic number where he sings, jumps and pirouettes in front of the assembled court. The performances by such usually reliable character actors as John Van Dreelen, Vaughn Taylor and Don Beddoe reflect their apparent embarrassment at being stuck in this picture (if you've noticed the word "embarrassed" being used a lot in this review, it's intentional), the direction by the usually competent George Sherman is almost nonexistent, the sets appear to be made of cardboard, the "action" scenes are laughable . . . in other words, the entire picture is a dud. Avoid it.

I saw this film in 1964 during a re-run at the local cinema in Bangalore, India. I was 9 years old at the time and thought that the film was great fun. That's it; it is basically a juvenile film and should be seen as such, not deeply analyzed from an adult perspective.

Oddly enough, I remembered two scenes from the film that helped me to track it down 50 years later. First was the sequence where the boy prince escapes in a basket and is wounded in the process. Second, the wrestling scene where the prince, now a strong young man, flattens the Caliph's court wrestler in a bout. Good memories from a bygone era!