Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves (1944)
This is basically just a limp rehash of the Jon Hall/Maria Montez Arabian Nights movie that Universal released the year before. That one apparently made them a bunch of money so they figured they could film it again with the same two stars and make even more money. And it really is the same film. Jon Hall plays the rightful ruler of Baghdad in both who is trying to regain the throne from some pretender, Maria Montez is the acting-challenged red head posing as an exotic beauty who really loves Hall's character but is being forced to marry the usurper in both, and at some point in each movie the lovebirds have some mistaken identity problems which allows the director to drag out the story before the mistake is discovered.
I enjoyed Arabian Nights in spite of Montez because it had a nice balance of adventure and humor with a stable of great supporting players. If you likewise saw it and enjoyed it, I would recommend watching it again as opposed to sitting through Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves. The reason Ali Baba fails to capture any of the fun of the first one is because they eliminated almost all of the humor, reduced the supporting cast to bland villains and wannabe matinee idols like Turhan Bey and they gave this Maria Montez thing a lot more screen time. If you really didn't notice had bad she was in Arabian Nights because of everything else going on, you will in this one where she spits out her lines like she had just eaten a dog turd sandwich.
I don't know why I should even bother to summarize the plot since you could just read the Arabian Nights review and get the same thing, but this movie did involve a Batcave-like hideout, so I feel like I should give you some context on how that wasn't even very cool. Baghdad is once again under siege, this time from the Mongol hordes. This allows us to have a main villain that looks like he's trying to channel Ming the Merciless' little non-threatening brother.
The Caliph is counseled by his adviser Cassim (Ali Baba's brother in the real story) that he should work out some type of deal with the Mongols to give up Baghdad and get some sweet set up in the country instead. The Caliph just looks at this guy like a camel farted in his face and says that he's no pansy and they're all going to battle the Mongols once and for all, but first they need to stop at Cassim's house to pick up the Caliph's son, Ali. Uh, if you are going up against the Mongol hoards in a do or die battle, wouldn't you want your kid as far away from the action is possible? Especially with such an obvious traitor in your midst? (The guys who always recommend the easy way out in these movies invariably turn on their friends.)
Meanwhile, back at Cassim's country estate, young Ali and Cassim's daughter Amara are busy giving each other HIV by cutting themselves and rubbing their bloody cuts together. Somehow this questionable activity is a sign that they are betrothed to each other (each has the blood of the other flowing inside of them), which is a good thing, since they're both probably got some disease now and it wouldn't be right if they went and knowingly infected some third party - unless it was a Mongol.
The Caliph shows up, takes his son and goes off to battle. He gives Ali a medallion which says something along the lines of "Son of Caliph. If found drop in nearest mailbox." Cassim doublecrosses the Caliph and the Mongols are waiting. Everyone is killed, but Ali escapes having seen Cassim's treachery.
Ali wanders the mean deserts of Arabia for awhile and happens upon a band of thieves leaving their secret hideout. He watches and figures out the command to open the secret door into the mountain. Once inside he drinks up all their beer and passes out after going through their collection of Playboys. Wait a minute, that might have been what happened to me when I was 12 and figured out how to get into my uncle's garage.
In any event, the thieves return and find Ali sleeping it off. The head of the thieves, Old Baba, decides that they need a pesky kid to take along on their raids and calls him Ali Baba. They know by the medallion he wears that he is the rightful ruler and Old Baba assigns the rotund (read: comic relief) Abdullah to watch over him and make sure he stays out of the beer and skin mags.
Ten years quickly pass and Jon Hall finally shows up on set fresh from the tanning booth in the role of the grown-up Ali. He has acquired everything you would expect from an adult guy named Ali Baba, including slicked back hair and pencil thin mustache. Has anyone noticed that the only guy who wears those nasty things on their face anymore is John Waters?
Apparently the thieves have been just biding their time, waiting for the Caliph to get old enough to order them around, because the Mongol ruler (Khan) is still in control over Baghdad and being assisted by Cassim. In fact, one of the ways he's assisting him is that he is providing his daughter, Amara, to him for a bride. He hopes that this will solidify his standing in the Mongol's court and whines incessantly to his daughter about how much her wedding to the Mongol will mean to him if she'll just go along to get along. She doesn't want to marry him, because he's icky, but who can stop the Mongol horde from doing what they want, when they want?
Amara and Ali run into one another for the first time in years when he's scouting out her wedding train to see if it's just a big stinky trap. They don't know each others' true identities and before your know it, Ali is caught (Yep, I guess it was a big stinky trap after all). They lock up Ali in a cage and haul him back to Baghdad to be executed. Along the way, one of Amara's servants Jamiel reveals that he is an Ali Baba groupie and helps him out. This is Turhan Bey and he has the sideburns and slicked up hairdo that says "teen singing idol" more than "servant who is an expert knife thrower".
Back in town, on a set that looks exactly like the set they used when they were going to execute someone at the beginning of Arabian Nights, Ali is about to ride that big magic carpet into the sky, when his boys break him out. I think that this may be when they also capture Amara, but people always seemed to be getting captured and escaping in these old kiddie adventure movies so who knows how it really went down.
Somehow the thieves end up with both Amara and Ali. Ali still burns with a desire to kill Cassim for doing his father like he did all those years ago, so he has Jamiel send a note to the Mongol ruler that he will trade Amara for Cassim. The exchange will be made at Cassim's house. The best part of the movie is when Cassim is moaning about all this and Khan just looks at him and says "I'll let you make the choice". Just so we know what a putz Cassim is, he never volunteers to take his daughter's place (Worst dad ever!) and eventually when Ali figures out who she is, he just lets her go. This sets the stage for the final battle at the wedding of Amara and Khan.
Ali decides that the wedding is the best chance they have of defeating the Khan and for him to get laid, so they come up with some bizarre plan to disguise themselves as giant jars of oil. Cassim though has his spies and knows of this plan and has a bunch of swordsmen stab the jars. It turns out that there was only sand in the jars and Ali snottily tells Cassim that even though Cassim has spies that found out about the plan, Ali found out that the spies found about the plan and so they changed the plan! Then the thieves hop out from behind the bushes (that's a much better plan than hiding in big jars anyway if you ask me) and it's on!
This movie just goes through the motions in its ill-advised attempt to mimic Arabian Nights which while fun, wasn't really great. Without the supporting cast (No Shemp?), it's up to Hall and Montez as well as the villains to carry the movie. Hall is inoffensive in his blandness, needing someone colorful like Sabu to play off of (not the tanner yet also bland Turhan Bey), Montez is just hideous, conveying nothing other than a off-putting haughty demeanor and is unconvincing as anything other than a heavily made-up trollop.
The villains are either dull bureaucrats like Cassim or the relatively uninvolved Khan (he makes announcements periodically that he's going to have some people tortured, but that's about it). Ali doesn't even get to kill Khan at the end (Abdullah does in an effort to save Ali who is floundering around in a wading pool). Some of the sets are okay (except for the ones that looked like left overs from the last movie) and there's a lot of riding around on horses and some swordplay, but what's missing is the camaraderie of the gang that they had in the first movie. Of the forty thieves, no one other than Abdullah had a distinct personality. That's probably just what you would expect from a movie that didn't have one of its own either.