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 Sinbad is played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and he and his men are looking for
Deryabar which is an island supposedly holding the treasure of Alexander the
Great. Other folks are also looking for this loot and they include a woman
named Shireen (Maureen O'Hara). They also describe a "treacherous barber" on
Sinbad's ship that is after the treasure as well. "Great family entertainment"
and also a "fun-filled, swashbuckling high-seas adventure." 1947, 116 minutes, VHS
There's one thing I look for when watching one of these swashbuckling movies and
that's when and how often our hero swings from a rope. Usually, it occurs on
board some ship that he's trying to hijack, or if it's his own, then he's
either swinging away to kick some grubby, unshaven lout into the swirling,
shark infested waters below or he's aiming to scoop up some sea-hussy (usually
a countess of somewhere exotic) who desperately needs to be rescued before she
passes out due to the way too-tight corset she is inevitably wearing. I was
therefore completely dispirited when Sinbad finally grabbed a rope at about the
107 minute mark of a 116 minute movie and swung down from somewhere on the ship
and kicked a guy or something. When I sat down to watch this movie, I was
convinced I was going to be able to get in some cheap shots at modern day comic
Sinbad when comparing his tubby, unfunny behind with the he-man adventure
antics of the real Sinbad. As I sat there watching Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. turn
in a performance I would have expected from someone like Martin Short or some
other guy that thinks he's really funny, but isn't (modern day Sinbad, but way
skinnier), I began thinking that maybe these two Sinbads, with their blindingly
bad sartorial taste weren't so different after all. Of course Sinbad's TV
shows are only about a half hour in length compared to the nearly two hour
brain-cramping, stool-loosening running time Doug, Jr. prances and grins
his way
through. I actually started watching this movie at about nine o'clock at
night, thinking that this would be a good fantasy adventure to view before
hauling in my couch from the front porch and sacking out for the night. At
about
nine-thirty, after having paused the movie several times for such important
crises as getting a bowl of Captain Crunch and looking out the window to see
if the neighbor lady was still fighting with her relatives because she got
tired of waiting on them and left a note on her door saying she went to see
some different relatives and when they finally did hook up, somebody's little
note got thrown in their face, and the next thing I know, I'm telling the cops
that I've just been watching Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. movies all day and drinking
Vanilla Coke straight up, I just gave up watching the movie (kind of like how
you gave up reading this sentence) figuring I could finish it tomorrow
afternoon when I finally woke up, refreshed.  So what is the problem with this movie? When I first latched onto it, it
looked like the perfect vehicle for ancient action and that it would be teeming
with fantastic monsters, derring-do, and journeys into mysterious and dangerous
lands. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. seemed to be kind of a brand name for this type
of thing, though I had never actually seen Dougie in action, I did hear good
things about his father, silent film star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Of course, my
unrefined tastes prohibit me from actually watching silent movies (it's bad
enough when I have to read the subtitles on these foreign films so I'm not
about to watch heavily made up goofs move their lips, stop the
action so the dialogue card can come up, read it, then wait for these guys to
come back on and move their lips again), so I have no idea if Doug, Sr. was
worth anything either (all the uppity film historians assure me that he is).
In addition to this bona fide action star of the thirties and forties (I'm
guessing he was used whenever Errol Flynn was making another movie or going on
trial or something - there are also the various Tyrone Powerses that inhabited
some of these movies, but I'm not even going to try and sort them and
their films out here). In addition to Doug in the title role, you've got an
able-bodied supporting cast including Maureen O'Hara and Anthony Quinn. Top it
all off with a gaudy Technicolor set design and you should have had a
spectacular fantasy-adventure film. Of course, this being the real world, it
all turned out to be one giant middle-eastern turd. Where to start?
The most obvious offender in this movie is Fairbanks. At first, he seems
affable enough in a roguish sort of way, spinning some tall tales for his
disbelieving pals at the beginning of the movie. Sure you wonder if the top
sailor in all the land should really be wearing red pants or yellow shirts or
whatever sassy ensemble he woke up and decided would knock the boys down at
the docks out, but you can write that off to a different time with a different
fashion sense (we
all remember tube tops, right?). What is impossible to write off is that
Sinbad spends the entire movie leaping around and spinning and moving his arms
to and fro like he was performing Swan Lake instead of beating up a platoon of
palace guards. I don't know if the director told him to camp it up or if that
came to him naturally (one would hope that he didn't mince about for two hours
because he thought it was a good idea), but he does it constantly and
in scenes that should just require him to walk or stand still. It's all very
distracting and ruins his performance entirely, in spite of the fact that he
looks like he could be a good Sinbad.  So what is Sinbad prancing around so excitedly about? Well, since his posse is
tired
of hearing about the same old seven voyages over and over (The Roc again?
Bor-ing!), Sinbad breaks out the "there is this eighth voyage that I just got
back from that is more exciting than all my other voyages put together. I
suppose I could tell you about that one." I hope that Sinbad is a better
sailor than storyteller, because what he proceeds to tell all of us is one of
the most meandering, muddled, dull tales I ever heard outside of church. It
all started when Sinbad and his comic-relief sidekick, Abbu see a ship floating
around just off the coast. Sinbad jumps in and goes to salvage it or something
and finds that everyone on board is dead from poisoned water. I knew I was in
way over my head when Sinbad was hopping around in the cabin looking at
swatches of fabric and checking them out against his waist to see which one
would make the most delicious belt. He and Abbu steer the ship back into port.
On the boat, there is a chart that shows the location of the island of
Deryabar which is
where everyone who is anyone in the treasure hunting biz knows that Alexander
the Great hid all of his gold and valuables. Once they get the ship back into
port there is some rather long scene where Sinbad is trying to trick his way
into winning the boat in an auction. If no one bids on the boat then he gets
it by default. He sours the crowd by blathering about how the ship is haunted
or is a gas guzzler or something and it almost works! Except for some sexy
broad in a litter that gets into a bidding war with Sinbad. This is Shireen,
and she's a princess that is the main squeeze of the Emir. Maureen
O'Hara plays Shireen and in spite of her constantly talking about her Kurdish
heritage, you can't help but notice her red hair and pale skin and think that
maybe her real name is O'Shireen. She's attractive enough, but it's another
instance where this movie just drops a pile on your front lawn by trying to
play it off like she's some exotic beauty. Everyone thinks that the chart on
board the ship will lead them to the treasure so that's why she's bidding on it
for the Emir (I guess, I didn't understand half the dialogue - the script was
littered with bad accents and faux-Middle Eastern speak, plus Doug's jumping
about was making me dizzy). 
Sinbad wins the boat and he and her have some Kodak moments and he goes and
meets her
at her hotel room or something. At this point in time, I believe that she
thinks he is the prince of Deryabar and that he knows where the
treasure is. I had trouble keeping track of who Sinbad was pretending to be,
because about every twenty-five minutes he would change it up on everyone and
say, "no, I'm not the prince, I'm Sinbad the sailor" and then when they wanted
to talk to Sinbad, he would suddenly be the prince again. For some reason
everyone always
believed him even though the only reason anyone would think he was anything
other than some limp-wristed pirate groupie is because he said so. He also
wears a medallion that has a picture of a mountain and a star and it has the
same design as is on the ship he found. He can't recall how he got the
medallion, but
we are to assume it has something to do with the treasure and with Deryabar.
There's also a bad guy in addition to the Emir. His name is Melik and he is a
portly devil that looks vaguely Chinese. We now from an early flashback that
Melik is a bad guy, so it makes all the babble about whether Sinbad can trust
Melik or not to be fairly undramatic and the identity of some mysterious dude
name Jamel to be pretty un-mysterious. Guess who poisoned the water? Guess who
stole the chart? Guess who really isn't the ship's barber? The ship's barber?
Yep, Sinbad goes off in search of the treasure with a crew complete with their
own hair stylist. I would have thought that the Flowbee was invented for
situations just like this. Eventually, Sinbad shows up where the Emir lives (I
don't recall why) and they hang out for awhile. Sinbad tries hitting on
Shireen and she plays hard to get by hitting the gong that's hanging in her
quarters for just such occasions and summons the palace guard, resulting in the
only significant
action of the film. It involves Sinbad fleeing the guards and here
his Keri Strug-like leaping abilities are put to good use. The fights are
sickeningly fake, even by professional wrestling standards and consist of such
stupid stunts as Sinbad swinging a guy around and sliding him down the floor
like
a bowling ball and knocking over three other dudes. There is also the
way-too-frequent use of the move where Sinbad ducks or leaps around the guy and
the pushes him in the arse with his foot off of a roof or into a fountain. You
even get a scene where he slides down some awnings and rigs it
up so that all these dopes slide to their deaths, while he stands on a balcony
next to them, waving cheerfully. Sinbad is caught eventually, but escapes using the old "smoke bomb in the magic
lamp" trick we employed at the senior prom one year. Somehow or other everyone
ends up sailing to the island together (Sinbad, Melik, Shireen, the Emir) and
they meet up with an old coot that is guarding the treasure. This is
apparently Sinbad's father and we get a convoluted story about how Sinbad was
shipped off on a boat for his own safety and the medallion is proof of his
heritage, but Sinbad
realizing that Melik and the Emir are up to no good and probably just want the
treasure and aren't interested at all in seeing Sinbad the Sailor, Jr. and
Sinbad the Sailor, Sr.
reconnect, so he plays it off like he got the medallion at K-Mart or something.
Sinbad, Sr. shows them where the treasure is, Melik croaks from all the fun,
Sinbad escapes back to the ship with the girl, the Emir gets fire-bombed by
Sinbad's sailors and they all live happily ever after except for the audience.
The tortured story was only exacerbated by the fact that there was no action in
this movie. All the characters ever did was stand around and talk to one
another (except for Sinbad, who jumped up and down and talked) about stuff none
of
us cared about. There weren't any strange and exciting locations, unless you
count all the studio sets or models of ships that floated around in the RKO
bathtub in front of a painting of the horizon (No splashing! We used
watercolors!). Sinbad never faced any monsters or heinous creatures (unless
you count the really tall, old guy that played his dad). Sinbad rarely did
much of anything except try to be cute and sly, but he came off as desperate
and foppish. Anthony Quinn is smart enough to realize what a leaky dingy this
movie is and phones his performance in, looking disinterested (undoubtedly
hoping no one
will recognize him with his turban on) whenever he delivers his lines
lacking anything approaching actual effort. At almost two hours in length you
would have thought that Sinbad would have gotten some action sequences in, just
to give his mouth a break, but there's so much talk, the movie is almost forty
minutes old before you get the first of what could be called an action scene.
Even the end is devoid of a climatic showdown between Sinbad and the Emir as
the Emir gets burned up when Sinbad launches his catapult full of flaming
stuff onto him from about half a mile away. This one probably had Douglas
Fairbanks, Sr. checking to see if it was too late to change his son's name to
Waldo or maybe Bruce or something.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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