Pictures and the Picturegoer (Jan-Dec 1924)

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12 Wcr\ires ana Kicf\jre<?ve>' NOVEMBER 1924 orvours ist Guide to the Best Films of the Month. an imaginative delight. But there has never yet been made — except in Germany, where Cinderella charmed the Berlin audiences last year — a fulllength fairy story with all the fascinating impossibilities of wishing apples and magic horses and cloaks of darkness. The very things which the screen can do to perfection have hitherto been kept from us, the very tricks which delight the photographer's heart have been reserved for serious moods, for allowing the star to play a dual role, for visions and ghosts and Ernst Germain as " Baruch " The Ancient Law." There are a dozen reasons why The Thief of Bagdad should head the Honours List for this month. I might select it for its lovely settings, its fairy palaces and stairways and bazaars; for its lights and sense of colour, its burning glow through the black and white of the photography, as though the whole studio had been bathed in a sunset of red and gold. I might choose it for the new grace which has crept into the movements of Douglas Fairbanks, a sort of dancer's grace of rhythm and line, a mimicry of movement " The Thief of Bagdad " is th first film fantasy. A comedy interlude in "The Ancient Law." the use of miniature settings. But at last a producer has had the courage to turn the camera's cunning to good account, and has given us a real fairy tale in celluloid. The Thief of Bagdad is prodigal in fairy stuff. Indeed, it is so lavish with magic as to be almost careless, using each machine of enchantment for a short minute and flinging it away. It offers us a magic rope which climbs endlessly up into the sky, a winged horse and a magic crystal, an apple which can bring back life after life has gone, and a magic carpet which caries three men on its back, and on which the Thief and his beautiful princess are finally wafted away over the halls and bazaars of Bagdad, through the narrow doorways and away over gate and the desert to a fairy land of their own. There is a cloak of invisibility, under which the Thief carries off his princess from her