ONE OF THE BEST … EVER

 

In 1940, no less a luminary than the late Bosley Crowther, the still-to-this day highly respected Dean of film critics for the NY Times, wrote in a review: “… storybook splendor as magnificently technicolored a world as has ever been seen on screen.” The film he was writing about was The Thief of Bagdad, and those glowing remarks are particularly noteworthy when one realizes that they were made barely a year after he had seen Gone With The Wind.

The Americans in Hollywood responsible for film preservation did not have to deal with the blitz of WWII nor the imminent threat of a Nazi invasion. One result of that is Alexander Korda’s lavish fantasy based on The Arabian Nights has not aged as well technically when compared to Gone With The Wind or, for that matter, many of its American counterparts. Even so, The Thief of Bagdad remains a wonder to behold and is to this day one of my all-time favorite films.

Why bring this up now … more than three quarters of a century since its initial release? A recent bulletin in the NY Times called attention to a group of classic and semi-classic films now being screened on HBO and The Thief of Bagdad was one of the six featured in the article.

I was a very little boy when I first saw this magnificent movie and I cannot tell you how many times I have seen it since. The number is far more than you might imagine. The last time was the other evening courtesy of HBO.

HBO serves up a print from The Criterion Collection so it is as good as it gets, and once you are past the credits the film quality is more than decent and certainly more than worthy of your attention.

Some will squirm at a few of the special effects; they were made in 1940 … a pre-computer era. Also, the technicolor process was then comparatively primitive to what we have today.

I call attention to this because, although as a child I was enthralled by this movie, my advice is you may not want to spoil this show for yourself by bringing in the kinder to share the experience. I have found most … if not all … of the younger generation have been spoiled by AI, causing them to scoff at this romantic work created over a half century before their birth. They do this with movies filmed in black and white as well. Their loss.

Conrad Veidt as Jaffar is one of cinema’s greatest villains … transcending even his own role as the Nazi commandant in Casablanca. And the screen debut of Sabu justifies what turned into a long-term career as a star of more than twenty motion pictures with no need to augment that designation with his surname of Dastagir.

The Thief of Bagdad is a great movie and I cannot recommend it highly enough… and … yes, I know, most of the world spells Baghdad with the letter “H.”  Alexander Korda’s spelling, it turns out, was an old English transliteration of the Arabic name for that ancient city.

There are some other great classics currently on HBO as well: Fellini’s 8 ½, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (aka Bicycle Thieves).

They all bring meaning to the admonition of deeper, richer, fuller, better.

With all that in mind, I took a peek at the Zoe Kazan version of East of Eden on Netflix. Some of it I liked better than the East of Eden I produced in1980 … particularly the casting of Christopher Abbott as Adam Trask and Tracy Letts, as his father, Cyrus Trask. Being more interesting … and a better performer … than Timothy Bottoms, who essays the part in my decade’s old version, is a low bar for any actor. Mr. Letts had a tougher piece of competition when compared to Warren Oates, but I still preferred his interpretation by a rather large margin over what was performed in my version.

I thought my miniseries looked better, both in cinematography and art direction and … thanks to Lee Holdridge’s Emmy nominated music score … sounded a whole lot better as well. Not all that surprising considering Mr. Holdridge’s career record of 18 Emmy nominations and 7 wins.

Ms. Kazan’s version gets off the ground in a more interesting fashion than my own. Here, the benefit goes to a storytelling technique not in fashion in my day … that is of starting off with a hyper-dramatic scene or scenes, totally out of context, and then flashing back in time with the benefit of on-screen lettering, letting the audience know what they are about to see took place some time before the dramatic moment they had just witnessed.

It can be a smart way to go but not one often employed (if at all) back-in-the day when we were more-or-less inventing the mode of the miniseries. Back then, linear storytelling was the norm and, like it or not, with eight-hours of story to tell, and the foundation needing to be laid down first … well, often as the filmmaker, one had to simply learn to live with the fact that foundations are not the best-looking part of any edifice.

For me to compare my work on the Steinbeck novel to that of this more current version could devolve into a heavily self-serving exercise … or one of self-flagellation. For me … maybe a little of both. I always liked what Lloyd Bridges brought to my version as Sam Hamilton, but an actor named Ciaran Hinds did a very nice job for Ms. Kazan. The same holds true for my partiality for Soon-Tek Oh as Lee.  Actor Hoon Lee, I felt, was more than up for the competition.

The actors playing Cal and Aaron Trask in both versions had their moments but I will concede young Joseph Zada is a far better-looking successor to James Dean than my piece of casting. Not so with Abra or Kate. I am more than a little partial to my cast of Karen Allen and Jane Seymour in those pivotal roles.

Some of the elements of storytelling by Ms. Kazan I thought were superior. Some not-so-much. What stood out for me more than anything was what a good show Netflix has made of this classic novel and how much better it would have been with the award-winning score written by Lee Holdridge for my 1980 version and Frank Stanley’s cinematography which so enhanced Harvey Hart’s direction on my show.

Personally, I was grateful to have the excuse to go back and review my old show for comparison to the new … the sixty some year-old DVD set holds up well… but I was also humbled by some very good work by the successors to what I produced.

For those interested… John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (that was the title of my version and we remained true to the mission of following the novel throughout) can be seen with commercials on Roku. For the purists among you, there must be a site where you should be able to acquire the DVD of the series and, of course, you can also read about getting it made for ABC in my current memoir, Before and After Cagney & Lacey.

Why the management of Paramount + (owners of what I somewhat loosely refer to as “my” version of East of Eden) don’t have the good sense to take advantage of all the Netflix hype on the current version of the Steinbeck novel and stream these eight hours of “mine” they already own is yet another example of executive incompetence.

I used to rail about the intellectual acumen at the Network for whom I made the show … saying all too often … “now I know why they call this place A-B-C.”

I have yet to come up with something printable for family use for the folks at Paramount +

 

Barney Rosenzweig