Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, film versions. The cinema has generally been keener on the title than it has on the original storyline from The Arabian Nights. In a wartime adaptation directed by Arthur Lubin (USA, 1944), Ali is a young prince rather than a woodcutter, and the thieves are swashbuckling adventurers rather than brutal murderers. Ali joins their band as a way of hiding from the invading Mongols who have killed his father, the caliph. The story is primarily a peg on which to hang an escapist Technicolor extravaganza; at the same time it nods to the contemporary situation by suggesting that Ali Baba and the thieves offer a parallel to underground resistance movements, and that the cruel, tyrannical Mongols are like Nazis.

Eleven years later (France, 1955) Jacques Becker directed a version, shot partly on location in Morocco, which retains more of the situations from the original text, but plays them for laughs. Conceived primarily as a vehicle for the leading comic actor Fernandel, this adaptation makes Ali a crafty underling, servant of a brutal master who orders Ali to go and buy him a wife. Ali chooses a beautiful dancer, Morgiane, but falls in love with her himself, and then spends a lot of time helping her evade her eager husband's sexual claims. When Ali finds out the thieves' cave and its secret password he takes some of the treasure and is able to buy Morgiane from his master, but before they can live happily together there are forty angry thieves to contend with.

— Terry Staples