Ali Baba Goes to Town

Most of this film takes place in a dream. Eddie Cantor (Ali Baba) is a hobo travelling to Hollywood where he wants to hang out with the movie stars and collect their autographs. However, he falls out of the train he is travelling on and ends up on a film set for Ali Baba and the 40 thieves. He is given a part as an extra and waits for his moment. However, he has taken some medication which sends him to sleep.........cue the dream......

The film is fun if you like Eddie Cantor and a few of the cast play dual roles. It pokes fun at legislation that is of its time and this dates it. Also, the songs performed by Cantor aren't particularly memorable and the dancing is nothing memorable either. What does entertain in this film are the novelty numbers and so a mention must go to Jeni le Gon and the Peters Sisters who elevate the film into the worthwhile category.

Gypsy Rose Lee plays a part in this film as the evil Sultana and she is memorable as a baddie. She is mean and must have incorporated dominatrix aspects into her burlesque striptease routines. John Carradine has a very strange outfit in the dream sequence - a sort of inspiration for the New Romantic movement of the early 1980s and a modern-day champion for gender neutrality. He wears a large pearl necklace with matching earrings and what comes across as a clown/joker outfit with angled shoulder pads. He reminded me of Steve Strange in David Bowie's video for "Ashes to Ashes." Carradine's outfit is something that Steve Strange would have worn many years later as he influenced the fashion world and formed his band Visage - "Fade to Grey" is a classic. If you ask me, it's a ridiculous look.

Seeing it for the first time on Youtube recently, 'Ali Baba Goes to Town' made for an hour and a half of good fun entertainment and an interesting curiosity. Not a great film, but a pretty good one.

The story is a bit thin and silly, kept afloat by the dialogue, some efficient pacing and the songs but more an excuse to string along musical numbers and comedy. The cast are a mixed bag. Eddie Cantor enjoys himself thoroughly and is enormous fun, while Roland Young is a suitably urbane sultan. On the other hand, Louise Hovick (aka Gypsy Rose Lee) overdoes it and, despite singing gloriously, Tony Martin is very wooden.

However, 'Ali Baba Goes to Town' looks good, with pleasing photography, costume and set design while the special effects still hold up as above decent. The script is funny and cleverly written, while the energy has much exuberance so the film never feels dull.

A big standout here is the songs, which are marvellous. The standouts being "Swing is Here to Sway", "Twilight in Turkey" and "Vote for Honest Abe".

Overall, a fun curiosity if not great. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Ali Baba Goes To Town anticipates the war in Iraq by several decades. Just as we are at war to democratize Iraq and its capital Bagdad, so Eddie Cantor is in Iraq by himself to bring the New Deal to the old caliphate. The populace seems to take to it somewhat better.

Cantor is young Al Babson hitchhiking on a freight car to Hollywood when while doing a little soft shoe to entertain fellow tramps Stanley Fields and Warren Hymer he falls out of the car and in the desert. Not to worry though, he lands in the middle of a sand and sandal Arabian picture that 20th Century Fox was shooting. The film has the look of the kind that Maria Montez would do at Universal in the next decade. He gets hired as an extra.

However in a big scene where he's one of many to pop out of a giant jar, Eddie over medicates himself on his many pills and falls asleep and dreams himself back into old Bagdad. The people he meets there are suspiciously like the stars of the film he's on like June Lang, Tony Martin, and Roland Young. Young makes a rather urbane sultan who takes to Cantor, so much so he makes him his prime minister. Cantor proceeds to introduce the New Deal to Bagdad and gives the people some ideas of democracy.

That does not sit well with a trio of villains, Douglass Dumbrille, John Carradine, and Louise Hovick. If you don't recognize the name Louise Hovick, she was a minor starlet at Fox who would leave their shortly for another career involving exposure under the better known name of Gypsy Rose Lee.

Cantor did this whole thing before and much better in Roman Scandals. In real life Cantor was a number one booster of the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt and the satire is somewhat blunted. It's also somewhat dated and you'd really have to be familiar with both Cantor and the Thirties to get a lot of the jokes.

Tony Martin is in the film as a young reformer type or what passed for one in old Bagdad. I got a feeling that a lot of his role was left on the cutting room floor. He makes no mention of Ali Baba Goes To Town in his joint memoir with Cyd Charisse.

Ali Baba Goes To Town did not fare well at the box office even with the presence of a whole lot of guest stars in the film via newsreel clips from the premiere of Wee Willie Winkie. By mutual consent Darryl F. Zanuck and Eddie Cantor did not make any more films and Cantor was off the screen for three years.

The film is really for Eddie Cantor fans and for those who'd like to familiarize themselves with one of the greatest entertainers of the last century. But there are far better filmed examples of his work.

It's always a treat to see another Eddie Cantor film, rarely shown on TV and slow to be transferred to the latest video technology. Eddie dreams he has traveled to Bagdad, where he becomes Ali Baba, becoming involved in palace politics and initiating an Americanization program. He introduces swing music and finally convinces the reluctant sultan to replace his hereditary position with an elected president, with the understanding that the sultan will have no meaningful opposition. Eddie arranges for rally signs displaying various New Deal slogans and also nicknames the sultan(Abdullah) "Honest Abe". But, the people overwhelmingly elect Eddie, even though he isn't running. They dig his swing music played by a Harlem band, his humor and his enthusiasm for reforms benefiting them. The Sultan wins only 2 districts: garbled versions of Maine and Vermont, which were the only 2 states FDR didn't carry in the 1936 elections. Eddie is now in big trouble with the sultan, who is determined to make good on his threat to boil Eddie in oil. Eddie has to get away from here fast, but how? He finds a magic flying carpet, but the magic word to make it fly isn't known. Eddie guesses "inflation", since FDR thinks that should make the economy fly. It works, but without a steering wheel, Eddie is at the mercy of its whims as to where it takes him. His troubles aren't over yet....I'm sure, the screen writers would be shocked if they knew that Iraq would be forcibly subjected to an Americanization campaign only 65 years later.

The musical highlight is the "Swing is Here to Stay" scene: an all African American effort, if we include Eddie in black face as an AA. The supposed band consists of AAs dressed as various native African tribals playing mostly obvious fake ornate or primitive musical instruments while dancing around. Meanwhile, Eddie struts and dances and sings in front, eventually being replaced by Jeni Le Gon, as a wild native dancer, then by the Peters Sisters, primarily a singing trio, with some footwork included. The Peters Sisters pretty well filled up the screen, being on the heavy side, but I enjoyed their act the most. They repeated their performance near the end of the film. It's too bad this seems to be the highlight of their very limited film career, although they continued to perform for several more decades. They may also be seen-heard on DVD in "Hi Di Ho" and heard on the CD "The Jazz Train", although I have not seen or heard these.

ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN (1937) is an interesting historical curiosity for classic movie buffs. It stars famed entertainer Eddie Cantor in one of his rare movie roles. The cast includes such familiar faces as Roland Young, John Carradine, Douglass Dumbrille, and Charles Lane, but also features burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee (a.k.a. Louise Hovick) at the outset of her ill-fated film career. "Looney Tunes" fans and music enthusiasts are also in for a treat seeing Raymond Scott and His Quintet dressed as Arabs and "performing" their eccentric jazz ("Twilight in Turkey") on primitive instruments.

Old movies from Hollywood's Golden Age often serve as time capsules for their era, and that is true with ALI BABA. Meant to be shown for a few weeks in theaters before stepping aside for new features from Hollywood's movie-churning machine, films set out to entertain the audience of their time, never dreaming of being resurrected in the age of home video and TCM. Jokes are often topical, reflecting the political climate or world news of the day. Dance sequences capture an era in music history and small cultural references may be lost on modern viewers.

ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN borrows its premise from Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", inserting a modern man (through a dream) into an old and foreign setting. This time, star-struck autograph seeker Al Babson (Cantor) visits the set of a Hollywood "Arabian Nights" movie, dozes off, and imagines he is in ancient Bagdad, where Roland Young is the real sultan and Douglass Dumbrille is the scheming prince. Cantor reforms Bagdad, introducing American principles of democracy and economics. He shapes Arab society in the image of New Deal America, with amusing (if absurd) modern touches (camel filling stations?) and plenty of cracks at Franklin Roosevelt and 1930s politics.

Eddie Cantor was an entertainer on stage, radio, and screen. He was famous in part, like Al Jolson, for his blackface routines, and there's one in ALI BABA. When the sultan is unable to grab the attention of his tribal African servants, Cantor speaks some Cab Calloway jive and gets them on their feet. Rubbing on his minstrel face paint, Cantor leads the Africans in an extended musical number ("Swing Is Here To Stay"), which earned an Oscar nod for dance direction. The scene was an innocuous inclusion in 1937, but can be a bit uncomfortable for modern viewers in this age of racial sensitivity.

Another great time capsule scene is at the close of the film, where the movie-within-the-movie has its glitzy premiere. It's a look back at the red carpet Hollywood premieres of yesteryear, where stars would be announced as they arrived by an emcee at a microphone. Footage from an authentic movie premiere provides cameos from Hollywood icons like Douglas Fairbanks, Shirley Temple, Tyrone Power, Victor McLaglen, Sonja Henie, Cesar Romero, and Dolores del Rio, as well as other stars of the day whose names haven't stood the test of time.

This Eddie Cantor vehicle is a dated comedy in many ways, but is valuable from a historical perspective. With its political satire and its glimpse of vintage Hollywood, the movie is intriguing. Some of the gags are fun, and it's a rare film that shows John Carradine (in an Arabian get-up, no less) doing a silly little dance. The flying carpet effects are relatively primitive, but fairly effective. I'd never seen Eddie Cantor on film before, and I must say I found his eye-rolling shtick tiresome. But that's probably his trademark and he did know his way around a witty line of dialogue.

Check out ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN if you're a fan of old-time Hollywood. (It helps if you're familiar with the 1930s and recognize names like Eddie Cantor, Gypsy Rose Lee, Roland Young, John Carradine, and Raymond Scott.) It's mildly entertaining, but it's certainly a neat curiosity. Keep an eye out for it.