It's odd that at the rather late date of 1973, there were not one but two big Hollywood musicals trading in old-school "Orientalist" exotica-even stranger because that was a year in which the movie musical seemed particularly dead. One was the musical remake of "Lost Horizon," an infamous high-profile flop. The other was this rare live-action feature for Rankin-Bass, known primarily for its TV animation specials (notably "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Frosty the Snowman"), which vanished without a trace and has been near-impossible to find ever since. (Imagine my surprise this evening upon suddenly finding a decent copy on YouTube.)
There must be an interesting story behind the making of this film--was it originally intended as a TV project, and/or a cartoon? (The script certainly suggests as much, and there is one stop-animation sequence.) How did it come to be a coproduction with Japan, at least partly shot on some impressive locations there with the proverbial "cast of thousands"...yet manage to attract no actors with stronger box-office appeal than Desi Arnaz Jr., Zero Mostel or Jack Weston? Why is it ostensibly about Marco Polo, yet barely references his famous travels, instead almost entirely limiting itself (for most of the runtime) to boring romantic intrigue at the Kublai Khan's court, as if it really wants to be "The King and I"?
Unfortunately, the behind-the-scenes story would probably be more fun than the onscreen results, which are bland and dull in a way that seems aimed at audiences of at least 20 years earlier--when the movie might have been half an hour shorter, and provided more energetic fun. You know it's in trouble when early on there's an endless, witless number for Arnaz and Weston whose whole joke is that it's a song about spaghetti. Yes, that's it. All the songs (by a composer whose other credits seem to all be for TV cartoons) are time-killing mediocrities that might've been lent some visual entertainment value in an animated film. But here they play out as listlessly as if they were in a community-theater musical, complete with "adorable" children's choruses and the main actors mugging in vain. And whose idea was it for Cie Cie Win's spunky tomboy figure to have a tantrum-throwing called "By Damn" in which she angrily rips her clothes off, in a movie otherwise clearly aiming primarily at family audiences? At least she can sing, which is more than you can say for Arnaz, who brings little more than a male-ingenue smile to his part, or Mostel, who is tiresomely hammy as usual here.
There are acrobats and a Vegas-showroom-style dance for a lot of sexily clad women. But though the choreography isn't inspired, it's still poorly shot by Seymour Robbie, who a TV veteran who has no real feel for production numbers or spectacle, and whose sole prior big-screen movie (motorcycle flick "C. C. Company" with Joe Namath and Ann-Margret) hardly suggested he'd be a natural for this kind of assignment. Of course, nobody could have done much cinematically with a movie that presents itself as a lavish musical fantasy, yet frequently grinds to a halt for scenes in which one character poorly sings a song to another, with nothing else going on. That includes the film's "climax," a dull solo for Mostel.
I remember "Marco" getting (tepid) press reviews in advance of an announced release early in 1974. But apparently it's now unclear whether it actually played any theaters here at all, debuted instead on TV, or what. (Arnaz supposedly promoted it on Johnny Carson in 1972, so perhaps it had already sat on a shelf for a while.) You can see why it went nowhere: It was wildly out of synch with the times, and isn't any good even as an anachronism. I was glad to have my curiosity satisfied by finally seeing it, but checking the film off a bucket list of hard-to-find obscurities was virtually the only interesting thing about the experience. It's big without style, antic without being funny, and a musical with songs and dancing so nondescript you'll forget them while you're watching them. We've all seen worse movies, but this is a flavorless professional object on which much money was spent to no point or joy, not even the campy so-bad-it's-good kind.
