Il giardino di Allah

After watching this film on Turner Classic Movies, the host, Robert Osborne, said that "it's best to ignore the story" and just enjoy the film! This is a great way to sum up this odd little film. In some ways, it's a terrific film--it's one of the prettiest color films of the 1930s and is a real artistic triumph. However, despite the masterful color filming, it's an incredibly dull and uninspiring film--thanks to a very tepid script.

In a bit of a departure, Marlene Dietrich plays a rather decent and chaste woman instead of her usual 1930s vamp. Oddly, however, the magnetic Charles Boyer is given the limpest and least interesting role in the film. He plays a monk who has left his order, but instead of a man searching for SOMETHING outside the monastery, he just looks rather constipated and confused--mostly staring into the camera or looking rather depressed. How Marlene fell for this dull yutz is beyond me! Because of this character, the film itself just seemed silly and trivial. BUT, combined with the great camera-work, it is still worth a look--just don't set your hopes too high!

Early Technicolor, subdued and with shadows playing over the wide stretches of sand and silk (Dietrich's wide array of costumes), is the real star of this desert opus that should fascinate any student of cinematography interested in exploring David O. Selznick's use of color a few years before GONE WITH THE WIND.

MARLENE DIETRICH strikes some awesome poses and looks stunning in all of her close-ups and CHARLES BOYER is a suitably romantic figure as he copes with a secret unknown to her--he's a man hiding his past as a monk. She's searching for true love after a girlhood devoted to her sick father and Boyer seems to be the living embodiment of her ideal.

It's all so unreal and yet it's hard to turn away from the gorgeous colors and not be drawn into the story. When things get too dull, there's always Basil Rathbone, Joseph Schildkraut and C. Aubrey Smith in the supporting cast to bring some added color to the tale.

It's Technicolor heaven for Dietrich's fans and to top it all there's a nice Max Steiner score in the background. None of it can be taken seriously but it has its compensations from a visual standpoint.

Much abuse has been heaped upon this film in users' comments here ("tripe," "hokum," etc.) and, yes, in later years even Marlene herself called it "twash," (along with most of the rest of her movies). But it's gweat twash and, in all fairness, much-loved weepies like "An Affair To Remember" have got nothing on this picture. The fabulousness (that's definitions 1 & 2 in Webster's) of the plot, the emphatic performances, the overblown dialogue and the sheer absurd audacity of full silver service and "dressing for dinner" in a tent in the middle of the Sahara; these are the very things for which you watch such a film. After all, if life was never like this anywhere, at any time, it sure should have been.

The user who suggested the "right mood" is necessary is absolutely correct, and it helps to remember the perspective of audiences of the time who, while the Depression dragged on, desired escapism that bore no resemblance to their real lives. We certainly have our escapist fare today and, believe me, "Spiderman," "The Matrix" and "The Fast and the Furious" are going to look at least as ridiculous - if not more so - after a half-century (if not before). So, please, let's not have any more carping about implausibility.

The aspects that have garnered the most criticism are some of the very elements that make it so much fun, but you must abandon your jaded cynicism and surrender yourself to the experience. I'd never recommend this film to everyone I know, but of those to whom I have done - people I knew could appreciate it - not one has gotten all the way through it without choking back a tear or two (if not outright bawling like a baby).

One thing everyone does seem to agree on is the ravishingly beautiful look of this picture, and they're oh-so-right about that. The DVD from Anchor Bay is particularly stunning - there are scenes that look like they were shot yesterday - so, if you decide to see the film, try to get your hands on a copy of that release.

Incidentally, this was not the first Technicolor picture in the three-strip process (as opposed to the two-strip, which goes back to 1922) shot on location, as one comment said. That honor most likely belongs to "Trail Of the Lonesome Pine," which was shot and released a few months earlier.

Domini (Marlene Dietrich) is a rich woman who has spent many years taking care of her ailing father. When he finally dies, she realizes that she has missed much in her own life, and sets out to North Africa to find herself. Boris (Charles Boyer) is a Trappist monk who has taken vows of poverty and silence, but he can no longer bear the burden of either, and so he heads to North Africa to find himself. The two spiritually conflicted people meet and fall in love, but their sad ending is foretold.

This was a wild mix of beauty and camp that will appeal to some viewers but leave others rolling their eyes in disbelief. I can't recall many films of this period that were as openly spiritual and as concerned with the burdens of the soul, and yet the two leads are among the most vain and superficial of movie stars, both with acting talent, but both better known for their looks than their depth. Dietrich especially looks more like a studio creation than a living human, with her almost comical artificial eyebrows and professional-grade makeup design.

The movie looks amazing, a word that perhaps gets overused in amateur criticism, but it is most deservedly used here. The color cinematography, coupled with masterly use of shadow and color, and terrific use of locations, create a film that is a joy to behold even if the story and performances may leave you cold. There's a sequence early in the film involving dancer Tilly Losch as a local Arab dancing girl that made me think I had mistakenly wandered into a Maria Montez camp classic (that's a good thing). Schildkraut as a shady Arab, Brandon as his companion, and Carradine as a creepy street person promising psychic readings, are all enjoyable. This earned a pair of Oscar nominations, for Best Assistant Director (Eric Stacey) and Best Music - Score (Max Steiner), and won a special honorary Oscar for the color cinematography (W. Howard Greene & Harold Rosson).

Whatever was Selznick thinking when he wasted so much gorgeous Technicolor photography on so much tripe? For a producer renowned for elevated the level of adult entertainment in the 1930's, it's shocking to see him select a script designed to appeal to the 3-year-old romantic in all of us. Not even the powerhouse leads can save this sandblown mess: Boyer's customary sincerity and craft is subverted by the preponderance of pretty-boy glamour shots that rival even those of Dietrich, and by the script's demands that he engage in silent-film "face acting" which was wildly inappropriate in the mid-30's, albeit even for characters experiencing spiritual crises. (However, the manful and professional way in which he handles these indignities is quite admirable.) And, Marlene's contempt for the proceedings fairly radiates from her porcelain mask of a face (which is no mean feat!); all the diaphonous gowns in the world can't disguise her phoned-in performance. She reportedly hated the sweltering location filming, causing her to fix her hair with bottles of hairspray, improbably turning it into a rigid helmet in the desert winds! (In all fairness to her, though, this must have been a difficult film for her, for she was in the midst of grieving for John Gilbert, who was to have taken the Boyer role.) Bottom line: savor the glorious, original Technicolor shots, and chuckle at the tacky dramatics.