'SON OF ALI BABA'........DOUBLE FEATURE! 2ND BIG HIT!

Son Of Ali Baba (1952)  The subtitle of our post is how this little movie would advertise itself on posters and theatre marquees of the early 50's.......as a supporting second feature to the bigger-budget, bigger star-studded main attraction.......

                In the midst of the nightmare horrorshow we all now live in, BQ invites you to return to a sweeter, simpler more innocent night at the movies.......

                 When it came to B movies at Universal studios Westerns and Arabian Nights tales functioned as the go-to genres........

                  Produced fast and cheap, the studio populated these films with their freshman class, young actors under contract......learning their craft by trial and error as they were drafted into movies with no thought as to the level of their talents or suitability for their roles.......

                 Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie reigned as Universal's favorite cutie-pies.......and their corny little costume swashbucklers now seem as adorable and harmless as any Disney animated film.......

                 This particular fairy tale finds Ali Baba's son Kashma (our boy Tony) as a sort of Bagdad military cadet, who still parties hearty with his fellow recruits......excepting evil Hussein (Hugh O'Brian) the son of the equally villainous Caliph (Victor Jory).

                   Dropping into Kashma's Arabian Playboy Mansion comes Princess Azura (Piper Laurie) freshly escaped from the clutches of the Caliph, who planned to gift her her to the Shah...........(if you think about it more than a minute, it's probably the first Hollywood fairy tale about sex-trafficking...)

                  But think no more of that......this is all about scimitar swordplay, dancing girls, dialogue filled with memorable, ornate faux-Arabian phrasing.....(...."you three-tailed serpent!"....and Curtis's immortal, Brooklyn-ese "Yonda lies the Valley of the Sun".....often mis-stated, to Curtis's eternal chagrin, as 'yonda lies the castle of my fadda...")

                Let's also hail the wonderful supporting cast of hardworking journeymen character actors, Victor Jory, Gerald Mohr and as Ali Baba, the tireless Morris Ankrum, who normally played the military men who battled giant sci-fi monsters rampaging throughout the 1950's.......(oh we almost forgot our favorite piece of casting......the blond, blue-eyed William Reynolds as Tony's best bud.....Mustapha (!)…..)

                  Tony enjoys quite the female contingent here, starting off his own pile of groupies who yell birthday greeting to him as he and the cadets parade down the streets. Later, when he's deep in battle with the bad guys, he's aided by his tomboyish childhood gal-pal Tala (Susan Cabot), who regularly perforates Tony's enemies, Robin Hood-style, with her trusty bow and arrow......

                  (We could easily do an entire post on the exotic, gorgeous Cabot, who went on to star in iconic Roger Corman shlockers like "Wasp Woman".........and lived a bizarre tragic life, murdered by her own son who was fathered by King Hussein of Jordan.....and no we didn't make that part up...

                  For now, let's remember all these people when they were young, handsome and beautiful.....when their movies were as light and airy as a white-puffed dandilion......when the world made more sense.....when a U.S. President was someone to be respected, revered and admired.......

                ......those times look as far away as an Arabian Nights fairy tale.......but we still have "Son Of Ali Baba" to recapture some of the dream.....3 stars (***).