Raoul Walsh was the last major creative figure to join The Thief of Bagdad, a Doug­las Fairbanks production that had been in the works for over a year by the time Walsh came on board. Fairbanks had already writ­ten a massive screenplay (under his nom de plume Elton Thomas) and William Cam­eron Menzies had already designed and constructed the towering art nouveau sets. When Fairbanks, trying to convince a reluc­tant Walsh to take the assignment, took him on a tour of Menzies’ Bagdad, “I caught my breath,” Walsh recalled in his 1974 autobiography Each Man in His Time, “I changed my mind then and there. I would make The Thief of Bagdad and it would be the best picture I had ever directed. That is what one man’s genius can do to another man’s ego”. Though the final film remained very much an expression of Fairbanks’s un­flaggingly optimistic, go-getter personality, the fit with Walsh is quite close: Fairbanks already possesses the internal dynamism of the self-propelled Walsh protagonist (though without the dark side) and Walsh’s later use of great heights as a visual meta­phor for his characters’ (over)achievement, as in High Sierra and White Heat, may have originated with Fairbanks’s vertiginous stunts. (Walsh himself took the credit for engineering the film’s magic carpet – which took flight suspended by cables from a con­struction crane.) For Jacques Lourcelles, however, the film remained “a very minor work” for Walsh: “Walsh may have under­stood Fairbanks perfectly, but his comic strip character did not inspire him”. Tell­ingly, Walsh’s only other film with a strong fantasy element was his notorious 1945 flop The Horn Blows at Midnight.
(Dave Kehr)