Sinbad the Sailor was the first film Douglas Fairbanks Jr. made after a decorated career serving in the Navy during World War II. The son of one of the most famous swashbucklers in Hollywood history, Fairbanks cuts a dashing figure in Richard Wallace’s overlong Orientalist fantasy, but there’s too much talk and too little excitement to recommend it to casual viewers.
I have fond memories of Nathan Juran’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), which I saw on the big screen as a kid in the early ’80s. I don’t remember a lot about the lead performance by Kerwin Mathews, or how good the story was, but Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion special effects blew me away. Sinbad the Sailor, on the other hand, has no wild monstrosities like the cyclops or the cobra woman. (A mynah bird on a string is the most memorable special effect, and it’s a bad one.) Instead it has fairly grown-up dialogue and a feisty romance between Sinbad (Fairbanks) and Shireen (a Kurdish woman improbably played by Maureen O’Hara).
Fairbanks plays Sinbad in a grand, theatrical style, with lots of balletic movements and arm sweeps. The Sinbad of Sinbad the Sailor is a braggart and raconteur who begins the film by promising to tell his rapt crew of his legendary “eighth voyage” — the one that never made it into the history books. It involves his quest for the lost treasure of Alexander the Great, hidden on the mysterious isle of Daryabar. He’s accompanied by his faithful (and comical) sidekick Abbu (George Tobias), a fat, effeminate cook named Melik (Walter Slezak), and a crew of roughneck sailors led by a brute named Yusuf (played by Mike Mazurki, of all people). Opposing him is the evil Emir (Anthony Quinn), who wants the treasure and the beautiful Shireen for himself.
RKO intended Sinbad the Sailor to be their big film of the 1946 Christmas season, but a strike at the Technicolor processing plant delayed its release. (A problem that plagued David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun, as well.) Instead, they dumped a little black and white movie called It’s a Wonderful Life into theaters. Oh well.
This was the first Douglas Fairbanks Jr. film I’ve seen, and while it wasn’t bad, it didn’t blow me away. (I’ve only seen one of Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s films — the 1926 two-strip Technicolor adventure film The Black Pirate — and that one did blow me away.) Fairbanks channels his dad in a couple of action scenes in which he leaps from rooftop to rooftop, swings from balconies, somersaults through descending gates, and trips up legions of the Emir’s palace guards. The action sequences are good, but there are too few of them for a film that’s almost two hours long.
The lead actors are all good (I especially liked Anthony Quinn as Sinbad’s handsome antagonist), but the Arabian Nights-inspired sets are chintzy and the script is talky and repetitive. I didn’t hate Sinbad the Sailor, but I was looking at my watch a lot during the final 45 minutes.
OCD Viewer 