Kismet (1944)

I’m usually a sucker for these sumptuous Arabian Nights style adventures, but I really struggled to stay engaged with this, despite it’s cast. Ronald Colman is “Hafiz”, a wily street beggar with a vivid imagination who fancies himself a prince. His occasional lover is “Jamilla” (Marlene Dietrich) who just happens to be the shrewd and independently-minded wife of the Grand Vizier. Now she knows that he is full of it, but even though she inhabits a tower in the palace with all she could want, she is bored and so enjoys his embellished tales. When he is not out telling his tales, he is at home with his young daughter “Marsinah” (Joy Page) filling her head full of princely marriage nonsense, unaware that she has actually fallen in love - only not with a prince, but with a pruner in the Caliph’s garden. Still with me? Well there’s more to come as the Grand Vizier (Edward Arnold) has designs on the throne and the Caliph (James Craig) knows about the plot and is working on a counter-plot of his own. He doesn’t know, though, that his life was previously saved by none other than, yep, our imaginative minstrel. With all the threads starting to knit nicely together, it might just fall to “Hafiz” to save the day? For me, the problem is a lack of Colman and then a lack of the flair of Colman when we do see him; coupled with a really sterile effort from Dietrich. At one stage she does her own equivalent of the dance of the seven veils, but appears to need the furniture as a support rather than offering us something with flair and sensuality. The plot is complicated but that could have made this all the better had William Dieterle managed to get his cast working together and well, instead of in this lacklustre and glacially slow fashion. Sadly, there’s not an ounce of on-screen chemistry for us here and I was quite disappointed by it all.