The Queen of Babylon (1954)

Now then, this is really pretty poor. The plot, insofar as that remotely matters, involves a young man "Amal" (Ricardo Montalban) who is badly injured after a fight and who is nursed back to health by pretty young thing "Semiramis" (Rhonda Fleming). The king's guard are none too impressed with her helping this rebel and so she is imprisoned, then paraded before the king "Assur" (Roldani Lupi) where he takes a shine to her. She becomes his concubine but when he is poisoned, she is the prime suspect and it falls to "Amal" to rescue her and restore order to the Kingdom. To be fair to director Carlo Bragaglia, there is plenty of action here but he is really let down by some sloppy production standards, bad continuity and fight scenes that are just too badly choreographed. Montalban is not anywhere near good enough to hold this up on his own, and it really does feel like a very long 100 minutes before an ending you could predict from the tea leaves. Pity, the story isn't bad, but the rest of it... Nope, sorry!