The world premiere of The Thief of Bagdad was held at the Liberty Theater in New York City on March 18, 1924. Rather than follow the usual practice of compiling one from existing music, Fairbanks hired composer Mortimer Wilson to create an original musical score. Fairbanks hired the poet George Sterling to write the intertitles and give them a lyrical quality. William Nolan, the film editor, systematically cut the 480,000 feet of exposed film (shot on multiple cameras) down to about 15,000 feet for the final cut. The post-production phase, which began February 1, 1924, went swiftly because of the meticulous preparations. Shooting lasted a little more than 28 weeks. Production of The Thief of Bagdad began on July 5, 1923, with non-stop work, excepting Sundays and Christmas Day. Built upward and outward on the foundations of the Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922) sets, Nottingham Castle was ingeniously transformed into the palace of Bagdad. The Bagdad set was enormous the bazaar set alone covered more than two acres, with a concrete floor four inches thick, which had to be re-enameled several times a week. Menzies’s sets for The Thief of Bagdad created an ethereal world of its own, with cast and setting melded in rhythm and motion.įairbanks also embraced the concepts of stylized performance and sets from contemporary German cinema.

Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) were a tasteful mixture at best and in most cases a jumble. Prior to The Thief of Bagdad, set designs and décor in major films like D.W. Applied to the film’s Art Nouveau décor, Menzies’s pen-and-ink effects, which register like drawings onscreen, were revolutionary in American cinema. Building on Bakst’s ideas, Fairbanks, Walsh, Menzies, and the consulting artists developed the integrated curvilinear Art Nouveau design, which lifts the film into a soaring fantasy. He dances the part of Ahmed like a ballet dancer in the style of Nijinsky. His thief is entirely different from the roles his audiences had come to expect from the all-American “Doug” Fairbanks. Fairbanks also took his inspiration from Scheherazade, Diaghilev’s great success, which was choreographed by Michel Fokine, danced by Nijinsky to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, with costumes and décor by Léon Bakst. Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had a great impact in America, as in Europe, defining modern dance in the early 20th century. He wanted the design to suggest the extravagance of imagination manifest in the Arabian Nights tales. Indeed, Walsh was hardly mentioned in the reviews for The Thief of Bagdad.įor art director, Fairbanks hired William Cameron Menzies but had already chosen the film’s ethereal, spectacular setting in the early planning stages. A cinema auteur more than 30 years before the concept was developed, he put his own identifiable stamp on his films. However, Fairbanks was the real force both in front of and behind the camera, and he frequently took charge of the difficult scenes.

Fairbanks typically pushed his chosen directors far beyond what they thought they could achieve, and the results were often remarkable.

The type of fantasy-spectacle Fairbanks envisioned was not Walsh’s element, as the director later conceded. Walsh’s style and temperament were well suited to bring out the best in Fairbanks’s narcissism and self-parody. He was confident of Walsh’s capabilities in the coordination of the production and enjoyed his sense of humor Walsh was an inveterate practical joker and Fairbanks loved practical jokes. The Thief of Bagdad required 65 weeks to make, the sets covered six and a half acres at the Pickford-Fairbanks Studios in West Hollywood, and the prodigal production cost the enormous sum of $1,135,654.65.įairbanks’s selection of the film’s creative team was inspired, his most important choice being Raoul Walsh as director. The film was not only his most ambitious effort but also one of the largest and most expensive made until that time. The superb visual design, spectacle, and special effects, along with his magnetic performance, all contribute to making it his greatest work. An epic fantasy-spectacle inspired by The Arabian Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is Douglas Fairbanks’s masterpiece.

The thief of bagdad