Sudan (Universal, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (January 23) at shortly after 10 I ran myself and my husband Cahrles the third and last film on the single-disc Blu-Ray of three of the six overripe Technicolor extravaganzae featuring Maria Montez and John Hall, made at Universal between 1942 and 1945. The film was Sudan, sixth and last in the series, and deals with a fictional kingdom called “Khemmis” in and around ancient Egypt. Montez plays Naila, who on the death of her father, the King of Khemmis, is crowned Queen and heir. Only the real power behind the throne is her prime minister, Horadef (George Zucco, who as befits a character actor of his stature and renown basically owns the movie, dominating every scene he’s in), who either personally murdered the King or hired someone else to do it. (The script by Edmund L. Hartmann is predictably unclear on the point.) But in order to keep Naila from catching on to him, he tells her that the King was actually killed by Herua (Turhan Bey), leader of a gang of escaped slaves who hide out in a mountain redoubt and periodically lead raids on slavers to set their captives free and invite them to join their band in the mountains. Naila announces her intention to ride into the mountains and meet Herua face to face so she can find out why he killed her dad, but Horadef arranges with a thug in Naila’s court to have her kidnapped and sold into slavery herself, whereupon he intends to take over the throne of Khemmis and rule for his own ill-gotten gains.

Naila is rescued by a pair of thieves, Merab (Jon Hall) and Nebka (Andy Devine, whose casting is an ill-advised attempt to provide the supposedly necessary “comic relief”)/ In one scene Andy Devine rips off one of W. C. Fields’ classic gags, in which he uses ventriloquism to make it seem as if his horse can talk, though neither he nor screenwriter Hartmann thought to include the punch line of Fields’ version: when he finally sold the supposedly talking animal (a dog in Fields' case), Fields has the dog say, “For your selling me, I’ll never talk again,” and Fields drawls on in his own voice, “He probably means it, too.” The slavers brand Naila with a big letter “S” on her forearm, but she ultimately escapes with the help of Nerab and Mebka, only she’s recaptured and this time she’s rescued by Herua and his band. Herua and Naila fall in love – much to the chagrin of Merab, who hoped to get her himself – and Herua explains the defense mechanism he’s built into their mountain redoubt> a series of huge piles of rocks, held in place alongside the walls of the valley that is the only entranceway, held in place by ropes which he and his men will cut whenever an invading army comes up the defile, burying them under huge boulders and rubble. Unfortunately, Naila still thinks Herab killed her father, so he condemns him to death even though she’s in love with him,

Merab sneaks into Herua’s prison cell and seems to be ready to take his place being executed – was screenwriter Hartmann thinking of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities here? – when Naila gets arrested herself now that Horadef has installed his men and is ready to take over Khemmis. Merab and Naila confront each other in the prison and Merab pickpockets Horadef, showing Naila the dagger and the purse he stole from Horadef. Naila recognizes the ring as the one her father was wearing when he rode off to meet Herab, and this convinces her that Herua is innocent and Horadef is her father’s real killer. Horadef raises an army to invade Herua’s stronghold and either capture or kill both Herua and Naila – though Naila is actually leading the column towards Herua’s redoubt, mainly because she’s aware of the booby-trap and she’s willing to sacrifice her own life to kill Horadef and avenge her dad. Fortunately the plan doesn’t work that way because Herua deliberately delays setting off the booby-trap until after Naila is past it, so the bad guys get crushed by all the papier-maché rocks (which for the climax of a supposedly serious action drama looked all too much like the ones in Buster Keaton’s 1926 comedy masterpiece Seven Chances to me!). Naila stabs Horadef personally, fulfilling her vow to avenge her father’s death, and as I wrote in my journal entry on Sudan the first time I saw it, “The good gibberish-named people live happily ever after while the bad gibberish-named people get their just desserts at the end.” Naila ends up with Herua at the end – a surprising twist given that in Maria Montez’s previous films with Jon Hall they had ended up together, but here she’s paired with Turhan Bey ahd Hall and Devine ride off in the sunset together to pursue their joint career of petty thievery.

Of the three films on t his Kino Lorber release of half the Montz-Hall oeuvre, Sudan was by far the best, partly because George Zucco was a much stronger villain than Thoams Gomez in White Savage or Douglass Dumbrille in Gypsy Wildcat and partly because, instead of just poaching the familiar Hollywood-adjacent locations in L.A. as they did in Gypsy Wildcat, Universal shot the exteriors for Sudan in Arizona’s spectacular Canyon de Chelly/ So while Gypsy Wildcat looks like a Republic Western, Sudan looks like one by John Ford. One curious thing about Turhan Bey’s career at Universal is he at least partially escaped the usual typecasting that hamstrung most actors of color. He was born March 30,. 1922 in Vienna, Austria (which is also where he died on September 30, 2012) to a Turkish father and a Czech-Jewish mother, His birth name was Turhan Gilbert Selahattin Şahultavi, but in October 1938, with the Nazis having taken over Austria and his parents having dovirced, he moved to the U.S. with his mother and settled in Hollywood. Bey took actling classes fromBen Bard at the Pasadena Playhouse; supposedly he enrolled jus to improve his English, but Bard saw real potential in him as an actor and encouraged him to apply himself to that craft. Bard also suggested “Bey” as a stage last name for him because it was an honorific in Turkish.

Bey cycled through various studios, including Warner Bros., Universal and RKO, before re-landing at Universal in 1942 and working with John Rawlins, director of Sudan, who took him under his wing. In 1943 Universal cast him in a not very good horror film called The Mad Ghoul and actually made him the good guy. He was the accompanist of aspiring singer Evelyn Ankers and ended up with her at the end, while an Anglo actor with the boring name “David Bruce” played the titular monster. Here in Sudan two years later he also got the leading lady at the end. Bey’s career was derailed by World War II, though in an unusual way. Though he’d been born in Vienna he was legally a citizen of Turkey, and therefore he was exempt from the U.S. draft – until Turkey declared war on Nazi Germany in February 1945. Bey was drafted in June 1945 and,though he entered the Army Air Corps too late to see actual combat, his 18-month Army stint interrupted his career momentum. After he turned down a comeback film at Universal, the studio sold his contract to Eagle-Lion, where he made four cheapies and then did Song of India at Columbia. It was a flop, so Bey left Hollywood after just one more film (Prisoners of the Casbah, 1953) and returned to Vienna, where he became a commercial photographer. Bey returned to the U.S. film industry in the 1990’s and made a few films as well as TV appearances in Murder,She Wrote (whose star, Angela Lansbury, was quite partial to giving fellow veterans of Hollywood’s golden age roles on her show) and SeaQuest 2032, finally retiring to Vienna, where he died of Parkinson’s disease at age 90.