The Magic Carpet (Columbia, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran for Charles two movies I’d just bought on amazon,com as replacements or gifts: the 1951 Columbia “B” The Magic Carpet, which to the extent it’s known at all it’s for Lucille Ball, complete with dyed red hair that lights up the screen like neon in Supercinecolor, playing an Arab princess and Raymond Burr as a corrupt grand vizier who helps an usurping caliph rule and tax his subjects into oblivion. These two murdered the original caliph and his wife, but before they got her she was able to send their baby son out of the palace on a flying carpet (which flies quite convincingly -- though this was a “B” the effects work was really good, especially for the time!) and into the home of an apothecary, who raised him as his own son until he grew up to be played by John Agar. Agar was a good friend of John Wayne as well as the first husband of Shirley Temple -- both of whom he worked with in his screen debut, John Ford’s Fort Apache (it was sort of like Sue Lyon making her first film in the title role of Lolita, with screenplay by the original author, Vladimir Nabokov, and direction by Stanley Kubrick -- after such prestigious debuts both Agar’s and Lyon’s careers had nowhere to go but down). One can tell Agar is copying John Wayne in his role as Ramoth, the “Scarlet Falcon,” who leads a resistance movement against the usurping caliph (I don’t think I’d realized before just how much David Mathews’ script for The Magic Carpet owed to The Desert Song) even before he learns that he’s the rightful heir. He has the same ramrod-straight posture, the same halting cadence in his line deliveries, and the same attempt to project implacable machismo -- something even Wayne himself didn’t always pull off convincingly (I’ve written before about Robert Mitchum being an authentically masculine man and Wayne a poseur) and just makes Agar look ridiculous.

I’d first read of The Magic Carpet as part of a bizarre footnote to Lucille Ball’s career: she was scheduled to play the second female lead in Cecil B. DeMille’s big circus movie The Greatest Show on Earth, but it was a Paramount production and she still owed Columbia one more film on a three-picture contract. Ball asked Columbia studio head Harry Cohn for a loanout and Cohn refused; then Cohn sent Ball the script of The Magic Carpet in hopes she’d turn it down and therefore he could fire her and not have to pay her for the third film on her contract. Instead Ball took the role in The Magic Carpet, thinking that it was just a “B” and therefore she could finish it before DeMille’s film started shooting -- only as it turned out the dressers on The Magic Carpet had to keep letting out Ball’s costumes and she finally realized that after over a decade of trying, she and Desi Arnaz were about to have their first child. There are a couple of shots in The Magic Carpet that show Ball with a bare midriff and make it clear that Lucie Arnaz was one of those stars that, like Liza Minnelli and Mia Farrow, made her screen debut before she was born. I’ve always liked The Magic Carpet despite its dubious auspices, its weak leading man and its hacky director (Lew Landers) because of the deft balancing act David Mathews pulled off in his script, creating a tale the pre-pubescent boys who were the main audience for a film like this could accept as legitimately thrilling adventure while adult viewers (including the parents those pre-pubescent boys had dragged to the theatre) could enjoy it as camp. Part of the film’s plot is a romantic triangle between Ball’s character, Agar’s and a hanger-on in his band of rebels played by Patricia Medina (then Mrs. Joseph Cotten and an actress who had a respectable career in Columbia “B”’s even though hardly at the level of her husband’s!), and I only wish Mathews could have ended his script with Agar marrying both of them: Islam would have allowed it but the Production Code forbade it -- darn.

Previous moviemagg blog post on The Magic Carpet: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/12/magic-carpet-columbia-1951.html