The Thief of Bagdad

Produced by Alexander Korda and begun in Britain before the war forced its completion in Hollywood, The Thief of Bagdad (1940) was among the most ambitious fantasy spectacles of its day. Several directors had a hand in it, including Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan, but the guiding vision was Korda's, and the result won three Academy Awards — for its colour cinematography, its art direction and its special effects.

Sabu plays the irrepressible thief Abu, with Conrad Veidt as the silken villain Jaffar, John Justin as the blinded king and Rex Ingram as the booming genie released from a bottle. Shot in luminous Technicolor by Georges Périnal, the film conjures flying carpets, a mechanical flying horse and a six-armed dancing idol with an in-camera ingenuity that still charms, its matte work and vast painted sets establishing techniques that later epics would build upon. Miklós Rózsa's score swells beneath the wonder.

A landmark of fantasy film-making, it cast a long shadow: Disney's Aladdin and whole generations of adventure cinema borrow from its imagery and its boyish sense of wonder, and Martin Scorsese has named it among the films that first enchanted him. Vivid, fast and unashamedly magical, it remains one of the great enchantments of the studio era — a children's story told with the full resources of the screen, and a high point of Korda's London Films.