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 film 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. Georges Périnal shot it in luminous Technicolor, and its flying carpets, mechanical flying horse and six-armed dancing idol still charm through sheer in-camera ingenuity. Its matte work and vast painted sets established techniques that later epics would build on. Miklós Rózsa's score swells beneath the whole thing.

The film 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. It is fast and unashamedly magical, a children's story told with the full resources of the studio-era screen, and it is a high point of Korda's London Films, made by a producer who seems to have refused to economise on any of it.