User Reviews

Ali Baba is the servant of a rich merchant. One day, his master send him to the market to buy a woman slave. There, he find Morgiane, a beautiful dancer who is being sold by her own father. And he instantly become passionate for her. In the next day, he finds the cave where 40 thieves keep their stolen treasures. As he heard the magic words that open the cave's door, he can enter and steel some of the money kept there. So, Ali Baba becomes rich and buy Morgiane from his master. All seemed to be OK but the chief of the gang of thieves is pursuing Ali. After some laughable situations, Ali Baba, in the end, marry with Morgiane and give the money in the cave to the poor and the needed of the city. This is a funny version of the famous tale of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. In the leading role, we have Fernandel, a french comedian of the 40's and 50's, who was very popular here in my country, Portugal. Of course, it's not a movie in which the director wanted to make a masterpiece, but I think it's a good comedy about exotic people and landscapes. It was filmed on Taroudant, at 80 km from Agadir, on the south of Morocco. And it was the work of Georges Wakhevitch, who designed the memorable cave who opens with the command "Sesame, Open". In reality, it was a mobile door arranged against a true cave on the valley of Sous, the region from where are the 4000 Berbers who figure on the film. The feminine star on the movie, the Morgiane character, is played by a Egyptian dancer and actress, Samia Gamal, who became a star of the Egyptian cinema and who married a Texan oil magnate, overwhelmed by her womb dances.

... can't stop this turkey stinking up the screen. It's difficult - make that almost impossible - to imagine that Jacques Becker had just made the exquisite Touchez pas au grisbi immediately before moving on to this piece of cheese. Almost nothing about it works and the only minor point of interest is that leading lady Samia Gamal had starred in an Egyptian version of the same story twelve years earlier in 1942. What Becker and Fernandel were thinking of remains a mystery given that both were tops in their respective fields. Insipid, anaemic, uninspired, lacklustre, lifeless are words that spring to mind in connection with this entry though on the other hand if those adjectives light your fire you'll love it.

I really enjoyed (re)watching this movie. I must have seen it as a child in the late sixties while growing up in Morocco but didn't remember it well. "Deja vu" flashes came back while watching it now and then and also made me remember the context: some gags to pay attention to where discussed beforehand at school by schoolmates. The Fernandel movies where hugely popular at that time, specially amongst the then still very present French speaking population . Of course the whole Ali Baba tale is a fantasy. So lets judge it that way. The main thing I like about this movie is that it was filmed in Morocco, the perfect backdrop and scenery to merge with the Ali Baba story. But this movie is also not about the real Morocco, it is a fantasy...And the use of local scenery and extra's is VERY WELL done. Other then another Fernandel movie I also saw at the time set in the medieaval age (Le bon roi Dagobert) where anachronistic gags where built in: Fernandel, the medieval king asking : 'What is the time?", looking at his watch...The ending of Ali Baba with a least a thousand (!) extras is impressive . It is strange that the perfect production and its costs where dealt with with more attention to then the quite simple plot. But in this lies the charm of this movie. This is actually a feel good movie about a good man who does good deeds with the treasure he finds while he stumbles on huge richness in the 40 robbers cave. It IS also a comedy an that is Fernandel's strong point. After having watched this movie I had a big smile on my face for hours...

Looked at through modern eyes, Jacques Becker's Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is something of a moral atrocity - a plot driven substantially by slavery and exploitation, set in a world where the ruling class appear to admit no challenge to their hegemony, and in which women have no rights other than what relatively benevolent men might gift to them. Ali Baba is sent by his master Cassim to buy a suitable woman to add to the harem, but instead buys Morgiane, a woman more to his own taste, later drugging his master to preserve her virtue; he later crosses paths with the thieves, discovering the location of the great treasure they've accumulated and of the secret to access it (Open Sesame!) enabling him to buy Morgiane's freedom and return her to her father - who promptly tries to sell her again - as well as his own freedom. Ali ultimately simultaneously triumphs over the thieves, and over Cassim's efforts to take the bounty for himself; the treasure gets distributed to the masses (presumably to no lasting benefit) and he's left with Morgiane, who happily walks home through the desert as he rides alongside her on horseback (an image of subjugation so blatant that it's surely a joke). The charitable explanation would be that Becker's unexamined presentation of so much venal materiality serves as its own quiet indictment (the director's preceding film, the infinitely more highly regarded Touchez pas au grisbi, surveys another milieu of calculating older men and their self-entitled relationships with woman who earn their living on display), but that's not particularly apparent in a film that relies so much on Fernandel's foregrounded mugging and on easy colour and spectacle. One salvages whatever compensations one can - the final advance on the cave is impressive by virtue of sheer human numbers, and the movie throws gold coins around with happy abandon.