The Garden of Allah

Amazon.com

Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer play a pair of lost souls who meet in the desert. She is the sheltered Domini, looking for spiritual enlightenment in the Sahara. He is Boris, a young monk who has abandoned the monastery, wanting to experience the outside world. Together, they fall in love and try to come to terms with their mutual guilt while having a passionate affair. C. Aubrey Smith and Basil Rathbone serve as guides for Domini. John Carradine cameos as a bizarre fortune teller.

Unfortunately, even an excellent cast can't save this sandy soaper from itself. Although the Technicolor cinematography is gorgeous, and Dietrich sports a new and more stunning gown for every desert occasion, viewers will find no oasis to quench their thirst. Basically, this is a very early version of Hollywood's "sex and sand" films, so popular in the 1950s--lush, unusual, and ultimately silly. --Mark Savary

Description

Screen legends Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer "achieve the finest performances of their careers" (Newsweek), as they taste forbidden fruit under the seductive, blazing skies of the Sahara.Featuring a sumptuous score by composer Max Steiner (Gone With the Wind), this sweeping epicof passionate romance is "the most beautiful and atmospherically compelling picture ever made" (The Hollywood Reporter). After the death of her father, convent-educated Domini Enfilden (Dietrich) heads for the desert seeking peace. But instead of tranquility, the sultry beauty finds passion in the arms of Boris Androvsky (Boyer)secretly a Trappist monk who has broken his vows and lost his faith. Will Domini discover Boris' secret, and will his hidden past destroy their future happiness?

Customer Reviews:

Dabbling in the Desert.......2007-04-11

To be sure, this 1936 David O. Selznick production has a very tame storyline, bland even, by today's standards. But what it does have is Marlene Dietrich, Charles Boyer and Basil Rathbone and a steller cast, with beautiful music and some of the best Technicolor ever produced. It's well worth having as an example of Hollywood color filmmaking at its best.

von Sternberg, movie-doctor for Selznik.......2006-08-10

I own this movie and am proud of it. It's part of my Dietrich collection. Oh, I know this is not one of her best movies, but that wasn't her fault. She jobbed out of Paramount. Selznik wanted her and was willing to pay her price, and she did it. Business is business. Nothing personal.

Why did he want her? Charles Hingam puts it very well in these lines from his MARLENE: "By 1934 Marlene was established as the most glamorous of international stars. In the midst of the Depression, with millions on the bread line, she represented for countless women a wish fulfillment fantasy of unlimited wealth (she was the third highest-paid person in the nation, earning at least $350,000 a year), and of beauty, elegance, and style. Whereas her only serious rival as a female star, Garbo, lived in secrecy, and never dressed up, Marlene flung herself headlong into the public life of a rich woman. Critics poured ecstatic prose over her: the leading British journalist James Agate wrote: "As for Dietrich, she makes reason totter on its throne," and that was typical of journalists' responses in most countries of the world." So, what did Selznik get out of hiring her? Good or guaranteed box-office, not only here in the USA, but all over the world. Glamour was Platinum. What did she get out of it? Megabucks, when an average American family could eat for a week on $10.00. You could buy a Chrysler family sedan for less than $1,000.00.

But, after all, though it cost a lot to mount and shoot, it was a Studio picture. Among the bad things about that was that we forget, now, that all the studios dealt in ethnic, racial, religious and class stereotypes. All the studios had stables of character actors who could be used, interchangeably, as "types." Mischa Auer, Joseph Schildkraut, Peter Lorre; the list of names is long and includes female actors as well. They provided as background, living cartoon stereotypes, heightening versimilitude for the leading actors. The studios were owned and run by middle-european Jews, mostly, and they hired directors like themselves, and actors as well. Though gentile actors of both sexes were more the rule, there were a great many Jewish actors of both sexes who worked under gentile names. And many of these actors trained in the now defunct Jewish Theatre, and learned how to portray "types." Christian themes appeared often in films of the period, but here, we can say that Selznik's idea of Catholicism was risible, at best. However, it wasn't any sillier than most ideas about it on the Hollywood screen.

THE GARDEN OF ALLAH was and is a big movie. It's difficult to say how they put the thing together. From the look of it, and from what I understand of the production -- as it sweltered and sickened in the tent city set up in the dunes outside Yuma, Arizona -- Boleslawsky shot as best he could, in three digit heat, as quickly as he could -- almost certainly following Selznik's prepared script. They put together a rough cut of the rushes and realized immediately that it was a dog. No magic, no romance, no mystery, just a lot of actors in drag saying foolish things in front of too many blue-eyed arab extras. Probably Dietrich laid it on the line. She got von Sternberg to come in and do what he could with the first half of it. And he did. He did a lot of uncredited work, after all for decades. He didn't bother with the opening "churchy" bits, but began with the arrival of the heroine in his familiar Hollywood Algeria. The sets, the lighting, the costumes (to a good degree) and the action were all re-shot. The real beginning of the film is the nightclub scene in the native quarter. It is one of von Sternberg's typical nightclubs, filled with interesting, spontaneous-looking movement; with lighting effects, visual jokes, rows of undulating odalesques doing a slow but sexual Hootchie-Kootchie. And then, with a drumroll and silence, suddenly, slyly, the beauteous, undulating Tilly Loch who dances, and whose dance is the high point of the film. It is so fascinting, so exciting, and so erotic, that we see, but do not notice an arab standing in an alcove, vigorously masturbating. Unfortunately for the picture, Marlene could not be the center of all this delicious tumult. She had to stay in character; a character so different from her true self. She was no religious ninny; they should have gotten Loretta Young for the role. No; Dietrich got her start, remember, as the pretty blonde in a comic nightclub review at a notorious Lesbian bar in Berlin.

Anyway, Von Sternberg, who did the first successful musical, was one of the few directors who understood how to handle crowds of onlookers, performers, performing, musicians and lighting; and, he understood sound very, very well. He knew how to create an hypnotic and dazzling mis-en-scene that made one's blood pump. He did it again for Tilly Loch in her Orizaba number in DUEL IN THE SUN, providing for Selznik, again, the high point of that lengthy but well-meaning pot of canned chili. He did it for Dietrich fist, in MOROCCO, and later in her Cafe scenes in THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN. He even did it for Jane Russel and Gloria Grahame in MACAO. And we all know he did it for Gene Tierny and Oona Munson in THE SHANGHAI GESTURE.

Martin Scorsese is the only living director who has this gift in full flower, as we can see in the nightclub scenes in NEW YORK, NEW YORK and THE AVIATOR. A rarity.

And so, for whatever they paid him, von Sternberg worked his magic for the producer and the star. He kept Dietrich in good light and in costumes she could wear with chic (even echoing himself in the bedroom scene in MOROCCO, where she wears the silk gown and carries a palmetto fan: pure Whistler). Her make-up was faulty in the early shots, and there were no good close-ups until he was able to arrange one of the great closeups of the decade: her wedding day, when she murmurs her vows. That was the Money Shot. Pefect. Flaw-less. Not by today's standards, but perfect, nonethe less. But, by then we've seen half the picture, and we can stop it, rewind and go to bed. After that its just a horse-opera and progressively silly and dumb by turns. Dietrich and Boyer in a howdah?

But, the good thing about viewing good prints of Studio films is that you can learn a great deal from them, if you look very carefully and view the details again and again. And this film is no exception. They spent a good deal of money on it, and it shows. Not only is it entertaining, but it's a textbook demonstration of what to do, and what not to do.

One thing more: Losch is, I believe, a family name associated with Dietrich, and if Tilly was not fairly closely related to Marlene, she was almost certainly a good friend, for it was she who inspired (though I don't know if she is credit with the choreography) the notorious incense, veils and golden legs danse of Dietrich's wartime hit, KISMET. I've watched it countless times, thinking Tilly may have taken the pirouettes in the long shots -- the way Schwartzkopf took the high notes for Flagstadt in TRISTAN -- but I don't think so. Not a parody though. Dietrich wasn't a real dancer, anymore than she could play the violin, but god knows she had "moves" as they say.

Love in the desert once again.......2006-05-27

Marlene Dietrich is back in the desert in this David Selznick-produced melodrama. After her father's death she comes to Algeria to start life anew. There she meets Charles Boyer, a Trappist monk who has fled the order and broken his vows, though Dietrich doesn't learn this about him until the end. They share some adventures and eventually fall in love and marry. On their honeymoon they encounter a French officer (Alan Marshall) who reveals Boyer's secret; he decides to return to the monastery and Dietrich says farewell to him forever at its gates. The theme of the picture fits well with the setting, and there's a mysterious, deterministic air about the proceedings that is quite compelling (Max Steiner's musical score helps greatly in this department). Everything is done, of course, to bring out Dietrich's beauty, but she and the movie itself are much more than just a modern costume piece for her. Filmed in early Technicolor, the picture is a handsome production all around.

STUNNING!!!.......2004-12-08

I just completed three viewings of the Anchor Bay Release of this movie...I was stunnded & awestruck at the sheer beauty of this DVD. Every scene was carefully composed to show off the greatest beauty possible...Pure Eye Candy. The colors were bright and crisp and well defined. The sound quality was superb. One rarelly finds this perfection in this old of a movie.

See It for One Golden Boyer Soliloquy on God v. The World.......2003-12-14

A Trappist monk, who holds the secret of the monastery's excellent liqueur, makes a break for it, bumps into, and falls in love with, Marlene Deitrich, a devout Catholic, who learns the truth of his past from *BASIL RATHBONE* while vacationing in the trackless wastes of the Sahara desert. Will he or won't he return to the monastery, and why?

OMIGOD.

I never allow Political Correctness to get in the way of my enjoyment of a movie. In fact, I'll enjoy a movie to *spite* Political Correctness.

But this is one of the most racist movies I've ever seen. And it is massively inept. You really wonder how the same man who produced GWTW, David Selznick, could have produced this fiasco.

"The Garden of Allah" is unintentionally funny. In scene after scene, Arabs are depicted as being sex-obsessed bafoons. They are also depicted as having the same facial features as Northern Europeans, only with heavy dark make-up. And blue eyes peeking out.

Joseph Schildkraut and John Carridine play Arabs. Oh, okay. Then why not we use Hattie MacDaniel in our next movie to play Pat Nixon. Makes exactly as much sense.

There is a scene where a bunch of Arabs, all in matching white burnooses, are sitting around the desert at night, singing folksongs with some French Foreign Legionairres, and their heads are all moving back and forth to the same beat. One of the funniest scenes I've ever seen. Not meant to be.

In another scene, a "dancer" squats and bends backward, utterly grotesque, an insult to real belly dancing.

AAAAA!!!!

All I kept thinking was, "What would an Arab make of this movie?" Probably they couldn't even watch it, or would watch it in a boiling rage.

But there are other scenes, equally funny, that have nothing to do with Arabs. Marlene Deitrich goes to a European convent to get advice on what to do with her life. She's dressed, OF COURSE, to the nines. She couldn't survive more than a mile away from a 24-hour source of silk stockings. This is a woman whose greatest trek would be from the backseat of a limo to the front door of a nightclub.

So this nun, a propos de rien, says, "Why don't you go out into the desert?" Yeah, right! Nuns always say that to women who go to them for advice!

And ... Basil Rathbone. Need I say more? Basil Rathbone in a bright red robe -- thrown over a houndstooth check wool jacket -- wandering around the Sahara, trying to look at home? I don't think so.

Amazon.com

Customer Reviews:

Dabbling in the Desert.......2007-04-11

von Sternberg, movie-doctor for Selznik.......2006-08-10

Love in the desert once again.......2006-05-27

STUNNING!!!.......2004-12-08

See It for One Golden Boyer Soliloquy on God v. The World.......2003-12-14

OMIGOD.

I never allow Political Correctness to get in the way of my enjoyment of a movie. In fact, I'll enjoy a movie to *spite* Political Correctness.

But this is one of the most racist movies I've ever seen. And it is massively inept. You really wonder how the same man who produced GWTW, David Selznick, could have produced this fiasco.

Joseph Schildkraut and John Carridine play Arabs. Oh, okay. Then why not we use Hattie MacDaniel in our next movie to play Pat Nixon. Makes exactly as much sense.

In another scene, a "dancer" squats and bends backward, utterly grotesque, an insult to real belly dancing.

AAAAA!!!!

All I kept thinking was, "What would an Arab make of this movie?" Probably they couldn't even watch it, or would watch it in a boiling rage.

So this nun, a propos de rien, says, "Why don't you go out into the desert?" Yeah, right! Nuns always say that to women who go to them for advice!

And ... Basil Rathbone. Need I say more? Basil Rathbone in a bright red robe -- thrown over a houndstooth check wool jacket -- wandering around the Sahara, trying to look at home? I don't think so.

Amazon.com

Customer Reviews:

Dabbling in the Desert.......2007-04-11

von Sternberg, movie-doctor for Selznik.......2006-08-10

Love in the desert once again.......2006-05-27

STUNNING!!!.......2004-12-08

See It for One Golden Boyer Soliloquy on God v. The World.......2003-12-14

OMIGOD.

I never allow Political Correctness to get in the way of my enjoyment of a movie. In fact, I'll enjoy a movie to *spite* Political Correctness.

But this is one of the most racist movies I've ever seen. And it is massively inept. You really wonder how the same man who produced GWTW, David Selznick, could have produced this fiasco.

Joseph Schildkraut and John Carridine play Arabs. Oh, okay. Then why not we use Hattie MacDaniel in our next movie to play Pat Nixon. Makes exactly as much sense.

In another scene, a "dancer" squats and bends backward, utterly grotesque, an insult to real belly dancing.

AAAAA!!!!

All I kept thinking was, "What would an Arab make of this movie?" Probably they couldn't even watch it, or would watch it in a boiling rage.

So this nun, a propos de rien, says, "Why don't you go out into the desert?" Yeah, right! Nuns always say that to women who go to them for advice!

And ... Basil Rathbone. Need I say more? Basil Rathbone in a bright red robe -- thrown over a houndstooth check wool jacket -- wandering around the Sahara, trying to look at home? I don't think so.

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