A Bedouin princess (Maureen O’Hara) returns home from England to find her father murdered. She wants revenge, and so takes up with the sleazy Pasha (Vincent Price). The assumed murderer is Hassan (Paul Hubschmid), but is he the leader of the savage Black Robes or a hero on the run?
I’ll include Bagdad as a Swashbuckler by taking the broadest interpretation of the genre. It is a costume film, with little care for realism (so not a period drama), set in a strange land of the past (an Arabia that never existed), with bright colors, dialog that is a series of proclamations, and sword-play. I suppose that’s close enough for the genre.
So the incredibly White Maureen O’Hara is an Arab. Yeah. OK. One of the many Irish Arabs no doubt. This screams vanity project. O’Hara gets to do her angry shtick that she’d become famous for, wear beautiful clothing, dominate all of the scenes with a lack-luster love interest, and even sing in a style most unfitting for a film set in Bagdad. The full title should have been Maureen O’Hara in Maureen O’Hara’s Bagdad. It helps that O’Hara is generally worth watching, though this will not be remembered as a high point in her career.
I must admit to a fondness for this subgenre. Beyond the fantasy, there’s all the beautiful dancing girls. With one kind of beauty or another, there’s always something entertaining. But this is a particularly vacuous entry. Everyone is miscast. Perhaps Vincent Price could have played a Turkish lord, but there’s no sign of that here with one of his worst performances. But then if he’d been good, he would have really stood out. Over-acting is the rule, but not in a fun way.
Bagdad is a bright juvenile movie. No character seems like a person, the plot is silly, with numerous things happening for no good reason, and every aspect is lowest-common-denominator (except the cinematography, which is lovely). Taken as that, and watched by children, it is passable.