The Garden of Allah

Rating:
Summary: See It for One Golden Boyer Soliloquy on God v. The World
Review: 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.

AND THEN you get an hour into this unintentional laugh-fest and there comes the scene where Boyer has to explain to Deitrich why he left the monastery, and Boyer is so fantastic in this scene, so genuinely, deeply moving, when he's finally given a chance, by this movie, to act, and given a chance, by this script, to say something coherent, and it's one of the most moving moments that the movies have produced on the matters of faith in God, and worldliness, and sex, and eroticism, and love. Really. It's that good -- good enough to sit through an hour of inept movie-making just to see it, and place in it context. Check it out.

Rating:
Summary: For Lovers of doomed exotic Romance
Review: Handsome movie, breathtakingly filmed in color, in fact, one of the first full length films in technicolor.
The image of the dvd edition, is so near perfection that it's difficult to believe that this picture was released in 1936!

The plot is for sure outdated, but nevertheless the story of the doomed love affair between convent-educated Domini Enfilden and russian Boris Androvsky, a tormented trappist monk, who's just fled from his monastery, set against the beautiful background scenery of the desert, is enjoyable due to its aforementioned technical qualities and the "continental"appeal of both stars, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer.

Although Dietrich looks stylish and alluring as Domini Enfilden, I feel she never looked as good again, as in her early '30s black & white Paramount films, directed by Von Sternberg. Boyer is effective as the troubled monk, who wants a taste of the "outside world".

Excellent support by Basil Rathbone, Joseph Schildkraut and C. Aubrey Smith, plus a spectacular exotic arab dance sequence by then newcomer, Tilly Losch.

Rating:
Summary: A great romance
Review: Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer star in THE GARDEN OF ALLAH, a tale of forbidden love and passion in the Algerian desert.

Domini Enfilden (Marlene Dietrich) has spent her life caring for her ailing father, and she now wants her own life back again. She finds it when she travels to Algeria, and she meets Boris Androvsky (Charles Boyer), who, unbeknowst to her, is a runaway Trappist monk who deserted the order after taking the vows.

They marry, and after a lengthy honeymoon in the Algerian desert, the truth comes out and she begs him to return to the order.

Gloriously filmed in Technicolor, this David O'Selznick epic is one of the finer films in Dietrich's early career.