Crikey, what a film!
You can just imagine the planning meetings; "yeah, we'll have Gary Cooper as Marco Polo, there'll be adventure, beautiful girls, romance, action, all set in the mystic east, it's gonna be GREAT...".
Except it wasn't. The pacing is uneven, the film lacks realism, lacks historical accuracy, Cooper is miscast, and even as entertainment the film is somewhat lacking. All this applies by the standards of the time, not just in retrospect: When the film was released, after a troubled production, the audience voted with their feet and stayed away; the film lost a fortune. Often films that don't do well at the time are viewed more kindly in hindsight, but not this one; it is very patchy indeed.
Gary Cooper does his best but you can see his heart is not in it; if he too had been made up to look 'oriental' then it could have been an epic miscast on a par with John Wayne in 'the Conqueror' two decades later. As it is, it isn't quite as bad as that.
Watching this film was interesting for me in other ways. One thing that struck me was that the shot of our hero narrowly avoiding plunging into a chasm (screen left) was a dead ringer for a shot in the final Indiana Jones film; both appear to have been done using a matte of the chasm and if anything, the 1938 matte looks more realistic. So much for progress!
Another thing that struck me was that the 1980 film 'Flash Gordon' contains many of the plot elements seen here, albeit rearranged somewhat. One can only suppose that there was some, uh, 'inspiration' from this film. However whilst in Flash Gordon they went for 'camp' in an absolutely shameless fashion, and reviewers here have tarred this film with the camp brush too, I don't think it was ever meant that way. It might perhaps have been a better film if they had.
For me, the one standout in this film is Basil Rathbone; he really did make an excellent bad guy! Another film around this time also saw him playing a 'bad Guy', literally; Guy of Gisborne, in Robin Hood, a well-remembered role. Arguably he only narrowly avoided being eternally typecast as a bad guy by being eternally typecast as Sherlock Holmes instead. It could have been worse I suppose; although Rathbone fought against this Holmes association for many years he eventually came to embrace it.
There are other small roles of interest in this film such as Lana Turner's, but for the most part this film is today little more than a slightly puzzling period piece. It isn't actually awful to watch, but this 'rock' burned nearly everyone involved.
You can just imagine the planning meetings; "yeah, we'll have Gary Cooper as Marco Polo, there'll be adventure, beautiful girls, romance, action, all set in the mystic east, it's gonna be GREAT...".
Except it wasn't. The pacing is uneven, the film lacks realism, lacks historical accuracy, Cooper is miscast, and even as entertainment the film is somewhat lacking. All this applies by the standards of the time, not just in retrospect: When the film was released, after a troubled production, the audience voted with their feet and stayed away; the film lost a fortune. Often films that don't do well at the time are viewed more kindly in hindsight, but not this one; it is very patchy indeed.
Gary Cooper does his best but you can see his heart is not in it; if he too had been made up to look 'oriental' then it could have been an epic miscast on a par with John Wayne in 'the Conqueror' two decades later. As it is, it isn't quite as bad as that.
Watching this film was interesting for me in other ways. One thing that struck me was that the shot of our hero narrowly avoiding plunging into a chasm (screen left) was a dead ringer for a shot in the final Indiana Jones film; both appear to have been done using a matte of the chasm and if anything, the 1938 matte looks more realistic. So much for progress!
Another thing that struck me was that the 1980 film 'Flash Gordon' contains many of the plot elements seen here, albeit rearranged somewhat. One can only suppose that there was some, uh, 'inspiration' from this film. However whilst in Flash Gordon they went for 'camp' in an absolutely shameless fashion, and reviewers here have tarred this film with the camp brush too, I don't think it was ever meant that way. It might perhaps have been a better film if they had.
For me, the one standout in this film is Basil Rathbone; he really did make an excellent bad guy! Another film around this time also saw him playing a 'bad Guy', literally; Guy of Gisborne, in Robin Hood, a well-remembered role. Arguably he only narrowly avoided being eternally typecast as a bad guy by being eternally typecast as Sherlock Holmes instead. It could have been worse I suppose; although Rathbone fought against this Holmes association for many years he eventually came to embrace it.
There are other small roles of interest in this film such as Lana Turner's, but for the most part this film is today little more than a slightly puzzling period piece. It isn't actually awful to watch, but this 'rock' burned nearly everyone involved.