User Reviews

Its a somewhat interesting curiosity, strictly for fans of the actors. I assume that 90% of people these days will watch it because of Montez, and they will probably be a bit confused and disappointed; "Cobra Woman" this is not! Its very much kind of a version of "She" in the Sahara, with the odd low-budget feel of an old B&W Saturday Matinée serial; but this is very adult and not for the kiddies! Its intellectual and philosophical in some ways, and the Queen plays games of chess with her victims. Unfortunately for all sorts of reasons it ends up being a disjointed mess. My feeling was that its most fatal flaw among many is that it has several excellent actors struggling to give serious performances against the odds, and needs Montez to come up to their level; unfortunately she was absolutely not up to this task.

1940's version of oft filmed story of finding Atlantis under the Sahara is probably best known when it was filmed several times under the l'Atalante title of the novel. The plot has a couple of adventurers stumbling upon the lost continent under the desert and coming in contact with the queen of the continent, romance and other complications ensue. This time out we get a well made version but the pacing is a killer and after a half an hour I began to wander literally, I went into other rooms in my house as this was running in the DVD player because the movie is just so darn slow. Worst of all is Maria Montez as the queen who is beautiful but leaden. She's so bad in fact that her name is now linked in my mind to one of the worst performances I've ever seen (and I've seen a good many). You can try it but you may snooze

It's a shame that Universal never used Maria Montez as a female monster, a la a new Dracula's Daughter, or an ancient Egyptian princess made the walking dead in one of their later "Mummy" movies. She could be so deliciously evil when called to do so, and horror movie women were scream queens rather than the perpetrators of fear. But she did spread her share of fear, whether it was the mysterious Marie Roget or the jewel hunting cobra woman. In this action/adventure, made after her Universal days had come to an end, she's both conniving and sultry, playing another queen of questionable personality.

This is late 40's escapism at its strangest, a hidden oasis in the middle of the desert, melodramatic and silly, but not without mystery to make it intriguing. Jean Pierre Aumont is the handsome victim of her latest games, pairing him as a rival to Dennis O'Keefe whom he gets into a supposed fight to the death with for her favors. Henry Danielle is over the top as one of Montez's old conquests, giving a sense of "She" into the plot. A scene with a doomed slave girl is haunting at one second then shocking, then laughable with the way that plot development is tied up.

It's obvious that Montez had a career simply because of her exotic looks. She's certainly not a great actress by any means, bellowing many of her lines and coming off as rather cold in spite of her attempts to seem alluring. In fact, everybody seems to be overacting here, and as handsome as it looks, it sort of feels like a serial that might come to a cliffhanger at any moment. But there are some truly eye rolling moments, a few unintentional laughs, and the feeling that the writers secretly had their tongue in their cheek when they handed it over to the director to begin shooting.

Fruity, cockeyed yarn about expedition searching for, and finding, fabled Atlantis. The expedition is the French Foreign Legion. Atlantis is in the middle of the Sahara! Ruling the lost kingdom is a beautiful, ageless, sexually voracious queen. Most of the citizenry act as guards or as dancers. (No TV, no reading material, dancing is the main entertainment,) The music score is intrusive and distracting, and bulk of the acting is histrionic. Who cares? Queen Antinea wears skin tight or sheer as can be outfits. Plays chess with the men folk, leads them to her yawning conch shell bed, and drains their mojo, till their ain't no wick in the stick. Along with provocative costumes, is the $5.00 set design. Cinematographer Karl Struss filled the flick with phallic imagery. Candlesticks, chessmen, marble columns, even the omnipresent masked, turbaned guards. Bad film but a fun one.

At an isolated fort in North Africa, the sole survivor of a rescue party, Lieutenant Saint-Avit (Jean-Pierre Aumont), is convinced he's killed his friend Captain Morhange (Dennis O'Keefe) in the lost city of Atlantis. During a court inquiry, Saint-Avit relates, in flashback, what happened when his small party was sent to find a missing expedition led by his friend, Gassone. After getting lost in a sandstorm, the party stumbles upon a city high in the Hoggar Mountains where they find Gassone's gold-covered body (along with many others) entombed in a large marble hall. The barbaric land is ruled by a beautiful, cruel, and lusty queen, Antinea (Maria Montez), who is a direct descendant of Cleopatra and Marc Antony. Saint-Avit falls for the ruthless ruler but Morhange, hoping to enter a monastery, is able to resist. Antinea manipulates a drunken Saint-Avit into killing his friend but later, stricken by conscience, he escapes and is found wandering in the desert by his fellow Legionaires. Soon after, the amused court of inquiry acquits Saint-Avit, attributing his memories to mirage, but he is later given an amulet by one of Antinea's minions and heads into the desert. A search party, led by a handsome, young Legionaire, is formed but gets lost in a sandstorm...

Unlike G.W. Pabst's 1932 version, this faithful filmization of Pierre Benoit's novel, "Queen Of Atlantis", produced by Samuel Nebenzel and released by United Artists, plays as straight fantasy. SIREN OF ATLANTIS is pure escapism filmed in black and white and quite a bit darker than the Universal "sex and sand" Saturday matinée adventures popular in the 1940s and 50s. The clever use of light and shadow help disguise a low budget and a number of scenes from G.W. Pabst's film are repeated. Directorial credit is given to Gregg C. Tallas but both John "The Lodger" Brahm and Arthur "The Chase" Ripley did uncredited work and, like Ripley's THE CHASE, SIREN OF ATLANTIS also ends on a deja vu note. Former Universal star Maria Montez is right at home portraying the evil, imperious ruler of a lost empire; sheathed in lamé with a panther by her side, Antinea plays chess with her lovers before encasing them in gold (a la GOLDFINGER) and had the tongue of her alchemist cut out for saying things she did not care to hear. Henry Daniell plays Blades, one of a number of Europeans trapped in Atlantis after becoming lost in the desert before Saint-Avit arrived. In this telling, a native girl falls in love with Morhange and tries to help him escape; when they're caught, she jumps to her death rather than face the Queen's punishment of "the slow fire". There's more than a passing resemblance to the H. Rider Haggard novel, "She", and the story was later reworked by Universal as DESERT LEGION starring Alan Ladd and Arlene Dahl in 1953. "L'Atlantide" was made again in 1961 by Edgar G. Ulmer as CITY BENEATH THE DESERT starring Israeli actress Haya "Ben Hur" Harareet. Jean-Pierre Aumont and Maria Montez were married at the time of filming and the parents of the late giallo star, Tina "Torso" Aumont.

The premise of the Atlantis films isn't as preposterous as it seems. Plato wrote of a city that sank into the ocean after a day and night of cataclysm and the Sahara is, of course, the floor of a long forgotten sea...

Author/satirist Gore Vidal used SIREN OF ATLANTIS as basis for the fictional Maria Montez movie pivotal to the plot of "Myron", his sequel to the movie-mad novel "Myra Breckenridge":

Myra's back -and badder than ever after a sex-change operation makes her male again. Who pushed Myron Breckinridge through the television screen and onto the set of SIREN OF BABYLON? Myron takes stoner late-nite TV viewing to new heights when he finds he can enter Maria Montez' 1948 SIREN OF BABYLON at will. When he goes "in" the whole cast is in suspended animation and he starts changing the scenery around and fiddling with Montez' metal brassiere and adjusting the little gladiator skirts of her guards in an effort to make the film the sexiest movie of all time. He goes to the well once too often and accidentally collides with Maria ...and becomes her! "I AM Maria Montez!!" Watch out... Myra/Myron's loose in 1948 Hollywood -inhabiting the body of Maria Montez- and is going all out to have Maria win the Academy Award and turn SIREN OF BABYLON into the film that changed the world. Too crazed to have ever pondered (or care about) the fabled "Butterfly Effect" (change even a molecule in the past and the future will be forever altered) the planet will never be the same! Meanwhile, in 1974 Hollywood, Myron's wife Mary Ann (carried over from the first novel) is ready to have him committed because all he does is cry in Spanish for his husband "Jean-Pierre" and jabber on about getting "back to the set"...