Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Micitype Pretty Good

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

piker-5 It's a minor film indeed Paul Henreid, a boring lead But Hans Conried? I'd watch him read!This is the kind of movie that happens if you are running an assembly line. Sooner or later everybody gets a little slap-happy and and stops taking the enterprise seriously. The story, and I suppose there is one, takes place in that fuzzy movie middle-east, the one that never existed. It clearly is set before the onset of electricity but after the invention of brightly colored fabric dyes. Henreid plays a womanizing, swashbuckling magician with a girl in every, uh dune. This is the light-hearted breezy Paul Henreid. If anything, it shows he had a wider range than you thought. His pal/companion/assistant/whipping boy is the glorious and goony Hans Conreid. Somehow bandits "steal" all Henreid's dancing girls, and in getting them back he has to fight a corrupt Caliph and his evil assistant. The Caliph, incidentally, is dubbed by voice powerhouse Paul Frees. Can't imagine why but it's great to hear him.Given this tired setup it's not too surprising that the enterprise just goes over-the-top goofy. They throw in film in-jokes, anachronisms, and magic tricks that would be more appropriate in a Las Vegas showroom. You're a little disappointed that Hope and Crosby don't wander in for a cameo, but they'd have to cross studio lines to do it.I'll put it this way. If you watch too many old movies, it's pretty fun. If you never seen an old movie, this might put you off them forever.

MovieKonOSur While many have panned this film, the dancing and theatrics were excellent entertainment. Costuming and sets were well done and while the plot lacked a lot of depth, the mirth and special effects were interesting and ahead of other offerings from the mid 1950's.Casting was done with relative unknowns that worked diligently at coming across as middle eastern while obviously actually being from Mexico or South America...(distinct Spanish dialect in the accents).Dancing and magic was fun and believable. Sit back and enjoy, but don't expect any surprises...

phil_sexton Siren of Bagdad is quite a strange Paul Heinreid film for me. I'm familiar with him from Casablanca (who isn't?) and things like Watch on the Rhine, where he is deadly serious and somewhat ponderous. In Siren, produced by Sam Katzman, who threw together cheap B movies for many years (think East Side Kids), Heinreid is virtually winking at the camera as magician Kazah the Great, trying to rescue his dancing girls after they are kidnapped by... well, no one really cares who, exactly.No one seems to take the plot seriously at all, but do have fun camping in a sandy oasis (I'm sure the beach was just behind the dune), doing vaudeville-type magic tricks, and jumping on barely hidden trampolines when they fight ruffians, then chasing through a lot of sets with gold and primary colors while wearing yards of colorful fabric. There is very much the atmosphere of a Three Stooges short of the late 40s going on here. Hans Conreid plays magician Henireid's manservant Ben Ali who mugs his way through the film. I'm not sure if it's just the print that TCM showed, but the color and print quality are kind of poor for a Columbia film. The grain is noticeably different on the Columbia logo than on the print, and the day-for-night photography is pretty poor, mostly just a blue gel and under exposure for the effect. Interior shots are strangely lit, and very flat considering the scope of the (cheap) sets; I suspect that this is because they were playing things so broad, no one really knew where the actors would actually be during a shot. Kinda fun and very fast moving, which helps cover the silliness of the film.

William Giesin On January 10, 2008 I watched four Paul Henreid swashbuckler/sand and sandal movies one after the other on Turner Classic Movies. "Thief of Damascus", "Last of the Bucanneers", "Pirates of Tripoli", and "Siren of Bagdad" from 6;00 a.m to 12;00 p.m. Why would anyone do such a crazy thing? I suppose it was some kind of innate desire to journey back to my childhood and down memory lane and catch up on a much forgotten past. The film that stands out of the group, in my opinion, was "Siren of Bagdad". This film really challenges the limits of the concept of "the willing suspension of disbelief". One of the most humorous moments comes when Kazah (Henreid), a magician, turns his friend Ben Ali (Conried) into a beautiful blond belly dancer. The Sultan (Charles Lung) flirts with the sexy vixen beckoning her to speak. Hans Conreid's voice makes an obvious sharp contrast with the belly dancer's beauty. Consequently,the reason for the strange voice is palmed off as the result of someone scaring his/her mother by whistling when she was caring them. Wow! What a stretch. Conried was given some of the best lines in the campy script such as "I would ask you for a match if they had been invented by now", and "When does the next camel to Basra arrive?" Throw in a former Pro Wrestler, Karl "Killer" Davis (Morab)of "Mighty Joe Young" fame, and Sylvia Lewis, one of the sexiest 1950's belly dancers you will ever see...and this turkey makes the necessary transition. In other words...the film is so "bad"... that you walk away thinking it was "good". Does that make any sense to you? If it doesn't .... I don't recommend this film.