The Great Movies III

Despite its limited budget, The Terrorist is visually breathtaking: "The most beautiful film from India in years (maybe ever)," wrote David Overby, who selected it for the Toronto festival. Sivan shot some scenes in the jungle and others "in his own backyard," Dharker told me, when I showed the film at my 2000 Overlooked Film Festival. She did her own stunts and broke her leg during one of them. There is a lot of water in the film, a lot of rain, rivers, some tears; "the movie was shot in an actual drizzle," Sivan says on his Web site. "No sprinklers."

In an interview with David Walsh, Sivan notes: "Most of the films that deal with violence end up showing a great deal of it and then say, at the end, `No, it's not right."' Sivan deliberately avoided violence to focus on the story of Malli, who he says comes from "a group of young people, mostly teenagers.' They are deprived of any kind of education, sex life, smoking; everything is considered harmful. All of them are made to believe that being a martyr is the biggest thing to happen, and they're given fantastic funerals. It is like the ultimate high for a person in that kind of environment."

I admire The Terrorist because it sidesteps the ideology, the question of which side is right and which side is wrong, the political motives, the tactical reasons and simply says: here is a young woman who has decided to kill and be killed for a cause. Look in her eyes, listen to her voice, watch her as she lives for a few days, and ask yourself what motivates her, and why. Every time I see the film, I feel a great sadness, that a human imagination could be so limited that it sees its own extinction as a victory.

To begin with a story: our grandson Taylor was deeply immersed in a video game on his laptop. I began to watch The 7hiefofBagdad on DVD. At first he ignored it. Then I saw him glancing at the screen. Then he closed the laptop and watched full time. During the spider sequence, only his eyes were visible above the neck of his T-shirt. "That was a good movie!" he told me. "What did Taylor say when he found out it was almost seventy years old?" his mother, Sonia, asked me. "I didn't tell him," I said.

This 1940 movie is one of the great entertainments. It lifts up the heart. An early Technicolor movie, it employs colors gladly and with boldness, using costumes to introduce a rainbow. It has adventure, romance, song, a Miklos Rozsa score that one critic said is "a symphony accompanied by a movie." It had several directors; as producer, Alexander Korda leaped from one horse to another in midstream. But it maintains a consistent spirit, and that spirit is one of headlong joy in storytelling.

The story is loosely borrowed from Douglas Fairbanks Sr.'s The Thief of Bagdad (1924), itself a great film. Fairbanks Jr. told me it was his father's favorite. One major change is crucial: in the silent film, the thief and the romantic lead were one and the same, played by Fairbanks. In the 1940 film, they are made into two characters. The thief, Abu, is played by the Indian child star Sabu, then about fifteen. The king, Ahmad, is played by John Justin with a Fairbanksian mustache. This is an invaluable change, for both dramatic purposes and practical ones: the silent character needs no one to talk to. The 1940 characters become allies drawn from the top and bottom of society, making Sabu essentially the star of the film, although he doesn't receive top billing. The most compelling character, as he should be, is the villain Jaffar, played by the German emigre Conrad Veidt with hypnotic eyes and a cruel laugh. The beautiful, passive heroine, a princess desired by both men, is played by June Duprez.

The story in my mind moves from one spectacular special-effects sequence to another: the Sultan's mechanical toy collection. The flying horse. The storm at sea. The goddess with six arms. The towering genie released from a bottle. Abu's assault on the temple that contains the All-Seeing Eye. His climb up a mountainous statue. The battle with the gigantic spider. The flying carpet.

Half of the the shots in Citizen Kane used special effects, according to Robert Carringer, who wrote a book on the film. There is rarely a shot in The Thief ofBagdad without them. The film was a breakthrough in technique and vision, influential in shaping the entire genre. There are few effects in Star Wars (1977) that cannot be found in Thief. Some of them, such as blue screen, were still being perfected. Other effects, such as matte paintings, had been in use for years.