Jon Mirsalis on Piano The Thief of Bagdad exists on the dream side of spectacle, with its elaborate magical effects filmed on lavish, painted sets designed by William Cameron Menzies. Its pace is graceful, natural, and its star, Douglas Fairbanks, is here less the all-American acrobat than the ballet dancer reminiscent of Nijinsky. The story of a thief who pretends to be a prince and then must act accordingly heroic has its humor built in, and young Raoul Walsh's direction plays right into the self-parodying antics of Fairbanks. (While the Mongol Khan, played by the fascinating So-Jin, is about to escape with the princess and apple of the thief's eye, our hero is languishing in a ticker-tape parade through the city.) The Surrealists extolled The Thief of Bagdad, not for its more ambitious effects (such as the lizard-like monster), but rather "for that faery (féerie) Marvellous...the essential elements of which would be the geometry of line and the illogicality of detail" (Jean Goudal). Goudal cites two images- "the gate of the town that opens and closes through the connecting and disconnecting of identically formed panels, and Fairbanks soaring above the unreal clouds on his scleroid horse"-that "have the admirable manifest artifice of the dream." Gerard Legrand writes, "It isn't enough just to accumulate unusual objects to make a Surrealist film...But in The Thief of Bagdad the tempest and the immense beach where the wreckage lies, the flight of the doves at the instant the blind man reopens his eyes are as moving as the genie in the bottle and the temple scenes." (Both in The Shadow and Its Shadow, Paul Hammond, ed.)