A document of the Third Citroen Automotive Expedition from Beirut to Peking, led by Georges-Marie Haardt. In his review of this extraordinary film Herman G. Weinberg wrote in 1936: "Not only did Haardt show us pictures to substantiate the stories once considered incredible by Marco Polo's listeners-he let us hear the sounds of the great Orient, through the magic of the photoelectric cell. He has blown the breath of life into his images by recording the calls and cries...murmers of strange tongues, snatches of even strangers songs...groans and screeches...chantings..the street noises of the bazaars...a cacophonic symphony..." A more recent assessment, at the 1989 Telluride Film Festival where this preserved print was revived, calls The Yellow Cruise "a dreamlike and obsessive story of futile adventure. At its heart, this is an expedition of the absurd. Could it be that the purpose is to drive a car from Beirut to Peking? Perhaps, but these weird half-track vehicles never even make it over the Himalayas. Could it be ethnographic? Maybe, but their concerns are never scholarly and almost always bizarre. This is a movie where everything is doubly removed in time and place: it focuses on that incredible distance between us and antiquity but also between us and a bygone era of impassioned exploration and derring-do, making it a movie story of romantic innocents."