The Adventures of Hajji Baba

                     

Don Weis' The Adventures of Hajji Baba is a wide screen Technicolor hoot. When I compare it to such tired, socially responsible crap from 1954 as The Country Girl, I further appreciate Weis' buoyancy and colorful flair. The film is exotic schlock, a formula producer Walter Wanger had followed for 1942's Arabian Nights. The Adventures of Hajji Baba, likewise, did boffo biz. Why? The film has a shopworn plot, little characterization, but boasts more flesh on the screen than any other American film of the 1950s. Fifteen minutes had to be shorn from the American cut before it could be shown in the UK. After Weis establishes the film's milieu in one shot, color coordinated slave girls behind bars, he shows Hajji Baba (John Derek) plying one of his trades, which include Don Juan, barber, masseuse, and swordsman, by giving Claude Akins an oily rubdown. I hope Derek got hazard pay. Weis is able to instantly conjure the camaraderie of a community, notwithstanding the fact that he has a cast of very unlikely Arabs, such as the blue eyed Derek.

Establishing a milieu: the first shot of The Adventure of Hajji Baba

Hajji is tasked with protecting a willful princess (Elaine Stewart, as stiff as knotty pine) during a bewildering number of fracases. They both get tied up and tortured numerous times. Hajji makes time with every featured femme in the flick. Despite this and the countless harems we see, the women in this picture all have spunk and agency. In fact, one of the gals Hajji locks lips with is the leader of a rebellious Amazon gang played by flame haired Amanda Blake; soon to be Miss Kitty on television's Gunsmoke. This flick conveys the cheap thrills of pulp and peplum within an eye popping comic book framework. John Derek, villainized as Bo Derek's Svengali, is not bad. I prefer him to Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter. Weis started out promisingly with such trifles as The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, I Love Melvin, and this picture. By the 1960s, he was hopelessly out of step: Billie and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini are among the worst pictures of any era. Weis' bread and butter became television work: glimpses of a jaunty survivor can be found in episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Remington Steele.

 

Another factor that helps make The Adventures of Hajji Baba spritely entertainment is its vigorous score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Tiomkin was coming off the huge success of his score for High Noon and its attendant single, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin. Some thought Frankie Laine's hit version of the ballad saved that film commercially. Consequentially, a single was derived from the main theme of ...Hajji Baba featuring Nat King Cole on vocals with Nelson Riddle arranging. It was never more than a B side, but Cole's mellifluous voice pops up every five minutes of the film burbling "...Hajji Baba." It is bananas, but fits snugly within a film that is already cuckoo for cocoa puffs. Tiomkin's orchestral score is exciting and exotic without depending on Orientalist tropes.