Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good fun!
Comment: This movie is from 1943 Hollywood, which immediately tells you a few things about it:
1) It won't be politically or historically correct. Its portrayal of old Arabia will make historians yell at the TV. Nobody in it will be Arabian, except maybe the extras. All the lead characters will be white. Women will be treacherous, two-dimensional characters. There will be at least one gratuitous midget.
2) It will either be in black and white, colorized, or technicolor. None of these will look very natural.
These hypotheses prove to be correct. It's technicolor.
It's not the most hideously wrong portrayal of old Arabia I've seen. However, none of the actors know what an Arabian accent is like, and apparently nobody could agree on a consistent pseudo-Arabian accent, so every single one of them uses a different accent. Thus, the female lead Amara uses a thick Cuban accent. One of the main characters apparently went "oh, what the hell" and uses the exact same accent he uses when he plays the sidekick in Western movies. It sounds even more out-of-place than you would expect.
It's not the worst portrayal of women I've seen in an old movie, either. Amara falls out of character frequently (which the writers probably decided was feminine fickleness or something) and she's basically the only woman in the whole movie, except for her servant. Amara isn't very sharp, and needs to be rescued, but she isn't offensively stupid or wicked either. Her servant girl is traitorous, but no more so than the other characters.
There's one scene where one of the thieves (the one who talks like a cowboy's sidekick) asks Ali Baba why he's going to risk his life to save Amara. The thief says, "A man could risk his life for food, or money or even his horse, but never for a woman!" Then he rants on a bit about how women are man's ruin and so on, and how he should get a prostitute instead. Ali Baba pretty much rolls his eyes and rescues her anyway. In the very next scene, the woman-hating thief is in disguise drag. This is presented without irony, but I like to draw my own conclusions from that. Forty male thieves living together in a posh cave for decades without any no women around.
Overall, the movie was VERY fun to watch. The mildly-cheesy, unrealistic sense of high adventure drew me in amd absorbed me more than I expected. The vivid, over-saturated colors used by Technicolor are surprisingly suiting, unreal as they look. The visuals are stunning, which I hadn't expected either; the old-fashioned hand-painted backdrops are quite beautiful. Unlike a lot of older movies, it's too visual to just treat as a radio play and listen to while you're looking at other things or doing handcrafts. The story is very fast-paced. Tons of fun, very enjoyable!
Oh, and there was a gratuitous midget.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES (1944)
Comment: (Action/Adventure, 1 hr 27 min, Technicolor) Universal - U.S.A.DIRECTOR: Arthur Lubin
CAST: Scotty Beckett, Turhan Bey, Andy Devine, Jon Hall, Frank Puglia, Kurt Katch, Maria Montez (As: Amara)
COMMENTS: This Arabian Nights fantasy follows the exploits of the Caliph of Baghdad's son, who runs off into the desert after his father is killed by raiding Mongols.
There he encounters the legendary 40 thieves and watches in amazement as their command, "Open Sesame," magically parts a solid rock wall, revealing a cavernous hiding place filled with treasures.
He is adopted by the thieves, dubbed "Ali Baba," and grows up to be their leader. As an adult, Ali sets out to avenge his father's death and to free his land from the reigning Mongols.
The film is set in the ancient Middle East. Maria Montez stars as Amara, a Baghdad beauty, who is one of the main reasons of the fight between the Mongol Khan Hulagu and Ali Baba.
In this time, Maria demonstrated that she will never accept to do scenes or scene parts against her will. For instance, the director Arthur Lubin tried to convince her of appearing naked inside of a pool, the problem was solved when Lubin accepted to put her in a bubble bath.
Before beginning working in the most popular and commercial movie of its time, Maria said to the media: "According to my horoscope, the name I will have in this movie will not augur me success."
The producers thought Montez wanted to change the name they assigned her and they allowed her to do so.
The actress Miriam Colón, from Puerto Rico, appeared in this film, but she was not credited in the cast.
