Every movie set in the Near East in the 40s and 50s had to have an interlude featuring dancing girls. I've always reveled in them. These are typical. Set to Lucien Cailliet's imaginative stereotypical score (oboes and drums), these half-dozen beauties whirl around and suffer abdominal contractions out of Martha Graham, followed by diaphanous veils and whatnot, but discretely dressed in harem pants and bustiers. No pipiks allowed.
It's 1805 and the Barbary Pirates along the North African coast have been harassing ships plying the Mediterranean. President Jefferson decides to put a stop to it by barricading their port and sends a few naval ships and a detachment of US Marines to the shores of Tripoli. John Payne is picked to lead the group. Their uniforms are splashy enough to coagulate your eyeballs.
So is Maureen O'Hara as the fiancée of the local sheik from whom Marine Lieutenant John Payne must recruit mercenaries to attack the outpost at Derne, overlooking Tripoli. She's stunning in her pastel gowns, orange flame lipstick, and eyelashes long enough to dust venetian blinds. Her comic sidekick is Connie Gilchrest, whose haimische New York accent no one tried to fix, thank God. Lieutenant Payne has the requisite earthy sergeant, Grant Withers, but it's the Victor McLaughlin role and Grant Withers looks and acts like he's been holding hands with a bottle for the past thirty years.
Maureen O'Hara, outstanding in a few movies, including "Our Man in Havana," overacts outrageously, but then the director appears to have ordered everyone to overact, so the obviousness assumes a style of its own. If O'Hara is voicing an opinion that sounds suspicious and underhanded to Payne, he doesn't merely glance at her. He frowns, squints and stares directly at her for as long as she speaks. She's sassy, as usual, but the hero helps her find her identity as a compliant mate, as usual. If it isn't John Wayne it's John Payne.
O'Hara's figure is fictional, delightfully so, but Presley O'Bannon was real, and so was the commander of the detachment, William Eaton, whose title was Naval Agent to the Barbary States. The titles matched the uniforms. In fact, the story, glamorized and given a commercial sheen in the Hollywood style of the period, sticks fairly close to historical fact, overlooking the occasional irritating inconsistencies that are found in real life. As in history, Payne hires a hundred or so mercenaries who turn out to be a mixed bag of Arabs and Greeks who don't like each other much.
Situation report. I was never much of a technical writer and realize the observations above are a little entropic so let me summarize. Half way through the movie, John Payne is leading this motley of Arabs, Greek mercenaries, and ten Marines across the sand dunes of north Africa, with the intention of deposing the miserable wretch who is pirating our ships in the Mediterranean. Maureen O'Hara has her eyes on the wealthy Arab leader but Payne doesn't want her along and has forced her to travel with the "dancing girls." Payne and O'Hara hate each other but the discerning viewer knows how it will work out. There are the usual hazards of journeying across the desert -- lack of water, sandstorms, haboobs, intrigues, shifting allegiances. Some nice location shooting, apparently somewhere near Palm Springs. The model work and special effects are quite good too for the period.
The ragtag army finally reaches the sea and gratefully draws supplies from the ships of the US Navy. The plan is to bombard the fort at Derna into submission, then have Payne and his unit charge into the rubble and mop things up. The great battle takes place.
But guess what? The Arabs were a clever bunch. (They invented soap in the Middle Ages, but also algebra, an Arabic word, a dirty trick for which they can never be forgiven.) And here, just as the enemy seems about to lose Derna to the Marines, the Arabs break out thousands of hand grenades based on NUCLEAR FISSION and they blow Payne and his attackers to pieces, the disjecta membra thrown into the sea. And when the Arabs are done ravishing Maureen O'Hara, and event that has left her incandescent with pleasure, she too is flung off a cliff to the waiting Kraken. It's a tragedy, true, but an exceptionally light-hearted one.
It's 1805 and the Barbary Pirates along the North African coast have been harassing ships plying the Mediterranean. President Jefferson decides to put a stop to it by barricading their port and sends a few naval ships and a detachment of US Marines to the shores of Tripoli. John Payne is picked to lead the group. Their uniforms are splashy enough to coagulate your eyeballs.
So is Maureen O'Hara as the fiancée of the local sheik from whom Marine Lieutenant John Payne must recruit mercenaries to attack the outpost at Derne, overlooking Tripoli. She's stunning in her pastel gowns, orange flame lipstick, and eyelashes long enough to dust venetian blinds. Her comic sidekick is Connie Gilchrest, whose haimische New York accent no one tried to fix, thank God. Lieutenant Payne has the requisite earthy sergeant, Grant Withers, but it's the Victor McLaughlin role and Grant Withers looks and acts like he's been holding hands with a bottle for the past thirty years.
Maureen O'Hara, outstanding in a few movies, including "Our Man in Havana," overacts outrageously, but then the director appears to have ordered everyone to overact, so the obviousness assumes a style of its own. If O'Hara is voicing an opinion that sounds suspicious and underhanded to Payne, he doesn't merely glance at her. He frowns, squints and stares directly at her for as long as she speaks. She's sassy, as usual, but the hero helps her find her identity as a compliant mate, as usual. If it isn't John Wayne it's John Payne.
O'Hara's figure is fictional, delightfully so, but Presley O'Bannon was real, and so was the commander of the detachment, William Eaton, whose title was Naval Agent to the Barbary States. The titles matched the uniforms. In fact, the story, glamorized and given a commercial sheen in the Hollywood style of the period, sticks fairly close to historical fact, overlooking the occasional irritating inconsistencies that are found in real life. As in history, Payne hires a hundred or so mercenaries who turn out to be a mixed bag of Arabs and Greeks who don't like each other much.
Situation report. I was never much of a technical writer and realize the observations above are a little entropic so let me summarize. Half way through the movie, John Payne is leading this motley of Arabs, Greek mercenaries, and ten Marines across the sand dunes of north Africa, with the intention of deposing the miserable wretch who is pirating our ships in the Mediterranean. Maureen O'Hara has her eyes on the wealthy Arab leader but Payne doesn't want her along and has forced her to travel with the "dancing girls." Payne and O'Hara hate each other but the discerning viewer knows how it will work out. There are the usual hazards of journeying across the desert -- lack of water, sandstorms, haboobs, intrigues, shifting allegiances. Some nice location shooting, apparently somewhere near Palm Springs. The model work and special effects are quite good too for the period.
The ragtag army finally reaches the sea and gratefully draws supplies from the ships of the US Navy. The plan is to bombard the fort at Derna into submission, then have Payne and his unit charge into the rubble and mop things up. The great battle takes place.
But guess what? The Arabs were a clever bunch. (They invented soap in the Middle Ages, but also algebra, an Arabic word, a dirty trick for which they can never be forgiven.) And here, just as the enemy seems about to lose Derna to the Marines, the Arabs break out thousands of hand grenades based on NUCLEAR FISSION and they blow Payne and his attackers to pieces, the disjecta membra thrown into the sea. And when the Arabs are done ravishing Maureen O'Hara, and event that has left her incandescent with pleasure, she too is flung off a cliff to the waiting Kraken. It's a tragedy, true, but an exceptionally light-hearted one.