utgard14 Venetian Marco Polo (Gary Cooper) travels to China and meets the famed ruler Kublai Khan (George Barbier). While there he learns about all kinds of nifty things like spaghetti, gunpowder, and firecrackers. He also falls in love with Khan's beautiful daughter, Princess Kukachin (Sigrid Gurie). Unfortunately he must deal with the evil machinations of Khan's scheming adviser, Ahmed (Basil Rathbone).Diverting adventure drama with a slightly miscast Cooper having a good time. Rathbone is great as a villain. Ernest Truex is good fun as Polo's comic relief sidekick. Sigrid Gurie is lovely to look at and listen to. Best scene is where Cooper teaches her how to kiss. As a history lesson you could probably wipe with it. As entertainment, it's enjoyable and fun.

bkoganbing Gary Cooper had a most interesting relationship with Sam Goldwyn. He did seven films with Goldwyn and a cursory glance at the titles shows that Goldwyn was constantly giving him better and more suitable material for him. With The Adventures of Marco Polo he could hardly have done worse.How can I say it, Gary Cooper just does not suggest a renaissance Italian Man. Unless they all had that Montana drawl. Contrast his performance here with Tyrone Power in Prince of Foxes or in The Black Rose where he plays an Englishman in the China of Kublai Khan. Power in this part would have made it believable. But Darryl Zanuck wasn't giving Ty Power's services away.To complete the film, cowboy Cooper is given a Smiley Burnette like sidekick in Ernest Truex. The two of them as the history books tell us, go off to the court of Kublai Khan to negotiate a trade agreement for Venetian merchants, particularly the House of Polo.There the real history stops as Cooper gets involved in all kinds of palace intrigue.Here's some of where Sam Goldwyn's casting gets positively zany. George Barbier is Kublai Khan and Goldwyn must have seen Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades where Barbier played King Sancho. Worked for C.B. it'll work for me. Sigrid Gurie was another Scandinavian import, another one trying to be another Greta Garbo. If Anna Sten didn't work, we'll make Sigrid a Scandinavian Mongol Princess. Best of all is Basil Rathbone as Ahmed, his Saracen adviser who plays the part just as if he was playing Guy of Gisborne. Rathbone carried it through however, he must have seen how all around him looked so he could hide in the crowd.H.B. Warner had the year before played the High Lama Chang in Lost Horizon. Here he's a clever fellow who shows Marco Polo this latest thing the Chinese have invented called gunpowder. Actually they'd had it for some time and the west had had it also, a fellow named Roger Bacon had written extensively and experimented even more extensively with the stuff a couple of centuries before. Never mind it took Gary Cooper to see its possibilities.Sam Goldwyn's sets were lavish and the battle scenes at the end very well staged. That it has nothing to do with any history is only a minor criticism, it does not succeed because of the unbelievable plot and incredible casting.

salweir Everyone is miscast: a Caucassian actress born in Brooklyn, herself billed as a "Norwegian beauty" cast as a weak sister Chinese princess; Alan Hale as the western Chinese rebel leader; Gary Cooper as Polo. This is an awful movie. High handed attempt to pass off a third rate piece of junk as entertainment. Historically inaccurate doesn't even begin to describe how bad this movie is -- and I happen to like Gary Cooper. But he looks uncomfortable in this worthless celluloid. This type of film is what makes so many people who are not uncritical admirers of Hollywood criticize its racism, its stereotyping and its insulting of peoples not European.

arieliondotcom If you want good fortune, avoid this one, cookie!! The big disappointment is that it is in b/w. You can put up with almost anything in glorious technicolor, but not this. It is painful to watch and the corny Confucius line is intentional to give a taste of that. From the shame of the lack of genuinely oriental actors (although this can be forgiven to some extent given the range of the conquests of the Khans. For example, the Princess, obviously Swedish/German with light eyes) could have been the conquest of Khan and a foreign woman of a farflung edge of the empire) to the failed attempts at humor, this one is a loser. But the acting is so horrible you really don't want to forgive them anything. Especially the so-called humor like shouting "Marco! Polo!" in the beginning of the film. Laugh riot that. Not.The one redeeming factor of the film is Gary Cooper. If you are a die-hard Gary Cooper fan you will probably watch him in anything so you may be forgiven for watching this.But if you're not a GC addict you should avoid this at all costs or risk having your brain fried worse than fireworks in your ears.