blanche-2 I grew up listening to Gordon MacRae sing The Desert Song on an album that also featured him in the musical Roberta. The soprano in both cases was Lucille Norman, and both recordings were wonderful. So it was with great interest that I watched "The Desert Song."Having myself appeared in "The New Moon," I can tell you that on stage, these operettas only work if done tongue in cheek. If one were filming them for today's audiences, I suspect they would have to be done that way as well.However, for beautiful music, "The Desert Song" is operetta at its best. The story is not unfamiliar -- just think Superman or Zorro. Shiek Yousseff (Raymond Massey) secretly plots to overthrow the French, all the while pretending to be their friend. Opposing him are the Riffs and their leader, El Khobar. El Khobar is in reality Professor Paul Bonnard who is making a study of the desert. The Riffs' attacks on supply trains keep the villages in food. General Birabeau (Ray Collins) of the French Foreign Legion arrives to investigate, and his daughter Margot (Kathryn Grayson) accompanies him. He hires Bonnard to tutor her. Margot, meanwhile, has eyes for a Legionnaire captain, Claud Fontaine (Steve Cochran). El Khobar kidnaps Margot until he can convince her that Yousseff is not on the side of the French, but Yousseff's men attack the camp and take Margot prisoner. This is different from the actual operetta, in which Birabeau has a son, not a daughter; his son, Pierre, is actually the Riff leader The Red Shadow. In the operetta, Margot is engaged to Claud Fontaine, but the Red Shadow is in love with her. Gordon MacRae and Kathryn Grayson lend their beautiful voices to songs such as "The Desert Song," "One Alone," and "Romance." Grayson is not quite bubbly enough as the flirty Margot. I can't believe that with that size voice, she sang Butterfly on an opera stage, but I guess she did. It's a pretty production, with Dick Wesson, playing a reporter, providing some comic relief. In the operetta he has a girlfriend, Susan.This is the kind of movie where you enjoy the music and the singing. Well worth watching.

edwagreen What saves this movie is the wonderful singing done by Gordon MacRae and Kathryn Grayson. This movie really was something different for these general movie musical stars. They actually played in a film that involved intrigue.Usual evil player, Steve Cochran, is given little to do in the role of a nice guy, most unusual for him. Even in the Virginia Mayo-Danny Kaye films, Cochran got better parts as gangsters.Raymond Massey, who by this time had fallen into supporting roles, is evil as ever as the Arab to watch. His game of blaming other Arab factions in the movie worked only for a while.Grayson and MacRae sing the title song with great beauty.Note an interesting part by Robert Conrad and the guy who played Edward G. Robinson's brother in "The Ten Commandments," is as wicked as ever here.

MARIO GAUCI The third (and most popular) film version of the Oscar Hammerstein II-Sigmund Romberg operetta features an eclectic assembly of handsome singing stars (Gordon MacRae and Kathryn Grayson) and reliable character actors (Raymond Massey, Steve Cochran, Ray Collins and William Conrad). While I cannot say that the song score was particularly memorable in itself, the film is made tolerable enough by its straight "Arabian Nights" trappings: a mysterious avenger (MacRae, of course, posing by day as a mild-mannered anthropologist) takes on the might of a tyrannical Sheik (Massey) and the French Foreign Legion (commandeered by Cochran and Collins) while romancing the latter's rebellious daughter (Grayson). Also on hand to round up the colorful cast of characters are Dick Wesson as an indomitable reporter successfully providing the expected comic relief, Allyn Ann McLerie as the requisite dancer-temptress with a proverbial heart of gold and Frank DeKova as a typically hot-headed (and ultimately duplicitous) desert rebel.

weezeralfalfa I recently found a DVD source for this forgotten gem. Wow! It's beyond me why reviews of the major film roles of Kathryn Grayson and Gordon MacRae invariable ignore this unique operetta. Gordon sandwiched this film in between his early film years, mostly costarring Doris Day, and his peak career period, staring in the film versions of "Oklahoma" and "Carousel". Kathryn was nearing the end of her Hollywood career, starring in the much better known "Kiss Me Kate", filmed the same year. To my mind, Kathryn was just about the classiest woman Hollywood ever featured. She had it all: classic beauty, a great operatic voice and very flirty looks at the men, yet prim and proper. She gets ample opportunity to display all these qualities in this film. Unfortunately, her real life romantic relationships seem to have been a bit of a mess. Gordon does a great job playing starchy, if handsome, French anthropologist Paul Bonnard, who doubles as El Khobar, the dashing leader of a band Riff Berbers in their fight against the French legionnaires and an evil sheik, played by veteran character actor Raymond Massey. This dual personality does strongly remind us of the Clark Kent-Superman duality in the 1950s TV series. True, it does strain credulity that Gordon, as a rather thinly disguised El Khobar, could have avoided recognition by Kathryn and others as being the professor. Steve Cochran makes a dashing-looking Captain Fontaine whom Kathryn, as the newly arrived daughter of General Birabeau, immediately falls for. Eventually, she transfers her chief affection to Gordon in his El Khobar incarnation, being bored by his persona, the professor, her private tutor. Both Kathryn and Gordon sing quite a few solo numbers as well as several duets. Allyn Ann McLeries is fine in her supporting role as Azuri, a sensuous blue-eyed Riff dancing girl, presently employed in the evil sheik's palace, but in love with El Khobar, who inexplicably rebuffs her advances. Having recently seen her in the supporting role in "Calamity Jane", filmed the same year, I was surprised how well she could be made to look and dance like a real knockout Berber temptress. Dick Wesson, as the goofy nosy American reporter, provides some comic relief from time to time.By way of historical background, the Riffian Berbers mainly inhabited the Rif mountains, which are a Moroccoan coastal range near Gibralter. Thus, the depiction of the Riffs as galloping over endless sand dunes is presumably quite inaccurate. The tribal peoples of the Rif Mountains declared their independence from Spanish Morocco in 1921, under the leadership of Abd el-Krim. Unlike his predecessors, he was able to suppress the usual intratribal fighting that had defeated previous attempts to oust the Spanish. The Spanish were unable to defeat the Riff, but when the French entered the conflict, they brought overwhelming forces and technology that eventually defeated them.According to another reviewer, the character El Khobar is very loosely based on the life of the German Josef Klems, who joined the French army and spent some years fighting the tribesmen in Morocco. However, the French couldn't forget that he was a German. One day, he beat up an officer reminding him of this, and he fled to the tribal people. They spared him and eventually he was made a leader of raids and given two wives. He sometimes dressed up in his French uniform and thus was able to gain entrance to French posts around dusk, where he would steal weapons and ammunition while the men were at dinner. ..An Italian adventure film, "Man of Legend", made in 1971, is also loosely based on his life. A review said it is a good film, but not presently available.