Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

The grandest production of Douglas Fairbanks’ career, The Thief of Bagdad (1924) is first and foremost a love story. It is also one of the greatest spectacles of the silent era. The film’s legendary production design is a striking part of this Arabian Nights fantasy.

Fairbanks is a street thief who falls in love with a princess who is about to marry. He impersonates a prince to gain access to the princess and becomes involved in a competition for her hand in marriage. Faced with three unsavory royal suitors, the princess falls for the thief in his disguise.

Character actor Sojin Kamiyama makes an excellent villain as Khan, the Mongol prince, who would rather steal the princess’ heart than win it. Anna May Wong is the young handmaiden who is secretly in league with Khan. And Snitz Edwards lends able comedic support as the thief’s cohort. One of the major stars of the production is William Cameron Menzies, whose production design is stunning.

— Carl Bennett

This Blu-ray Disc edition has been mastered from a new restoration conflated from 2K high-definition scans of two 35mm negatives, which incorporates the color-tinting and color-tones of the original release prints. It appears that some image-stabilization and noise reduction has been successfully applied to the digital video master.

The film is accompanied by the music score composed by Carl Davis, who conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra, incorporating themes by Rimsky-Korsakov.

The supplementary material includes: audio commentary by film historian Jeffrey Vance; a featurette on the production of the film, with production photographs and intertitles accompanied by theatre pipe organ music (17 minutes); and a modern trailer for this Cohen edition (2 minutes).

The combination of a high-resolution scan with the music score by Davis makes this Blu-ray Disc our recommended home video edition of The Thief of Bagdad.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

The film is accompanied by the music score composed by Carl Davis, who conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra, incorporating themes by Rimsky-Korsakov.

The supplementary material includes: audio commentary by film historian Jeffrey Vance; a featurette on the production of the film, with production photographs and intertitles accompanied by theatre pipe organ music (17 minutes); and an insert booklet with writings on the film.

Sight unseen, we recommend this edition for European collectors. North American collectors will need a region-free Blu-ray Disc player to view this edition.

United Kingdom: Click the logomark to purchase this Region B Blu-ray Disc / Region 2 PAL DVD edition from Amazon.co.uk.

The film is accompanied by the music score composed by Carl Davis, who conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra, incorporating themes by Rimsky-Korsakov.

The disc features audio commentary by film historian Jeffrey Vance, and a featurette with production photographs.

While we have not viewed this DVD edition, we have reviewed the BD edition noted above, and this is likely to be the best DVD home video edition of the film currently available.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

This DVD edition of Fairbanks’ fantasy masterpiece has been mastered from archival 35mm print materials. The results are quite good with some light dust, speckling, schmutz, scuffing, processing defects, mild frame jitters and other print flaws.

The film is accompanied by a stereo music score based on the 1924 cue sheets and performed by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. An excellent job by Rodney Sauer and his team.

The disc also features a supplementary section that includes: outtakes from the film (19 minutes); an introduction by Orson Welles from The Silent Years television series (5 minutes); exerpts from Méliès’ Arabian Nights and Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924); excerpts from the original souvenir program; and notes by Rodney Sauer on the music score.

The overall quality of this DVD home video edition is very-good and it remains quite collectable.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

This early DVD edition shows that good mastering can take one a long way. The full-frame digital video transfer was prepared for laserdisc release in 1996 by home video producer David Shepard from a 35mm preservation negative. While the older transfer still looks good on today’s HD equipment, it is also a little hot in its highlights.

The musical accompaniment was arranged from the original 1924 music cue sheets and performed in 1975 by Gaylord Carter on a Wurlitzer theater pipe organ, and is presented here in mono sound. Carter always turned in an exciting performance, capturing the essence of musical accompaniment in silent era theaters.

Not bad, for an older edition of The Thief of Bagdad on a low bit-rate, first-generation DVD. But, beware, several readers have noted that a portion of the pivotal rose bush scene is missing from this edition.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

The film is likely to be accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting recordings.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

This budget DVD edition of The Thief of Bagdad has been transferred from a Blackhawk Films 16mm reduction print and, therefore, has many of the shortcomings of that older print. The picture is slightly contrasty, with loss of detail in highlight areas. The print used for the transfer has some minor emulsion damage, several sections of exposure fluctuations throughout, splices, long vertical scratches, dust, and frame jitters. The original print has cropped the original print framing slightly, and the video transfer has not been windowboxed, with the result that some of the film’s intertitles with be cropped to the point of difficult reading on some televisions.

The mono audio is lifted directly from the 16mm print soundtrack, an orchestral soundtrack with (sometimes silly) sound effects. The music is serviceable, but hardly pleasing.

This disc should not be your first experience of The Thief of Bagdad, since the film has survived in very good to excellent 35mm prints that have been utilized for other home video editions (notably the out-of-print HBO Video laserdisc and VHS editions). Sight unseen, we feel that the earlier Image DVD edition has to be far better than this Alpha Video edition, and we recommend the Image disc until a better DVD edition is published.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
United Kingdom: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.co.uk. Support Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is also available directly from . . .

This DVD edition has been mastered from a good 16mm reduction print, greyed-out in its tonal range and flecked with a typical amount of speckling and dust, but with a few print tears, long vertical scratches, and some serious emulsion scrapes. The image detail is very soft, almost to the point of distraction.

The video transfer runs at sound speed — which is a bit too fast — because the film is accompanied by a music score, with sound effects, from the monaural optical soundtrack of the source print. All of which begs the question why St. Clair Vision thinks that 5.1 surround sound is justified, other than to dupe an unknowing consumer into thinking they are getting a disc of value. Don’t bother.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

Other silent era ANNA MAY WONG films available on home video.