The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales

• The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales
• About
• Get help in the Literature Group

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, film versions.
The cinema has generally been keener on the title than it has on the original storyline from The Arabian Nights . In a wartime adaptation directed by Arthur Lubin (USA, 1944), Ali is a young prince rather than a woodcutter, and the thieves are swashbuckling adventurers rather than brutal murderers. Ali joins their band as a way of hiding from the invading Mongols who have killed his father, the caliph. The story is primarily a peg on which to hang an escapist Technicolor extravaganza; at the same time it nods to the contemporary situation by suggesting that Ali Baba and the thieves offer a parallel to underground resistance movements, and that the cruel, tyrannical Mongols are like Nazis.

Eleven years later (France, 1955) Jacques Becker directed a version, shot partly on location in Morocco, which retains more of the situations from the...

[The entire page is 275 words long]

Oxford University Press Titles

• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology
• The Oxford Dictionary of Economics
• The Oxford Companion to American Literature
• The Oxford Companion to American Military History
• The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature
• The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales
• The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
• The Oxford Dictionary of Plays
• The Oxford Dictionary of Art
• Oxford Dictionary of Sociology
• Oxford Dictionary of World History
• Oxford Dictionary of World Mythology