TheLittleSongbird Seeing it for the first time on Youtube recently, 'Ali Baba Goes to Town' made for an hour and a half of good fun entertainment and an interesting curiosity. Not a great film, but a pretty good one.The story is a bit thin and silly, kept afloat by the dialogue, some efficient pacing and the songs but more an excuse to string along musical numbers and comedy. The cast are a mixed bag. Eddie Cantor enjoys himself thoroughly and is enormous fun, while Roland Young is a suitably urbane sultan. On the other hand, Louise Hovick (aka Gypsy Rose Lee) overdoes it and, despite singing gloriously, Tony Martin is very wooden.However, 'Ali Baba Goes to Town' looks good, with pleasing photography, costume and set design while the special effects still hold up as above decent. The script is funny and cleverly written, while the energy has much exuberance so the film never feels dull.A big standout here is the songs, which are marvellous. The standouts being "Swing is Here to Sway", "Twilight in Turkey" and "Vote for Honest Abe".Overall, a fun curiosity if not great. 7/10 Bethany Cox

drednm Bright musical comedy with Eddie Cantor as a hobo who wanders onto a movie set and gets hired as an extra. He falls asleep and dreams he's back in ancient Bagdad.In ancient Bagdad he's taken as a relative of Ali Baba and gets involved in the palace intrigue where the Sultana (Gypsy Rose Lee as Louise Hovick) and her allies are plotting to overthrow the Sultan (Roland Young). Cantor cracks an endless stream of one-liners about Roosevelt's "New Deal," which of course no one understands. The plot then has Cantor running for president against the Sultan. But it's all a dream.The two show stoppers are the extended "Swing Is Here to Sway" with Cantor joined by dancer Jeni Le Gon and the fabulous Peters Sisters, and the "Twilight in Turkey" number by Raymond Scott and Quintet and danced by the Pearl Twins. Great stuff.Co-stars include Tony Martin, June Lang, John Carradine, Virginia Field, Alan Dinehart, Stanley Fields, Warren Hymer, and Lynn Bari as a harem girl. The Peters Sisters, Mattye, Anne, and Virginia, just about steal the show from Cantor, who discovered them at a local nightclub and put them right in his movie.One of Cantor's best.

vincentlynch-moonoi If I could give this film two different ratings, I would. If I were watching this in 1937 I'd rate it highly because the script is really quite clever. But, for someone watching this today, if they don't have a decent knowledge base about the politics and life of the Great Depression, many of the jokes will go right over their heads. So, my 1937 rating is a 7. My 2011 rating is a 5.As another reviewer here put it very well, "Eddie Cantor is in Iraq...to bring the New Deal to the old caliphate." That's why understanding jokes about FDR and the Republicans at that time is essential in watching this film.Aside from Cantor, the performances here are rather meek. Tony Martin unimpressively plays a good guy on the side of freedom. Bland Roland Young all too calmly plays the sultan. Though her performance is tenuous, it's interesting seeing Gypsy Rose Lee (with all her clothes on) playing a member of the royal family.I watched this on a retrospective TCM was doing about how Arabs have been treated poorly on the silver screen. While I admit that they weren't portrayed positively in this film, my impression is that it wasn't done with any malice at all. The royals and locals here were treated much the same as Bing Crosby treated the royals and locals in "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court"...and they were all White.The average person today probably wouldn't enjoy this film. But Eddie Cantor is a show business legend, and this performance is in his heyday, and is worth watching for that reason. So, I'll give the film its rating for 1937 -- a 7.

Karen Green (klg19) In his second "back to the past" dream film (four years after "Roman Scandals"), Eddie Cantor skewered FDR and the New Deal in this satiric look at the Arabian Nights. Cantor and screenwriter Gene Fowler wanted to do a take on "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," with the difference that, as much as they poked fun at FDR's policies and oratory, the New Deal policies that Cantor institutes in Baghdad don't backfire quite the same way as the Yankee's did at King Arthur's court.Hobo Aloysius Babson, a film fan and autograph hound, stumbles onto an Arabian Nights film set and gets made an extra. A miscalculation on his medicine sends him into a dream, however, and he finds himself at the court of the Sultan of Baghdad. Giving his name as "Al Babson," they assume he's the son of Ali Baba, and after surviving an assassination attempt made with his stunt knife, he's made an adviser to the king.The film is full of Cantor's trademark humor, singing and dancing, and the obligatory rueful reference to Cantor's family full of daughters. A troupe of African musicians--who speak no language but Cab Calloway's--provides a terrific swing number (unhappily, Cantor performs it in blackface), and Cantor and Tony Martin deliver a catchy number, "Vote for Honest Abe," that works as a campaign song for Sultan Abdullah.The production cost over a million dollars, not a little of which went to create an impressive flying carpet effect. Sadly, two of the crew were killed when the carpet fell on them, and Cantor himself got so knocked about and bruised in the scenes on the carpet that he was elected an honorary member of the Hollywood Stunt Men.The film ends with Al Babson attending a film premiere in which he sees Eddie Cantor (another common Cantor touch), and a host of stars such as Victor McLaglan and Shirley Temple are also seen there (understandably: the premiere was for "Wee Willie Winkie").All in all, the film is great fun, with fast-paced and topical dialogue and lots of great sight gags (a "W.P.A. Filling Station" for watering local camels). It's very much of its time, so if you're at all familiar with the New Deal era, it will be an entertaining hour and a half.