The Desert Song (1943 film)

The Desert Song
Directed by Robert Florey
Produced by Robert Buckner
Written by Robert Buckner
Oscar Hammerstein II
Otto A. Harbach
Frank Mandel
Laurence Schwab
Starring Dennis Morgan
Irene Manning
Bruce Cabot
Cinematography Bert Glennon
Edited by Frank Magee
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release dates
  • December 17, 1943 (1943-12-17)
Running time
 90 minutes
Country United States
Language English

The Desert Song is a 1943 American musical film. It was directed by Robert Florey and starred Dennis Morgan, Irene Manning and Bruce Cabot.[1] It is based on the 1926 operetta with music by Sigmund Romberg. It was nominated an Academy Award for Best Art Direction (Charles Novi, Jack McConaghy).

This film version of the operetta was, like the 1929 film version, almost never seen after its original release. Copies were hard to come by. In 2014, it was released on DVD by Warner Brothers [2]

Technically the film is more sophisticated than the earlier film due to its large budget and advances in both sound and color. It tries to make the operetta topical in terms of World War II, by having the outlaw hero with a dual identity fight the Nazis as well as Arabs. As in the 1953 film, the hero's name is changed to El Khobar, rather than the Red Shadow.

The 1943 Desert Song is perhaps the only instance in which a stage operetta of the 1920s has been updated to reflect topical concerns of the 1940s. In fact, the U.S. United States Office of War Information held up release of the film for a year due to the shifting political position of France. It did well at the box office nonetheless.[3]

This is the first film version of The Desert Song to be made in full three-strip Technicolor.

Cast

References

  1. ↑ "NY Times: The Desert Song". NY Times. Retrieved December 19, 2008.
  2. ↑ "The Desert Song (1944) -". www.Shop.WarnerArchive.com. Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  3. ↑ You Must Remember This: the Warner Brothers story, Richard Schickel and George Perry, pg. 161
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