On a rainy weekend afternoon, the Film4 channel is normally worth a look. Yesterday's offering was The Thief of Bagdad(sic), 1940.

The film is pretty creaky and as racially dubious as you'd expect for the time. All of the male cast members, with the exception of Sabu (one of the most naturally charismatic screen actors who ever lived) are blacked up and the woman are just left to play white-as-rice Arabian totty. And the dialogue is riddled with that "may the bird of paradise cast jewelled peaches upon your fragrant bosom" type stuff. What's striking is the freedom with which Islamic tradition and Allah are invoked by all and sundry (Favourite line: "Her eyebrows are like the crescent moon of Ramadan..."). Hard to imagine modern Hollywood producing a film featuring an avowedly Islamic hero from the tales of Schehrazade. The forties and fifties saw a raft of feature films and shorts featuring the likes of Abu the Thief, The Poet from Kismet, Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor. Back then, the boogey man was European (In The Thief of Bagdad the magnificent Conrad Veidt plays Jaffar and doesn't even attempt to modulate his teutonic accent.) and so an Arabian milieu, albeit a romaticised one, posed no problems.

Now the climate has shifted, the face of fear is wreathed by beard and turban and even the anodyne version of Aladdin released by Disney in the nineties would be a tough sell today. The irony of yesterday's film was almost painful at points:
"Basrah! How beautiful it looks!"
"How beautiful it smells!"

Hmm. Meanwhile, it now seems certain that the major North American screen acting and writing unions will be calling for strike action in the very near future. This has caused a panic among the big studios and a whole slew of films are now being rushed to completion before the A-list walks. A leaked memo was reproduced in this month's Empire magazine, listing dozens of movies currently up against the clock. Of these, 18% are either clear remakes or at least retellings of stories that have been done before*; 9% are franchise sequels/prequels; 19% are based on existing novels, prose or comics; 6% on televison shows; 4% on toy lines, computer games or theme park attractions; and 56% are entirely new ideas. I know the percentage total is over a hundred, but some scripts tick more than one box. Whatever, that last percentile is crucial and probably a slightly healthier prognosis for original screenwriting than most would imagine. Yet it's among the toy adaptations we find something interesting: Jerry Bruckheimer, of all people!, is trying to get a film based on Prince of Persia off the ground. I don't imagine the game is a particularly sensitive evocation of the Iranian region's ancient history, but there's no getting around the fact that its protagonist is an Arab. We'll see what happens.

*Btw, in the "really not necessary, thanks" department are Fox's remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (cgi Gort?!), Sony's of The Taking of Pelham 123 (whither a modern day Matthau?) and- worst of all- Universal's desecration of their own horror catalogue with new versions of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Wolf Man and the bajillionth riff on Dracula... Ho hum.