The Thief of Bagdad@100...Brilliance of Douglas Fairbanks

 

 

Floats like a butterfly . . . Fairbanks did the vast majority of his stunts himself.

Fairbanks was such a smart guy, read what he thought about creating sets for the movie:

"A special problem that faced us for The Thief of Bagdad was my desire that a dream city should not look too well anchored on its foundations. It is easy enough to make a thing fantastic and unreal, but I wanted it to seem light in addition. By using a somewhat weird design, by painting trees and branches black even when we had real ones, by the use of light backgrounds instead of the customary dark ones which are thought to bring out the figures more clearly, by confining our colors to gray, gold, silver, black and white for everything except the actual costumes, we obtained an unusual effect; but sets built on the ground will look as if they were.

To get away from this solidity, we painted our buildings darker at the top than at bottom. This seemed to make them less solid and heavy at the bottom. We also built upon a highly polished black floor that had reflections. The vertical line of a house meets the horizontal line of the ground and ends there. Our polished floor reflects the building lines and lifts our city. And this black floor caused considerable extra work. There was endless brushing and polishing week after week."

मी हा १९२४ सालचा जबरदस्त  सिनेमा अजून बघितला नाहीये पण मला हे नाव माहित व्हायचे कारण आम्ही मिरजेत देवल टॉकीज ला बघितलेला १९६९ सालचा दारा सिंग यांचा त्याच नावाचा सिनेमा जो मला अजून थोडा थोडा आठवतो.....