The Adventures of Hajji Baba - 1954

A young John Derek plays the ambitious barber Hajji Baba in early 1800s Persia, full of grandiose plans for his future—much to the laughter of his customers. He makes a wager with the successful traveling merchant Osman Aga (Thomas Gomez) that he will achieve great things (by the end we will see Osman as rich, then destitute, then rich all over again). Soon, circumstances conspire to put the barber in a position where he must either live up to his bold promises—or, well, he's dead.

Elaine Stewart, as Princess Fawzia, is the daughter of the local ruler—she's mean-tempered, spoiled, naive, and completely unaware of this. She has fallen in love with a man she barely knows: the ruthless and sly ruler of another city, portrayed by Paul Picerni. Against her father's protests, she escapes her city and sets off across the desert. When disaster strikes, she is forced to rely on the help of Hajji Baba, who has also landed himself in trouble outside the city walls. Despite constant bickering, the two join forces and journey together toward the distant city where the man Princess Fawzia believes she loves awaits with adoration for her and a rich reward for the helpful Hajji.

This may sound like a typical Hollywood "Arabian nights" kind of adventure with a damsel in distress and a fast-acting young hero as her saviour, but that's only partially true in The Adventures of Hajji Baba. The pair of bickering young travellers find themselves captured by a roving all-woman band of warriors led by an escaped slave named Banah (Amanda Blake) and the two are looking at prompt execution, or, at best, being sold into slavery. The Princess gets a brutal awakening when she calls upon one of the warrior band as a character reference, one of them having been a servant at her palace in the past, only to hear the judgement of her former underling: the Princess is childish, selfish, cruel and without value.

The Adventures of Hajji Baba is a strangely forgotten "epic" which has all of the better qualities of an early 50's color Cinemascope adventure. The cast itself is perfectly able to carry the threat of danger and the lightheartedness of the tale's humor without mixing them up and ending in camp. Derek's Hajji is as earnest and innovative as he has to be to survive, and does a nice modulation between disdaining the princess he is helping and also becoming more and more, shall we say, fond of the short-tempered rich girl. Elaine Stewart is a princess that has to come to her senses about how men (and herself) really are in order to get herself out of a difficult spot with Paul Picerni's very dangerous Prince Nurel-Din. She discovers that he is continuously collecting women and hatching plots and has no scruples about lying or having people assassinated if they annoy him.

Amanda Blake's warrior leader isn't Robin Hood, she is ruthless and her band is lethal (they ride into battle standing up on their horses with slings, knocking opposing forces off their horses with well-aimed stones) but we can see part of the group's mercilessness is because they are surrounded by even more brutal forces; they're a band made up mostly of escaped slaves; it's tough living at their hidden, rocky hide-out (but not so tough everyone doesn't look well-keptand wearing clean clothing. Not the case for their executed prisoners, all men, who are left hanging up over the rocks as carrion for birds). But, in The Adventures of Hajji Baba, everybody we like (and we like the dangerous band of renegade lady bandits) improves their character as things moves along, and Prince Nurel-Din then has to face the consequences of being a very bad man.

The direction by Don Weis is good, and there are short little bits that remind me of better, more serious films, such as when Derek's Hajji is being abandoned into the empty desert, standing still with an incredulous expression on his face (after all, he's so clever he is always getting himself out of jams, but not this time), and Weis's camera moves away from him as the desert increases in size around the lone figure standing next to a dead body. Ironically, the corpse becomes the tool for clever Hajji's rescue in this equally clever script by Richard Collins.

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Original Page June 13, 2025