The Garden of Allah (film)
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The Garden of Allah is a 1936 David O. Selznick film starring Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer, directed by Richard Boleslawski. The screenplay was written by William P. Lipscomb and Lynn Riggs, based on the book by Robert S. Hichens. The score is by Max Steiner. 79 minutes.
This melancholy romp through the desert is stunningly photographed and lushly decorated and costumed, garnering an honorary academy award for cinematography. Boyer, playing a Trappist monk on the lam (Boris Androvski), wants to live and love, after feeling, well, trapped in the order. Yet he is the only one who knows the secret recipe of the monastery's famous liqueur, not to mention that his marriage to the church is a vow unto death. Meanwhile, Dietrich, as heiress Domini Enfilden, is newy freed from her own prison of caring for her just deceased father and also seeks the frisson of the North African desert to nuture her soul (actually, Yuma, Arizona), travelling on a comically rendered model steamship.
They inevitably meet, and strike up sparks that, while not exactly visible to the viewer, are attested to in speeches with a wooden fervor. Perhaps marriage will cure their separate sadnesses? This is duly, if reluctantly, arranged by the local priest (odd, in this Muslim land), after which the newlyweds are whisked off in a proposterous camel-mounted billow of fabric into the scorching desert- a trip that the local sand-diviner has inconveniently forecast will come to a bad end.
And so it does, in the form of straggling legionnaires who pant into camp, only to recognise the liqueur, and the man, as the Trappists they are. Truth must out, and thence to a heart-wrenching conclusion, at least for the presumed lovers. Excellent turns by Basil Rathbone, Vincent Price, and especially Joseph Schildkraut as Dietrich's sidekick Batouch relieve the obscurity of the plot and the rather haughty treatment of a large cast of "locals". The beautiful desert color and cinematography presage what was to come in Lawrence of Arabia (film).
