Creating Crusoe: A Raft of Derivative Sources of Defoe’s Classic Tale

Posted on December 26, 2018December 22, 2022 by E Curb Nottus

Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Natural Environment, Popular Culture

A common retort to people purporting to be in a unique situation of any kind is the phrase, usually emphatically stated, “you’re not Robinson Crusoe!” – ie, (not) alone. The phrase references probably the best-known solitary and physically isolated character in English literature, a shipwrecked voyager stuck seemingly alone on a deserted island in some unidentified expanse of the great oceans. Daniel Defoe’s classic 18th century novel Robinson Crusoe.

A search for the genesis of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, like the story’s narrative itself, has taken scholars far and wide. Geographically, this has included both the South Pacific and the South Atlantic Oceans, the Caribbean and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The search has also led, through the work of biographers, to a study of DeFoe’s own life experiences for sources of inspiration for the work of fiction.

Alexander Selkirk’s adventures
For the great bulk of the (almost exactly) 300 years since Robinson Crusoe was first published, the conventional wisdom has been to attribute the book’s origin to the real life experiences of Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was a Scottish privateer who fell out with his captain and crewmates on a voyage and was voluntarily marooned on an uninhibited island for a bit over four years. When Robinson Crusoe was published less than a decade later, many made a clear link between it and the well-publicised accounts of Selkirk’s episode of being a solitary castaway. Moreover, some people thought that Defoe’s hero must have been a real person and that the book was a travelogue of actual events [‘Robinson Crusoe’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Selkirk’s Island 🔽

Some commentators today still hold that Selkirk was the true inspiration for Defoe’s most famous fictional protagonist [‘The Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Bruce Selcraig), Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005, www.smithsonianmag.com; ‘Scientists Research the Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Marco Evers), Spiegel Online, 02-VI-2009, www.spiegel.de]. A perception that was given some added credence by the Chilean government. With an eye to the tourist potential spin-off, Chile renamed Más-a-Tierra, the small island in the South Pacific which had been Selkirk’s enforced home for over four years, Robinson Crusoe Island.

Defoe’s ‘Crusoe’ cf. Selkirk
Most literary critics these days however accept that Selkirk’s epic misadventure was “just one of many survival narratives that Defoe knew about” (by no means the major one)✲. Becky Little has listed some of the key differences between Defoe’s story and the accounts of Selkirk…Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked, whereas Selkirk asked to be cast on shore; Crusoe is a plantation owner with a colonising mentality who adapts the island to his own world, while Selkirk was effectively a “glorified pirate” who “goes native”; Crusoe’s Island, as Robinson was to discover in time, was inhabited, whereas Más-a-Tierra was completely uninhabited; Crusoe was stuck on his island for 28 long years compared to a shade over four years that Selkirk had to endure [‘Debunking the Myth of the “Real” Robinson Crusoe’, (Becky Little), National Geographic, (28-Sept-2016), www.nationalgeographic.com].

Aside from Selkirk’s story, Defoe who read widely and voraciously would have drawn on other, existing accounts of shipwreck and survival – this includes a work by 12th century Arab Andalusian writer Ibn Tufail, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, both a philosophical treatise and the first novel to depict a desert island castaway, and the story of Pedro Luis Serrano (Maestre Joan)♉, a 16th century Spanish sailor thought to have been marooned on a small Caribbean Island for seven or eight years [‘RC’, Wikipedia, loc.cit.]❇.

Robert Knox, a prototype for Crusoe?
One of the major influences on Robinson Crusoe is sea captain Robert Knox’s experience of prolonged confinement after his British East India Company ship was forced aground on the island of Ceylon (published in 1681 as An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon). Katherine Frank in her book Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, has pointed to the parallels between Defoe and Knox. Knox’s Island confinement consumes some 20 years, comparable to the 28 years Crusoe is marooned on his remote island. Both Crusoe (in the book) and Knox (in real life) are unable to secure the full patrimony (inheritence) entitled them upon their return. Both are engaged in slave-trading activities at different times [Katherine Frank, Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, (2011)].

The derivative Defoe
Frank describes Defoe as a “congenital plagiarist” who freely borrowed material and ideas from numerous sources for Robinson Crusoe. Among the literary works mined by Defoe are Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. He also relied upon the books of voyages by contemporary explorers such as William Dampier and Woodes Rogers. And of course there was the borrowings from published accounts of real castaways and their ordeals – in addition to Serrano, Selkirk and Knox, Defoe drew upon the accounts of Fernando Lopez on St Helena in the South Atlantic and Henry Pitman’s stranding on Tortuga, et al [ibid.].

‘Robinson Crusoe’, allegory of incarceration
Frank also draws on biographical aspects of Defoe’s life that can be reflected in the famous novel. On two separate occasions Defoe was imprisoned for failure to settle his (very considerable) debts (the first saw him detained in the Fleet and the King’s Bench Prisons and on a subsequent occasion in notorious Newgate). DeFoe’s journal tells us how profoundly affected he was by imprisonment. Frank invokes the symbolism of being “shipwreck’d by land”, analogising the author’s mandatory detention with the catastrophe of being tossed about in a storm and helplessly cast adrift on a desert island, and concludes that “Robinson Crusoe clearly had its autobiographical genesis in Defoe’s bankruptcies and incarceration” [ibid.].

PostScript: a legion of imitators, the Robinsade
As plentiful as were Daniel Defoe’ sources of inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, the novel has continued to this day to capture the imagination of countless writers, film directors and TV producers. Seemingly ubiquitous, it has inspired the creation of a genre of writing, “survivalist fiction”, and even spawned a literary sub-genre known as the Robinsonade. These works include novels as disparate as Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies and JM Coetzee’s Foe, filmic representations of the novel by Luis Buñuel and modernised updates of the story such as Cast Away, plus the television series Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island. The form of the Robinsonade has also extended to a Science Fiction offshoot with Sci-Fi Robinsonades (movies: Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Martian; fiction: The Survivors (Tom Godwin), Concrete Island (JG Ballard)). Robinson Crusoe has proved to be particularly fecund in the world of reality television, inspiring a host of “real life”(sic) programs with titles like Lost! and Survivor that say it all! As Katherine Frank commented, “Crusoe hasn’t just survived, he has thrived, flourished and proliferated”.

﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎
✲ eg, the scholarly consensus tends to the view that no single, real life ‘Crusoe’ existed, the character was an amalgam of “all the buccaneer survival stories” [AD Lambert, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, (2016)]
♉ after Robinson Crusoe was published Serrano became known as the “Spanish Crusoe”
❇ Defoe got the idea for Crusoe’s familiar goatskin clothing from reading about another exile, John Segar, on St Helena

Remembrances of a Juvenile Bookworm: Old Street Directories I have had the Pleasure of … (Part 1)

Posted on July 7, 2018July 5, 2020 by funambulator@live.com

Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Literary & Linguistics, Local history, Memorabilia, Social History, Society & Culture

I had lots of old books when I was a kid growing up, but maybe only one or two books that would possibly generate the curiosity of an antiquarian✲. One of these books was given to me by my mother when I was about ten or eleven…a most unwise move on her part as it transpired.

The humble but rarely spotted 1922 street directory
This book was the Sydney street directory for the year 1922, to give it it’s correct and full title, Wilson’s Authentic Director, Sydney and Suburbs 1922. This small but squat little publication (5½” x 4½”, 735pp), the original owner of which was almost certainly my carpenter-builder maternal grandfather (an early owner of a motor vehicle I believe), came into my hands in something approaching pristine condition, notwithstanding that the directory was then already more than 40 years old!

Today although I still possess it, it is an almost unrecognisable shadow of its once immaculate state! As my juvenility slowly gave way to adolescence I managed to write (things entirely unrelated to Sydney street maps), scribble and doodle on its quasi-virginal pages. Equally as bad, I haphazardly tossed the book around with such careless abandon over the decades that the front cover (a orangey-brown hard cover) became separated from the spine and eventually disappeared forever. Of course if cornered I could sheet home part of the blame for my repeated if unintended acts of vandalism to my parents who showed such egregiously bad judgement in trusting such a historically valuable tome to a ten-year-old Visigoth in the first place! But ultimately mine was the hand that caused the damage…I suppose if I was scratching round to find any compensating factors, I might say that at the very least no one can accuse me of neglecting my parent’s gift. Far from it! As a “child-distractor” Wilson’s Street Director performed yeoman’s service! I certainly made extensive, if not good, use of it.

The directory maps
The maps of each area of Sydney are neatly and clearly drawn by hand, but lack the computerised preciseness and uniformity of a map today…the cartographers in an effort to make the street names stand out by using large, bold type, have the effect of some disproportionality in the maps…streets look a bit out of alignment with each other (refer also to Eastwood below). Moreover, a critical flaw of the maps is the absence of a distance guide.

Curiously there are some variances in the kinds of type-face used in different maps, some use a Gothic font in contrast to the classic style. ◀ The Redfern-Darlington map at left differs from the type used in most maps. On a few seldom occasions maps make reference to the traditional, nineteenth century British land concept of parishes (eg, the Parish of Gordon)…this seems extraneous as the maps and the book largely follow a division by municipalities.

Very many of the street names that were current then survive to this day, although with some surprising little twists – the Pacific Highway, the seminal road leading north from the harbour bridge out of Sydney, was then called Gordon or Lane Cove Road. After Wahroonga it becomes Peat’s Ridge Road. Church Street, Parramatta, traditional haunt of car yards, was at the time alternately called Sydney Road.
Similarly Liverpool Road, starting from Parramatta Road, bears the alternative name “Great Southern Road” on the map (now the Hume Highway). The Princes Highway, the longest road in South-east Australia, is not to be seen! Curiously some suburbs or parts of suburbs are not shown on the maps at all!

The suburb descriptors
One of the most interesting parts of the directory are the brief summaries of individual suburbs. Newtown is described as “thickly populated suburb adjoining the city” (well, no change here!), but its “numerous works and factories” have made way for the suburb’s relatively recent gentrification of modern living spaces☸. St Peters, just to Newtown’s south, is noted in the directory as being “for years the chief brick-making centre for the city” (these days the remaining, redundant kilns and chimneys are a historical curio within the undulating, expansive Sydney Park). Balmain, aside from its “fine public buildings” is “noteworthy as being the location of the deepest coal shaft in the Southern World – 3000 ft” (Balmain Colliery, corner of Birchgrove Rd and Water St, Birchgrove; an exclusive residential estate, Hopetoun Quays, today sits atop the former mine).

The map on page 223 details inner city Darlington (which in 1922 included the locale “Golden Grove”), then as now a suburb most approximate to the University of Sydney…the map shows that the grounds of the University had not at that time encroached onto the eastern side of City Road. The directory describes Darlington as “essentially a workers’ suburb, and being in close proximity to the City, is favoured by workers, who chiefly preside therein”.

Botany and Mascot are old adjoining suburbs in South Sydney. Map 151 (of Botany) and Map 405 (of Mascot) both document the existence at that time of Ascot Racecourse in Mascot…it was located on land adjacent to Botany Bay that now forms part of Sydney Airport⌽. Drummoyne is “a picturesque suburb which has made rapid strides since the tram was opened in 1902”.

Killara on Sydney’s leafy North Shore earns itself a stellar wrap that would make the burghers of the suburb today glow with pride: “(Killara) may justly claim to be both attractive and select. There are many substantial residences, the homes of the well-to-do citizen, and altogether the dwellings are of a superior class” (but not entirely exclusive because prestigious Hunters Hill also had “well-to-do citizens”).

Not to be outdone by the North Shore, the Eastern Suburbs gets even more of a ringing endorsement…the directory goes overboard with Vaucluse, and especially Watson’s Bay, lavishly portrayed as a “romantic looking and historical region, (standing) perhaps highest on the list of Australian ‘beauty spots’ “. Waxing lyrical, the writer ends with a frenzy of capitalisation extolling “the FORTIFICATIONS, LIGHTHOUSES, LIFEBOAT, SIGNAL STATION, and the WORLD-FAMED GAP, near the scene of the wreck of the ill-fated Dunbar” (a disastrous shipwreck occurring off South Head in 1857).

Strathfield, seven miles west of the GPO, was lauded for its “numerous magnificent and substantially built dwellings (today we wouldn’t hold back, we’d simply say ‘mansions’), the homes of the wealthy citizen”. Strathfield’s maps include the locale of ‘Druitt Town’, now called South Strathfield. The map on page 583 includes the less salubrious side of the municipality (the Government Abattoirs and Rookwood Necropolis), a striking contrast with the world of Strathfield’s croquet-playing set.

On the other side of Parramatta River, Ryde (which in 1922 encompassed present-day West Ryde, North Ryde and Macquarie Park) is described as a “famous fruit-growing district on the Parramatta River”. The present location of Macquarie University in the northern reaches of the Eastwood district (set on generous acreage between Marsfield and North Ryde) was in earlier days the site of largely Italian market gardens and (citrus) orchards, interspersed incongruously with a greyhound racing track. An interesting feature shows a preponderance of street names around the present site of the campus with a martial theme – named after overseas battles (or campaigns) including Balaclava, Waterloo, Crimea, Culloden, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Sebastopol, Khartoum. When Talavera Rd was added later, this brought the number of streets commemorating the Crimean War alone to four.

Mosman, still today a suburb whose affluence makes real estate agents salivate at the prospect of dollar symbols followed by multiple zeros, was ever thus the sought-after destination for the cashed-up aspirational denizen…”(a thriving suburb) situated on a charming arm of Port Jackson…on the abrupt sides nestle red-tiled villas in many quaint styles of architecture…but a few years since the tramway rendered its beauties easily accessible to city men”, etc.⊡

Freshwater (on the Northern Beaches) is depicted as being a “pleasant one-half mile walk” from the Brookvale tram stop at Curl Curl, (comprising) “permanent camps and excellent surf-bathing”. Similarly, close-by Dee Why, reflecting its use as a vacation destination in the day, is a “delightful and charmingly situated sea-side resort (with) a lot to be proud of” – one factor of which presumably is the safety of its beach of which “drowning casualties are up to now unknown”.

Manly, by 1922 already long-established as a “must go-to” day trip for Sydneysiders, is described as a “delightful (ferry) trip down the harbour”…the writer is unrestrainedly fulsome in praise of its virtues, “Few resorts offer such a diversity of attractions – bathing in surf and baths, riding, driving, cycling, and motoring; while golf, cricket, football, la crosse, rifle, rowing, sailing, tennis, croquet, bowling clubs are all in full swing. Open air entertainments and band concerts nightly, and the usual attractions of a popular watering place”.

Vying with Manly for the beachside glamour stakes (then as now) was Bondi (subsumed under Waverley in the directory). Bondi Beach, in the words of Wilson’s, was equipped with baths and municipal “surf sheds” which accommodated 4500 men and 1500 women (clear evidence that 1922 was indeed a pre-feminist era devoid of the slightest pretence to gender equality!)…the (beach) park, the writer went on, “remodelled with the construction of the sea wall” was “now a rendezvous for natural pleasure seekers”. Beach accessible suburbs are always in demand with homebuyers, as underlined in the description of Maroubra – “a favourite place for surf bathers and is advancing with lightning rapidity and they are building fast there” (no hyperbole spared!)

Page 513 illustrates how much can change over lengthy periods of time. In 1922 Sydney’s second university, the University of New South Wales, was still 27 years away, but the future UNSW site was then occupied by Kensington Racecourse✾ and Randwick Park. Nearby was Randwick Asylum, now the Prince of Wales Hospital, and the Randwick Rifle Range, further south on Avoca St, is no more. Anzac Pde runs through the present suburb of Kingsford which in 1922 was called South Kensington with a small part of this suburb forming the locale of Lilyville.

Even suburbs located far the city CBD were given a positive spin by Wilson’s – Penrith, 34 miles from the GPO is described as “the centre of a fertile agricultural and fruit-growing district” only one hour’s journey by rail. The township is “well lighted with electricity and excellent water supply”. Among its attractions are the Nepean River, “world famed for its championship sculling courses, which is recognised by many as the best course in the world” and beautified by its “rugged grandeur of mountain scenery (which draws in) tourists and camping parties”. It also offers short day trips to the “delightful villages” of Mulgoa, Wallacia and Luddenham for shooting and fishing.

The township of Hornsby in the north-west of Sydney is the “centre of a prosperous district”. And with its high elevation (594 ft above sea level), Wilson’s Directory talks up Hornsby as a “metropolitan sanitarium”. The country of its environs “abound with charming drives and magnificent scenery”. Galston is “seven miles north by good metal road” (the “famous Galston ZIG-ZAG”).

Hurstville is depicted as “the centre of a large and progressive district…charmingly situated nine miles south by rail from Sydney”. It includes Mortdale, a township of recent growth, most of the property owned and occupied by the working class”. Also within the Hurstville municipality, the book refers to the suburb of Dumbleton – now called Beverley Hills (conspicuous today for its plethora of restaurants favouring Cantonese Hong Kong and Guangzhou cuisines).

Pertinent omissions
There is an arbitrariness to the scope of the 1922 directory, it doesn’t extend to most peripheral districts like Liverpool, Blacktown, Campbelltown and Windsor/Richmond, all of which are included within the perimeters of contemporary greater Sydney. This perhaps provides a pointer to the trajectory of the early development patterns and communications of Sydney. Significant population and urban infrastructure reached districts like Penrith and even to parts of the Blue Mountains before it got to Windsor for instance☉.

PostScript: Swallowed up by Gregory’s expanding empire of streets? ‘Gregory’s’ before there was a Gregory’s?
In 1934 Gregory’s Street Directory (of Sydney Suburbs and Streets) made its debut, it was not long after this the Wilson’s Street Directory discontinued its annual publication and went out of business. I haven’t been able to ascertain for sure but I suspect a correlation between the two…it is quite feasible that the demise of Wilson’s was linked to the rise of Gregory’s, the latter becoming a household name in metropolitan street directories (and until the advent of GPS an unwaveringly constant companion of the majority of automobile glove-boxes).

Footnote: Taking the Eastwood map (above) as an example of the deficiencies of scale of the directory’s maps, the block between Herring St and Culloden Rd bisected by Waterloo Rd, encompasses the land occupied today by the rump of the campus of Macquarie University. This is some 16 hectares in area, but due to the use of large bold fonts for streets which condenses the sizes of blocks, the area seems quite small on the map!

More nomenclature change: the maps refer to the Municipality of Prospect and Sherwood, later the council was renamed ‘Holroyd’. Prospect retains its identity as a suburb but there is no longer a ‘Sherwood’ locality.

≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘≘
✲ is Wilson’s Authentic Director, Sydney and Suburbs 1922 an antiquarian book? The key words in any definition of a antiquarian book are ‘old’ and ‘rare’. The perception of ‘what is old’ is subjective and can be related to a given individual’s experience. To me (even way back when I first got hold of it) it was and is old! The quality of ‘rareness’ though might be harder to attribute to this book, short of conducting a survey of the remaining second-hand bookshops in this city (these days an increasingly less difficult task to accomplish) I have no earthly idea of how many copies there are in existence. It is certainly the only hardcopy of the publication that I have encountered in its physical state, however I am aware that multiple copies exist online in microfiche form. I suspect then that strictly speaking it probably falls short of the standard definition of antiquarian, so I am happy to go with any variation on a theme that retains that association…quasi-antiquarian, semi-antiquarian, even pseudo-antiquarian!
⌽ Mascot’s Ascot Racecourse (named after the premier horse-racing course in Britain) was the site from where the first aeroplane flight in Sydney took place (1911), [‘Ascot Racecourse, Sydney’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org]
⊡ appropriately enough to match its elite and exclusive status, Mosman, along with North Sydney, are afforded the only inset maps in “three colors” in an otherwise entirely black-and-white publication (alas these too were casualties of my cavalier treatment of the book during my juvenile years – the tricoloured inset maps of the two suburbs were torn off long ago!)
✾ the maps of the South Sydney area indicate how littered it was with racecourses in 1922…in addition to Kensington and Randwick, there were racecourses at Ascot (see below) and at Eastlakes (Rosebery Racecourse) now occupied by The Lakes Golf Course
☸ the locale of South Kingston gets a nod in the book but these days this name for part of the Newtown suburb has long fallen into disuse and is obsolete
☉ the Penrith and Windsor districts are both roughly equidistance from Sydney (moreover, Windsor was settled as early as 1791, a mere three years after the British takeover of the continent!). Blacktown’s omission is even more puzzling, being considerably closer to the GPO than Penrith!

The “Arabian Nights” Film in the West: Hollywood’s Inconsequential Oriental Adventureland

Posted on May 18, 2018January 11, 2022 by Sloane Snodgrasse

Cinema, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture

The earliest tales of traditional Middle Eastern folk tales, commonly subsumed under the umbrella title of One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights are thought to have have come from the Indian Sub-continent and Persia. The collection was built upon in piecemeal fashion in other Islamic lands throughout the Ottoman Empire, then at some point the compiled stories were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla wa-layla (or The Thousand Nights) [‘One Thousand and One Nights’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

The Arabian tales reached Western audiences in book form and ultimately the (English language) cinema courtesy of the work of many western scholars over many years – of which British explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Burton was but one important contributor, not to overlook the work of Henry Torrens the first translator of the 1001 Nights from Arabic to English⊙.

Hollywood first visited the “Arabian Nights” world for subject matter early on during the silent era…including the related fascination with Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik character, but it wasn’t until the 1940s that it became a regular feature of Hollywood cinema✳. By the early 1950s the popularity of the sub-genre had passed its high-water mark and pretty much tapered off after that point. Subsequently Hollywood has shown only sporadic interest in the sub-genre.

Cinema’s (especially Hollywood’s) harvesting of the “1001 Nights” for script material has been restricted to a handful of the better known stories, predominantly Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin’s Magic Lamp and the frame narrative of the storyteller Shahryar and Scheherazade. In typical eclectic Hollywood style, filmmakers have “cherry-picked”, incorporating several of the Arabian Nights story narratives into the same film…with the character of Ali Baba generally given the predictable “Robin Hood” treatment, depicted as a liberator redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor!

1940, The Thief of Bagdad: The spark for a steady stream of American “Arabian Nights” films♤
The 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad (made in the UK but distributed internationally by American company United Artists) seemed to be a catalyst for the “Arabian Sands of the Desert” film. Itself a remake the 1924 silent flick with the same title starring Douglas Fairbanks Snr, the 1940 Thief of Bagdad was British made but completed in California because of the disruption of Hitler’s War in Europe. The British Thief of Bagdad had high production values, a big budget and technical innovations…Technicolour and the first significant use of bluescreening in films; elaborate sets and costumes; high calibre acting and top-notch British filmmakers Alexander Korda and Michael Powell.

Low-budget Arabian adventure flicks with a cast of exotics
The box-office and critical success of The Thief of Bagdad provided an impetus to Hollywood studios to try to cash in on its success. Columbia eventually responded with its own Arabian A-picture 1001 Nights (1945) [‘A Thousand and One Nights/1001 Nights’ (1945), www.1000misspenthours.com], but the Forties through to the early Fifties saw a spate of mainly B-flicks on the Arabian Nights theme. In essence these were blatantly escapist romantic/adventures which rehashed Arabian stereotypes through mainstream American eyes (see PostScript). These Middle Eastern adventures provided a new (exotic) setting and new material for studios to feed a public perhaps feeling a bit jaded from a surfeit of Westerns (“cowboys and indians” films). They were also a fresh alternative to the string of World War 2 pictures and historical costume dramas being churned out of Hollywood.

Universal Pictures in particular took to the sub-genre with gusto, casting exotic types of players to headline these movies, eg, using and re-using the likes of Dominican Republic born Maria Montez, Mysore born Sabu and Vienna born (of Turkish and Czech Jewish origins) Turhen Bey in US Arabian B-pics, starting with Arabian Nights (1942). This three-piece ensemble was always accompanied by the distinctly un-exotic, “All-American hero” Jon Hall! Universal’s approach was usually to alternate their adventure locales – a standard Arabian Nights pic would typically be followed by a “South Seas island adventure” (almost invariably with the same “front four” and with titles such as White Savage and Cobra Woman) – just in case the punters were getting tired of the studio’s fixation on all those dudes in flowing robes and endless sand hills!

Many of the top male stars in Hollywood had a stab at playing the swarthy Arabian hero role during the sub-genre’s heyday…Ronald Colman in Kismet (1944); Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, following in his illustrious father’s swashbuckling footsteps in RKO’s Sinbad the Sailor (1947); Rock Hudson in The Golden Blade (1953); Jeff Chandler in Flame of Araby (1951); Tony Curtis (teaming up with Piper Laurie always outfitted as a harem girl) in The Prince who was a Thief (1951) and The Son of Ali Baba (1952). On the female lead side, Universal and United Artists gradually moved from using Dominican Montez to Canadian brunette Yvonne De Carlo as its main Arabian princess/heroine in films like The Desert Hawk (1950) and Fort Algiers (1953)◈.

Columbia’s foray into the “Arabian Adventureland”
Columbia Pictures maintained a sporadic interest in the sub-genre. It made three adventure features over a 19 year span around the heroic character of Sinbad, each heavily imbued with fantasy elements. In this series comprising The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger(1977), Sinbad, played by three different actors, all have to confront and triumph over all manner of malevolent mythical creatures (dragons, gigantic birds, supernatural monsters, etc) with the odd, nefarious wizard or grand vizier thrown in along the hero’s journey.

“Arabian Nights” meets “Sword-and-Sandals”
By around 1960 sword-and-sandal epic films (sometimes called Peplum) films were in vogue especially in Europe (see article ‘Review of The Epic Film’, March 2015 blog). At the centre of the “Sword-and-Sandal” flick was the invincible strongman-hero who would typically flex his massive muscles and battle Greek, Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian or some other despot from a mythical land. In a merging of Classical and Arabian adventure motifs, studios would occasionally reassign their contracted stars of “Peplums” to “1001 Nights” pics…so in the 1961 Italian made Il Ladro Di Bagdad) bodybuilder Steve Reeves trades his Classical Greek white tunic for some robes, a turban and a scimitar!

Continental “Arabian Nights”
Enthusiasm for Arabian “desert and minaret” films was by no means restricted to Hollywood film sets and the US, nor did the sub-genre entirely disappear after the 1950s. Among the subsequent efforts there was The Conqueror of the Orient, a 1960 Italian adventure flick shot in the De Laurentiis Studios in Rome; Shéhérazade, a 1963 French production with Anna Karina; Captain Sindbad (1963) an independent production starring Guy William’s (better known as TV’s Zorro) was made in Munich. And of course there was the sexed-up, X-rated Continental version of The Arabian Nights (1974) by the always different, always polemical and confronting Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini – the third in his trilogy of takes on the greats books of the world literary canon (following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales).

Sub-continent Hindi, Bengali and Tamil “Arabian Nights”
Considering that the South Asian Sub-continent played a formative part as an early contributor to the compilation of Arabian folktales, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that Indian cinema had embraced the Arabian Nights sub-genre. The Wadia brothers made Alibaba Aur 40 Chor in Hindi/Urdu in 1954 (remade in 1966 by Homi Wadia). Additional entries from India include Alibabavum 40 Thirudargalum (‘Alibaba and the Forty Thieves’), a 1956 Tamil-language “fantasy-swashbuckler” and a Bengali version of the Ali Baba story, Ali Baba and his Wonderful Lamp (1957).

“1001 Nights”, longevity in animation
The one movie genre where the Arabian Nights movie has achieved real staying power and ongoing popularity has been in animated feature films. There has been numerous attempts at telling the Arabian tales through animation on the big screen. In the US, Columbia led the way with its 1959 1001 Arabian Nights, very loosely based on the Arab folktale of Aladdin, but essentially a vehicle for the popular, myopic TV cartoon character Mr Magoo. The big box-office inroads in Arabian Nights animations were made by those that came later… especially the Disney classic, eg, Aladdin (1992), which spawned successful sequels, Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar (1994) and Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996). Hanna-Barbera also produced its comic cartoon critters take on “The Book of the 1001 Nights” with Scooby-Doo! in Arabian Nights (1994, made-for-television). Another in the animated category was the Indian/US co-production, Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists (2000).

Aladdin, he of the lamp with remarkable transformative powers, has been well served cinematically in animation features, viz a Soviet (Russian) fantasy version of Volshebnaya lampa Aladdina/Aladdin’s Magic Lamp in 1966; a French version, Aladin et la Lampe Merveilleuse/Aladdin and His Magic Lamp in 1970. There has even been a Japanese manga anime feature on the 1001 Nights theme, Doraemon: Nobita’s Dorarabian Nights (1991).

PostScript: Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle Eastern Muslims

❝(Aladdin) from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face. It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.❞
~ opening song from the original theatrical release of Disney’s 1992 Aladdin (due to protests Disney subsequently modified the offending lyrics but kept the ‘barbaric’ reference✤)

The bulk of Hollywood movies like those above have resorted to over-simplified, usually demeaning, representations of Arabs and of the Arab world回. Lebanese-American academic Jack Shaheen pioneered research in this area, unearthing the extent to which Hollywood filmmakers manipulated the images and perpetuated orientalist stereotypes on the screen¤. So, in the typical 1001 Nights movie, we get totally formulaic story-lines which have become an established trope in the trade…the (often eponymous) hero suffers an injustice (imprisonment, exile, etc) at the hands of an evil cabal of usurper sheiks/caliphs (aided and abetted by greedy merchants who covet all the wealth and power for themselves). The princely hero recovers and ultimately overthrow the tyrant/regime, and in the process of course wins the beautiful, entrapped princess!

The Harem Girls’ pool shot in the 1942 film

The films are usually decorated with an obligatory harem of young, gorgeous and seemingly empty-headed girls lounging round doing nothing, occasionally belly-dancing or reclining in a pool (kind of your Arabian equivalent of the bikini girls in the 1960s beach movies). Universal’s Arabian Nights for example is full of sexy, seductive veiled dancers. Not exactly Islamic orthodoxy here! Sightings of the Taj Mahal in the 1942 film also illustrates how Hollywood mangles geography in the Arab World…the same goes for history, many plots involve ahistorical scenarios, eg, in the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries the 8th century AD narrator recounts stories in which 17th-18th century muskets are in use [Arabian Nights (miniseries), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org; ‘Veils, Harems and Belly Dancers’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].The settings for the movies are equally formulaic – bustling bazaars with narrow, crowded alleys full of pickpockets, cardboard palaces that look like flimsy, fake Alhambras. Genies, flying carpets, robotic guards – a scene of frivolous adventure and fantasy. Outside of the city everything is amorphous desert, endless sand hills punctuated by outposts of tents and a caravan of camels❦ [‘Ancient Egypt and Desert Landscapes’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].

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⊙ the most popular of the 1001 Nights tales, and the most utilised by movie-makers – the Voyages of Sinbad, Aladdin and his lamp, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves – were not part of the original collection of stories but were added by the French translator Antoine Galland in the 18th century
✳ I would hesitate to describe the “Arabian Nights” movie as a genre in itself, it would be more correct to call it a sub-genre, in the same way that road films and biopics are sub-genre films. Arabian Nights films are sub-genres, usually of the genre of Adventure or Adventure/Fantasy (occasionally Adventure/Comedy)
♤ Americans insist on the spelling ‘Bagdad’, rather than the traditional Anglo/Commonwealth preference for ‘Baghdad’…just as they prefer ‘Sinbad’ rather than ‘Sindbad’, as it is sometimes rendered
◈ movies such as Fort Algiers also cross-over into related-type territory, the North African Bedouin/French Foreign Legion desert film
✤ the Disney animated version makes a further sin of omission common to cinematic portrayals of the character Aladdin – making him a boy of Arab appearance. One of the few screen adaptations to heed the textual evidence which indicates that Aladdin is a Chinese boy is the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries, casting a Chinese-American in the role
回 Hollywood has shown itself to be notorious at marginalising “the Other” on-screen, note the very strong parallels between its characterisations of Arabs/Muslims and of Native American ‘Indians’ and Mexicans
¤ Shaheen spent decades scrutinising not just the Arabian Nights movies but all Hollywood films and television that dealt with Arabs and Muslims, concluding that Hollywood depicted Arabs in overwhelmingly negative terms – as bandits, as duplicitous, naive, rapacious and malevolent people of a savage, nomadic race (and after 9/11 in particular, as one-dimensional terrorists) [JG Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilified a People (2001)]
❦ Hollywood productions reinforce the European orientalist construct, as identified by Palestinian scholar Edward Said, reducing the Orient to no more than “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences”

Cursed Movies III: Making Don Quixote, a Test of Adversity and Perseverance

Posted on November 30, 2017January 11, 2022 by E Curb Nottus

Cinema, Literary & Linguistics

Cervantes‘ Don Quixote is without peer as the foremost work in Spanish literature…it is considered without question to be the most influential work in the entire Spanish language literary canon❉. The general consensus among authorities in the field is that it was the primary manifestation (first pub. Vol I 1605) of the novel as we understand the development of that emerging literary form.

The Spanish proudly extol Cervantes’ name in the same reverential tone as the English speaking world bestows on Shakespeare. When it came to adaptations of Don Quixote to the cinema screen however, Cervantes’ great novel has not experienced the same good fortune as screen productions of Shakespeare’s greatest plays have had. While the story of the ageing knight-errant’s folly-filled forays in the campo of La Mancha has been a popular source material for the theatre, opera and both the big and small screen, it has not proved a rewarding experience for some of the leading filmmakers! There have been a number of attempts to bring the book to the cinema that have ended either in disarray or as incomplete projects…the mildly suspicious among us might easily convince themselves that the subject of Don Quixote is jinxed!

Disney: the animated feature’s arrested development
One of the early US attempts to produce a film of Don Quixote was as a feature-length cartoon by Walt Disney. The Disney team laboured for six decades commencing in the 1930s to make an animated version of Don Quixote. Studio artist Ferdinand Horvath produced project sketches of the Spanish knight-errant for Disney as early as 1929. Preparatory work for a film project during WWII using concepts inspired by 17th century artistic titan Diego Velázquez was jettisoned after Disney had two commercial failures in a row with Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940. The studio tried again, several times (1946, 1951, even as recent as the late 1990s). All of the projects were eventually aborted[1]. Don Quixote thus far has evaded all attempts at being ‘Disneyfied’✫.

Orson’s never-ending project: Less than awesome
Orson Welles’ efforts to make a film of Don Quixote was an incredibly drawn-out saga that failed to bear fruit. Financing (habitually a millstone around Welles’ cervix) was partly to blame but procrastination by the former “boy wonder” director was taken to a new level. Starting off with test footage as early as 1955, Welles was still intermittently working on the unfinished picture (which he described as his “own personal project”) when he died (1985). By which time Welles had 300,000 feet of shot film in the can! Eventually a version completed by a Spanish director saw the light of screen in the 1990s (described as a “Spanish restoration”). However according to James Clarke, the “print (was) impoverished…the film lacked clarity… (and) Welles’ commentary and dialogue was ineffectively dubbed into Spanish”[2].

The jinx again!
Dynamic Hollywood producer of the 1950s, Mike Todd, was riding high on the back of the blockbuster success of the star-studded Around the World in 80 Days. Todd chose “Don Quixote” as the follow-up project to ’80 Days’ based on the Jules Verne novel. Having cast his new, glamour wife Elizabeth Taylor to star in a lavish production of the Cervantes classic, the hard-headed Todd’s plans for “Don Quixote” perished in the airplane crash that took the producer’s life in 1958.

Terry Gilliam, nearly 20 years worth of broken mirrors!
The award for the most ill-fated attempt to bring “Don Quixote” to the screen goes to Monty Python member and film director Terry Gilliam. Gilliam first conceptualised his project in 1991…pre-production got underway seven years later and production itself got rolling in 2000 in Navarre (Spain). Gilliam brought his own, very idiosyncratic take on the Man of La Mancha (very loosely based on the original story). He cast Johnny Depp as a 21st century time-traveller hurled back to engage with the perpetually confused 16th century “windmill-tilter”.

From the start obstacles and setbacks piled on top of each other – flash floods destroyed sets and equipment in the Spanish campo, as a result the filmmakers had problems securing insurance for the production; Jean Rochefort as Quixote took ill and had to leave the set and the movie altogether; it was discovered that one of the film sites was directly below a Spanish Air Force flight path; plus the production was hit with further financial problems – the net outcome was the cessation and cancellation of the production. Gilliam made several subsequent attempts to relaunch the movie, in all there were eight unsuccessful tilts at making “Don Quixote” over a period of 18-19 years with a succession of actors coming and going. In 2002 Gilliam, no doubt with cathartic intent, released a documentary Lost in La Mancha about the trials and tribulations of trying to realise the plagued ‘Quixote’ feature film[3].

The indefatigable American Python resurrected the project once more earlier this year with longtime collaborator Jonathan Pryce in the title role. Finally in June of this year Gilliam tweeted, rather sheepishly, that the filming was finally completed…The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is slated for release in 2018[4].

PostScript: ‘Don Quixote’, a mixed track record in the cinema
Notwithstanding the long trail of misfortunes and misadventures that has bedevilled the efforts of the above film-makers to make Don Quixote, it would be misleading to conclude that the subject has been universally cursed. A survey of Don Quixote’s cinematic history on the screen confirms that it has been far from unmakeable. First point to note is that there have been a considerable number of ‘DQ’ films churned out over the decades[5], many of which went through more or less without mishap, or at least with nothing like the obstacles and hurdles in the way of Gilliam and Welles and others.

From across the world of international cinema these productions include the 1957 Russian version filmed in the Crimea (Dir: Grigori Kozintsev); the 1972 Man of La Mancha (a musical/comedy with Peter O’Toole in the lead); a 2000 feature with John Lithgow as the chivalrous but hopelessly misguided hidalgo (country gentleman); Albert Serra’s modernised Spanish version, Honour of the Knights (2006); a 2015 version directed by James Franco’s USC students, Don Quixote: The Ingenuous Gentleman of La Mancha; and believe it or not, a 2007 Spanish/Italian computer animation comedy Donkey Xote (hee-haw!), a light-hearted retelling of the classic story from the perspective of his squire Sancho Panza’s Equus Africanus steed.

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❉ its literary influence goes far beyond the Hispanic world…extending to his English contemporary Shakespeare who is widely thought to have collaborated with John Fletcher on a play (now lost), Cardenio, believed to be based on an episode in the Cervantes novel
✫ Disney still haven’t entirely let it go…the phenomenal box office triumph of the Pirates of the Caribbean series has prompted Disney to engage ‘gun’ screenwriter Billy Ray to write something similar in tone for Don Quixote, ‘Disney Developing a Don Quixote Movie’, (J Kroll) Variety, 13-Oct-2016, www.variety.com

[1] James Clarke, ‘The troubled history of Don Quixote on film’, BFI: Film Forever, 26-Apr-2016, www.bfi.org.uk
[2] ibid. ; ”Don Quixote (unfinished film), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[3] ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘My latest is a disaster movie’, The Guardian, 04-Feb-2001, www.theguardian.com
[4] “Sorry for the long silence…” (@TerryGilliam, tweeted 04-Jun-2017)
[5] in fact the tale of the muddled hidalgo with a penchant for charging at windmills has been a movie subject just about from the first dawn of the moving picture – as early as 1903 a silent film of Don Quixote was made by the French, ‘Don Quixote de La Mancha: DQ and Film’, (Barbara Robinson), USC Libraries (Research Guides), www.libguides.usc.edu

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Just blogging away … doing the hard blog

Continuing the search for signs of Intelligent Life in the University.

Literary & Linguistics

Creating Crusoe: A Raft of Derivative Sources of Defoe’s Classic Tale

Remembrances of a Juvenile Bookworm: Old Street Directories I have had the Pleasure of … (Part 1)

The “Arabian Nights” Film in the West: Hollywood’s Inconsequential Oriental Adventureland

Cursed Movies III: Making Don Quixote, a Test of Adversity and Perseverance