The Thief of Bagdad

A silent romantic fantasy-adventure on a scale that still startles. Douglas Fairbanks plays a thief of Bagdad who, on a whim, sneaks into the Caliph's palace, steals an apple, and falls in love with the Princess. To win her he must best rival princes in a quest across a world of magic: a flying horse, a six-armed statue, an underwater kingdom, a monstrous spider, an invisibility powder. Raoul Walsh directs from a scenario Fairbanks co-wrote under a pseudonym, and the production design draws on the illustrations of Edmund Dulac to build an Arabian Nights dreamscape out of lumber, paint, and ingenuity. Anna May Wong is a standout as the treacherous Mongol slave. The film's influence on the fantasy genre is hard to overstate. Published in 1924, it is in the public domain in the United States.