The next film I made was Bagdad. They call these “tits and sand” pictures…A scorpion stung me a couple of days into the shoot, but other than that it was uneventful...
-’Tis Herself: An Autobiography, Maureen O’Hara, as Princess Marjan
…take after take was being ruined by the inhuman howls of a lady camel…The camel must have fallen in love with one of the cast…Since there were only three men including myself in the company and lady camels only fall for human men, it must be one of us.
-The Book of Joe, Vincent Price, as Pasha Ali Nadim
Princess Marjan- How do you know so much? Hassan (played by Paul Hubschmid)- Oh, camel drivers usually know everything, sooner or later. Princess Marjan- And do they usually learn to speak English with a French accent? Who are you? Hassan- They call me Hassan, and the accent is Viennese, not French.
-Bagdad, 1949, filmed in Lone Pine, California
It must have been either me, Nedu, or Mustapha, the khawaja that the naaga fell in love with. And the Swiss-born actor Paul Hubschmid was no KhairAllah, who could imitate anyone and channeled the stuttering imbecile perfectly in the camel thief story he recited at the campfire. We saw no princesses on the darb, we were too far into the desert for that, but we can claim a more authentic shooting location than Lone Pine. That had Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, Dudes are Pretty People, The Girl-Shy Cowboy, Adventures of Hajji Baba, and Gunga Din with Shalom (Sam) Jaffe in blackface to its credit, while Kordofan only had Voice of the Whip and a few visits by George Clooney and Mia Farrow, while the catering truck had four legs and one hump and rustled up a pretty mean bowl of aseeda.