Very pleasant fantasy nonsense superbly photographed in most attractive Technicolor hues. Jon Hall as usual is hopeless but the rest of the players, even Turhan Bey (pronounced "Two Ron Bay),have a good time and Maria Montez of course acts as if she were a queen to the manner born. The costumes and sets are most attractive and there is plenty of unsophisticated action and even a scene where MM is branded (which we are surprised got past the kiddies' matinee censors). Film has been produced on a fair-sized budget, despite a great many obvious glass shots. And if the script and dialogue iare juvenile and the humor mostly forced (though there are one or two amusing lines) Rawlins has directed it all with plenty of pace and often a visual eye. The music score is unusually original instead of derivative for Universal and it too is as pleasant to the ear as Robinson's photography to the eye.

OTHER VIEWS: As with all the Montez-Hall movies, even the trailer is a real hoot. "I rule the city of Khemmis now!" exclaims that wonderfully deep-dyed villain George Zucco. "The only treason is to defy me!" Now that he has finally revealed his true colors to Maria, he cannot disguise his glee as he instructs his torturers to give Jon Hall, spreadeagled on the rack, "Another turn!" But the campiest line of all falls to Turhan Bey (delivered with a perfectly straight face) as he suggests to our "more alluring, more bewitching" Montez, "I suppose you think it strange that I interfered with your execution?"

• JHR writing as George Addison.

Ostensibly set in the Arabian desert, the third in a series of highly profitable films produced by Universal with Maria Montez, Jon Hall, and Turhan Bey (the other two being ARABIAN NIGHTS (1942),and ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES (1944),SUDAN is a formulaic romance with a disguised princess sold into slavery (Montez),a rebel leader suspected of killing her father (Bey) and a pickpocket with romantic intentions (Hall) aided and abetted by his comic sidekick (Amdy Devine). Add to that George Zucco in one of his hissable villain roles - and ludicrous costumes - and you have all the ingredients for another rip-roaring epic with plenty of fights and a rousing musical score (by Milton Rosen).

In truth John Rawlins's production doesn't have much to do with the mystic East. Shot in and around Los Angeles, its chase-sequences, with horses galloping across the sun-drenched desert, have more in common with the Western. Likewise the shots of the lovers (Montez, Bey) embracing in the mountains at night, with the peaks stretching like fingers into cloudless skies.

The story has clear propaganda elements: at one point Bey's Herua talks about ridding the world of "evil hours" while ensuring that his people will make Naila (Montez) "forget what has happened." When the villains have been vanquished, and the lovers ride off into the sunset, a heavenly choir strikes up another patriotic song praising freedom that exists like "the wild wind," protecting a people "always proud and free," and "that's the way we will remain," "fighting together for ever." The two lovers might be non-white (in the accepted racial sense of the term),but Rawlins's film projects a transcultural message; in the peace following six years of bitter war everyone, regardless of their ethnicity, will be able to live together harmoniously.

This wish might be idealistic, but it provides a suitably climactic coda to a highly entertaining adventure that is more about America's future than elsewhere.

With a very impish way of presenting its adventurous story, this is another film that would have pleased me a great deal...at the age of 10! Now, it's just another one of those silly sword and sandal adventures that are passable time fillers but not much else. It's the story of a newly crowned desert queen (the always striking but emotionally dead Maria Montez) who gets to wear Cleopatra type head dresses as she is manipulated by her father's trusted assistant (George Zucco) who has murdered the king and framed lowly pickpocket Jon Hall who saved the queen when Zucco attempted to banish her.

Colorful but juvenile, this is yet another reunion for Hall, Montez, Turhan Bey and Andy Devine, oh so silly as Hall's sidekick, complete with silly goatee and Buster Brown bob. Better in scope than the other Montez/Hall pairings, this has long views of endless desert vistas, and seems to be a combination of various places periods rolled into one. It's one of the silliest if this genre, not as camp as "Cobra Woman", but mixing the Arabian Knights feeling with that of a biblical epic, it seems to be taking place in some parallel universe. Montez tones her performance way down, often quite silent, and leaving the hamminess to veteran villain Zucco.

Technically, this is excellent, yet it was the very last of the colorful Montez/Hall epics, with "A Night in Paradise" closing off this series the following year with mostly different actors, including Merle Oberon in Montez's place. Andy Devine (if it is possible) becomes even more cartoonish here than in previous films at Universal of the genre. Still, there are some excellent effects, particularly an intense rock slide which takes place as the heroes and villains have a sword fight which leads to the final clinch over, you guessed it, a desert song.