Conqueror of the Orient (1961)

By CinemaSerf

When the evil "Dakar" (Paul Muller) seizes control of the City of the Golden Dome, he demands a whole new tranche of taxes from his already over-burdened people. One of his demands is that the young princess "Fatima" (Irène Tunc) marry him. She'd sooner shoot herself in both eyes - so she manages to escape his clutches and alights on humble fisherman "Nadir" (Rik Battaglia) with whom she falls in love. Can he save her from the agents of the nasty Sultan and maybe just lead a revolt against his tyranny? To be fair, here, the story is actually quite good - there are plenty of court intrigues and machinations, but the acting. Dear heavens but that is really poor. Battaglia is easy enough on the eye, as is Tunc, but the rest of this is little short of dreadful. The dialogue (dubbed , of course,) is straight out of a soap opera and the action scenes - there is an hilarious harem scene, but I doubt it is meant to be - are overly staged and frequently quite risible. The production budget cannot have been great, but the thing still looks ok - the costumes and sets are OK, but as the story develops it all just falls apart. The ending can't come soon enough.