Thief of Bagdad
1924 · 140 min
The Thief of Bagdad (1924): Douglas Fairbanks, William Cameron Menzies designs, and a real flying carpet on a crane. Watch the silent fantasy free online.
Raoul Walsh directed, Fairbanks produced and starred, and William Cameron Menzies designed a Bagdad nobody has really improved on since: six and a half acres of it at the Pickford-Fairbanks lot, standing on polished enamel floors so the city seems to float on its own reflection.
The magic carpet is not animation. It is a plate of steel with a rug over it and fringe long enough to hide the frame, slung on wires from a ninety-foot crane and hauled across the set at something like twenty-five miles an hour with Fairbanks balanced on top of it.
At about $1.1 million, it was the first Hollywood picture to cost more than a million dollars.
Free to watch via internet-archive, wikimedia, tubi.