Siren of Atlantis (1949)

It's a shame that Universal never used Maria Montez as a female monster, a la a new Dracula's Daughter, or an ancient Egyptian princess made the walking dead in one of their later "Mummy" movies. She could be so deliciously evil when called to do so, and horror movie women were scream queens rather than the perpetrators of fear. But she did spread her share of fear, whether it was the mysterious Marie Roget or the jewel hunting cobra woman. In this action/adventure, made after her Universal days had come to an end, she's both conniving and sultry, playing another queen of questionable personality.This is late 40's escapism at its strangest, a hidden oasis in the middle of the desert, melodramatic and silly, but not without mystery to make it intriguing. Jean Pierre Aumont is the handsome victim of her latest games, pairing him as a rival to Dennis O'Keefe whom he gets into a supposed fight to the death with for her favors. Henry Danielle is over the top as one of Montez's old conquests, giving a sense of "She" into the plot. A scene with a doomed slave girl is haunting at one second then shocking, then laughable with the way that plot development is tied up. It's obvious that Montez had a career simply because of her exotic looks. She's certainly not a great actress by any means, bellowing many of her lines and coming off as rather cold in spite of her attempts to seem alluring. In fact, everybody seems to be overacting here, and as handsome as it looks, it sort of feels like a serial that might come to a cliffhanger at any moment. But there are some truly eye rolling moments, a few unintentional laughs, and the feeling that the writers secretly had their tongue in their cheek when they handed it over to the director to begin shooting.

This is Monteziana at its best; Maria M even acts here, and the monochrome cinematography is splendid. The story has been filmed several times. This curio was Montez' first film after leaving Universal Pictures, where she had made a series of wonderful colour adventures, including COBRA WOMAN, directed by Robert Siodmak and scripted by a very young Richard Brooks. The author Gore Vidal did attempt to ridicule Montez and her fans in his sequel to his own Myra Breckinridge, called MYRON, but this seemed part of the author's long-time resentment of the Hollywood system and the way in which, during the 1960s, Hollywood cinema suddenly was being taken seriously by many film enthusiasts. In any event, the Montez legacy lives on.

Fruity, cockeyed yarn about expedition searching for, and finding, fabled Atlantis. The expedition is the French Foreign Legion. Atlantis is in the middle of the Sahara! Ruling the lost kingdom is a beautiful, ageless, sexually voracious queen. Most of the citizenry act as guards or as dancers. (No TV, no reading material, dancing is the main entertainment,) The music score is intrusive and distracting, and bulk of the acting is histrionic. Who cares? Queen Antinea wears skin tight or sheer as can be outfits. Plays chess with the men folk, leads them to her yawning conch shell bed, and drains their mojo, till their ain't no wick in the stick. Along with provocative costumes, is the $5.00 set design. Cinematographer Karl Struss filled the flick with phallic imagery. Candlesticks, chessmen, marble columns, even the omnipresent masked, turbaned guards. Bad film but a fun one.

1940's version of oft filmed story of finding Atlantis under the Sahara is probably best known when it was filmed several times under the l'Atalante title of the novel. The plot has a couple of adventurers stumbling upon the lost continent under the desert and coming in contact with the queen of the continent, romance and other complications ensue. This time out we get a well made version but the pacing is a killer and after a half an hour I began to wander literally, I went into other rooms in my house as this was running in the DVD player because the movie is just so darn slow. Worst of all is Maria Montez as the queen who is beautiful but leaden. She's so bad in fact that her name is now linked in my mind to one of the worst performances I've ever seen (and I've seen a good many). You can try it but you may snooze