Word: kublai
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...some 2,000 years ago camel caravans, loaded with silk, jade and lacquer, plodded their way to Samarkand, where the goods were shipped to Byzantium, Tyre, Rome. Seven centuries ago Marco Polo pushed his way down the Silk Road from the West to reach the court of Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, and gazed upon a civilization which surpassed that of his native Venice. Year ago 700,000 coolies with new China fervor and old China tools set to work on the half-buried old Silk Road and today a fleet of 1,000 Russian trucks shuttle over it carrying supplies...
...until the second half of the showing that the plot really unfolds, and gives free play to the intrigues of Ahmed, the petulant beauty of the Princess Kuhachin, and the trusting, almost child-like simplicity of the great Kublai Khan. Basil Rathbone, as the scheming minister of state, is as sly and villainous as in past pictures. Sigrid Gurie, Sam Goldwyn's famed Norwegian discovery from Brooklyn, is at times a bit annoying with her studied cuteness, while George Barbier plays his role as the great Khan in a manner more reminiscent of a genial Tammany district leader that...
...finale. With about as much relish for his task as a small boy's for his homework, lank, ingenuous Actor Gary Cooper dons Marco's 13th-Century raiment, crosses desert, sea & mountain only to find, in a remarkable conception of old Peking, George Barbier dressed up as Kublai Khan. Historically, Kublai Khan was China's strong man, who conquered all of China & ruled more subjects than he could count. Producer Goldwyn's Cathay is pretty thoroughly under the well-manicured thumb of Basil Rathbone, a saturnine, bewhiskered minister of state. And Producer Goldwyn's Marco...
...worth the paper they are written on. Retired Cinemactor Douglas Fairbanks toyed with the idea three years ago, then passed it along to Producer Goldwyn. First loud stunt of the Goldwyn staff was to trumpet an invitation to young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, kidnapper of Chiang Kaishek, to lead Kublai Khan's cohorts. When Producer Goldwyn, who had discovered Actor Cooper over a decade before (The Winning of Barbara Worth), lured him back from Paramount to play Marco, Paramount helpfully hollered bloody murder, sued unsuccessfully for $5,000,000. When the astronomical Paramount suit sputtered out, the Goldwyn staff...
...Kublai, the mighty Khan who in the 13th Century ruled from the Yellow Sea to Poland, used to decree the pitching of his gorgeous Mongol tent every summer on the wide grasslands of Xanadu or Shangtu a few hundred miles north of Peking, which he enlarged and made his Capital. Last week this same region of "Xanadu" was news again. Its trading post Dolonnor ("Seven Lakes") had been captured by the "Christian War Lord" Feng Yu-hsiang (TIME, July 24). Last week the great voice of War Lord Feng rumbled out of his barrel chest: "I command 100,000 soldiers...