Ali Baba Goes to Town: A weird, musical New Deal fever dream

Should you watch Ali Baba Goes to Town today? If you have a soft spot for 1930s musicals that aren't afraid to get weirdly political, then yes. If you are allergic to old-timey vaudeville humor or people singing about tax codes, you will probably hate every second of this.

Eddie Cantor is essentially playing himself, which is to say he is playing a man who cannot sit still. He spends the first half of the movie looking like he is vibrating out of his own suit. When he finally gets to the dream sequence in Baghdad, the movie stops being a standard backstage musical and turns into this strange, song-filled lecture on the New Deal.

It is genuinely odd watching a big-budget Hollywood production try to turn government policy into a dance number. There is a moment where they start singing about work programs, and you realize the film is essentially a giant, singing pamphlet. It’s not subtle, but it is definitely memorable.

The cast is bizarrely stacked. You get these fleeting glimpses of people like Dolores Del Río and even a quick look at Shirley Temple, which feels like a total fever dream. It’s like the studio just opened up the Rolodex and invited everyone to the desert for a party.

The musical numbers by Raymond Scott and His Quintet are the only things that really keep the pace from dragging. Whenever the plot gets too bogged down in the 'how to fix the Sultan’s budget' nonsense, the music kicks in and saves the day. I found myself checking my watch during the long dialogue scenes, then suddenly perking up the second a song started.

There is a lot of stuff here that feels a bit like Lightning Romance in terms of that old-school, slightly dusty energy. It’s not trying to be a masterpiece. It is just trying to be a show.

Some of the jokes are so dated they practically turn to dust when you look at them. Still, there is something charming about how earnest the whole thing is. It’s not trying to be prestigious, which is a nice break from movies that spend two hours trying to explain their own themes to you.

A few stray thoughts:

• The sets in Baghdad are surprisingly massive. You can tell they spent a chunk of change on those arches.
• The Peters Sisters have a screen presence that just blows everyone else out of the water.
• It is very hard to watch this and not wonder what the producers were thinking during the script meetings.
• The pacing is all over the place, but in a way that feels honest to how they made these things back then.

It’s not perfect. Sometimes the transition between the modern-day set and the dream world is so clunky it feels like the reel got stuck. But for a quick hit of 1930s weirdness, you could do a lot worse than this.