La ley del harem: Singing in the sand is harder than it looks

Is it worth your time?

If you like old movies that feel like a stage play had a baby with an opera, then yes. You should probably skip this if you need fast action or stuff that makes total sense 🏜️.

I found myself watching this mostly because José Mojica has this weirdly magnetic face. He was a huge deal back then, a real tenor who could actually act a bit.

The whole thing is basically a 'cine hispano' production from Fox. They used to make these in Hollywood for Spanish speakers because dubbing was still pretty bad in 1933.

It feels very different from something like The Big House which feels way more 'movie-like'. This one feels like a postcard that starts singing at you.

The story is about Prince Ahmed. He is very noble and very handsome and spends a lot of time looking at the horizon.

There is a harem, obviously. The 'law' mentioned in the title is mostly an excuse for people to stand in curved doorways and look worried.

Maria Alba is in this too. She has these eyes that seem to take up half her face when she gets scared 😮.

There is one scene where the music starts so suddenly it actually made me jump a little. One second they are talking about betrayal, and the next, there is a full orchestra in the middle of the dunes.

The sand looks very clean. Like, too clean. You can tell a guy with a broom was just off-camera making sure it looked perfect for the movie stars.

I noticed that the shadows in the indoor scenes are actually way more interesting than the plot. They have these sharp, black edges that remind me of The Deceiver or other early talkies where they were still figuring out lights.

The dialogue is very... thick. People do not just say 'hello', they deliver a speech about the sun and the stars.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of La ley del harem (1931) through its definitive frames.

It gets a bit slow in the middle. I actually checked my phone twice because the Prince was taking a very long time to walk across a room.

But when Mojica sings, the movie actually wakes up. His voice is smooth like butter, even with the crackly audio from the old recording.

There is this one guy, Ralph Navarro, who plays a soldier. He has this mustache that looks like it might fall off if he sneezes too hard. I spent about ten minutes just watching his upper lip.

It is not as fun as something like Ship Ahoy, but it has this dreamy quality. Like you are watching someone else's memory of a book they read once.

The ending happens very fast. It is like they realized they were running out of film and just decided to wrap everything up in five minutes.

I liked the costumes though. Everyone wears these massive capes that look very heavy. It must have been 100 degrees under those studio lights.

Is it a masterpiece? No. But it is a cool look at a time when Hollywood was trying to figure out how to talk to the whole world at once.

If you enjoy seeing how sets were built before CGI, you will like looking at the walls. You can almost see where the wood meets the plaster.

It is a mood piece. Don't go in expecting a thriller. Just sit back and let the singing wash over you 🎶.

One more thing—the way they handle the 'harem' stuff is very 1930s. It’s more about decorations and sighs than anything actually scandalous.

I give it points for the music and the weirdly intense staring contests. It’s a bit of a relic, but a shiny one.