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Just perfect...

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The acting in this movie is really good.

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.

At an isolated fort in North Africa, the sole survivor of a rescue party, Lieutenant Saint-Avit (Jean-Pierre Aumont), is convinced he's killed his friend Captain Morhange (Dennis O'Keefe) in the lost city of Atlantis. During a court inquiry, Saint-Avit relates, in flashback, what happened when his small party was sent to find a missing expedition led by his friend, Gassone. After getting lost in a sandstorm, the party stumbles upon a city high in the Hoggar Mountains where they find Gassone's gold-covered body (along with many others) entombed in a large marble hall. The barbaric land is ruled by a beautiful, cruel, and lusty queen, Antinea (Maria Montez), who is a direct descendant of Cleopatra and Marc Antony. Saint-Avit falls for the ruthless ruler but Morhange, hoping to enter a monastery, is able to resist. Antinea manipulates a drunken Saint-Avit into killing his friend but later, stricken by conscience, he escapes and is found wandering in the desert by his fellow Legionaires. Soon after, the amused court of inquiry acquits Saint-Avit, attributing his memories to mirage, but he is later given an amulet by one of Antinea's minions and heads into the desert. A search party, led by a handsome, young Legionaire, is formed but gets lost in a sandstorm... Unlike G.W. Pabst's 1932 version, this faithful filmization of Pierre Benoit's novel, "Queen Of Atlantis", produced by Samuel Nebenzel and released by United Artists, plays as straight fantasy. SIREN OF ATLANTIS is pure escapism filmed in black and white and quite a bit darker than the Universal "sex and sand" Saturday matinée adventures popular in the 1940s and 50s. The clever use of light and shadow help disguise a low budget and a number of scenes from G.W. Pabst's film are repeated. Directorial credit is given to Gregg C. Tallas but both John "The Lodger" Brahm and Arthur "The Chase" Ripley did uncredited work and, like Ripley's THE CHASE, SIREN OF ATLANTIS also ends on a deja vu note. Former Universal star Maria Montez is right at home portraying the evil, imperious ruler of a lost empire; sheathed in lamé with a panther by her side, Antinea plays chess with her lovers before encasing them in gold (a la GOLDFINGER) and had the tongue of her alchemist cut out for saying things she did not care to hear. Henry Daniell plays Blades, one of a number of Europeans trapped in Atlantis after becoming lost in the desert before Saint-Avit arrived. In this telling, a native girl falls in love with Morhange and tries to help him escape; when they're caught, she jumps to her death rather than face the Queen's punishment of "the slow fire". There's more than a passing resemblance to the H. Rider Haggard novel, "She", and the story was later reworked by Universal as DESERT LEGION starring Alan Ladd and Arlene Dahl in 1953. "L'Atlantide" was made again in 1961 by Edgar G. Ulmer as CITY BENEATH THE DESERT starring Israeli actress Haya "Ben Hur" Harareet. Jean-Pierre Aumont and Maria Montez were married at the time of filming and the parents of the late giallo star, Tina "Torso" Aumont. The premise of the Atlantis films isn't as preposterous as it seems. Plato wrote of a city that sank into the ocean after a day and night of cataclysm and the Sahara is, of course, the floor of a long forgotten sea... Author/satirist Gore Vidal used SIREN OF ATLANTIS as basis for the fictional Maria Montez movie pivotal to the plot of "Myron", his sequel to the movie-mad novel "Myra Breckenridge": Myra's back -and badder than ever after a sex-change operation makes her male again. Who pushed Myron Breckinridge through the television screen and onto the set of SIREN OF BABYLON? Myron takes stoner late-nite TV viewing to new heights when he finds he can enter Maria Montez' 1948 SIREN OF BABYLON at will. When he goes "in" the whole cast is in suspended animation and he starts changing the scenery around and fiddling with Montez' metal brassiere and adjusting the little gladiator skirts of her guards in an effort to make the film the sexiest movie of all time. He goes to the well once too often and accidentally collides with Maria ...and becomes her! "I AM Maria Montez!!" Watch out... Myra/Myron's loose in 1948 Hollywood -inhabiting the body of Maria Montez- and is going all out to have Maria win the Academy Award and turn SIREN OF BABYLON into the film that changed the world. Too crazed to have ever pondered (or care about) the fabled "Butterfly Effect" (change even a molecule in the past and the future will be forever altered) the planet will never be the same! Meanwhile, in 1974 Hollywood, Myron's wife Mary Ann (carried over from the first novel) is ready to have him committed because all he does is cry in Spanish for his husband "Jean-Pierre" and jabber on about getting "back to the set"...

Stangely, I had never seen this film and, stranger still, I had high hopes for it as some kind of 'discovery'. Yes, I knew its long history, its several directors, and its difficult production... yet, the mythic story always has held interest. Well, I finally obtained an only 'fair' copy, and, sigh, the film is really almost as poor as had been reviewed at the time. The wonderful surprise, however, is that Montez looks at her most beautiful in this black-and-white film! Jean Pierre Aumont and Dennis O'Keefe TRY to show some logic amidst a script that makes absolutely no sense. A fantasy about Atlantis can be fun, but this plodding, ill-written wreck shows its deficiencies too eagerly-- the mysterious entrance to the 'lost continent' (which seems to be one building, hardly even a city block) is easily reached. Where is the atmosphere coming from in the midst of the Sahara? And the water? And the people who know how to dance hoochi-koochi? There is a poetic fantasy screaming to come out, but it would require a good writer, ONE director, and some color. I was truly disappointed to find that I now believe all of the negative(s) that have been this film's historical document.