Very Cool!!!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

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.

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 I was truly disappointed to find that I now believe all of the negative(s) that have been this film's historical document.

The setting of this film suggests that it will be similar to the escapist fare which Montez starred in at Universal. She plays the man-hungry Queen Antinea of Atlantis, which is located inside a mountain in the Sahara Desert, into which two officers of the French Foreign Legion stumble. Within this setting, however, the story played out is not an action adventure, but psychological melodrama, involving a femme fatale, obsession, deception, jealousy, murder, guilt, repentance, and fatalism.There are many noirish resonances: the monochrome photography of the claustrophobic torchlit chambers of the underground kingdom, the obsession of St. Avit (Jean-Pierre Aumont, Montez' real life husband) for the queen, the amoral cynicism of the court librarian Blades (Henry Daniell), and the alienation of all the characters. The nearest thing to normality is the Legion outpost. The film ends with a strong suggestion that nothing has been resolved and that the same sequence of events is about to be replayed.This was Tallas' first film as director. He had previously been an editor, and indeed edited this film as well as directing, but the film's producer, Seymour Nebenzal, probably had more influence over the mood of the piece. Two years earlier he had produced "The Chase" (which also ended with the suggestion that it was all about to start again), and three years later produced "M" - clearly a man with a taste for the noir. The two uncredited directors also have noir credentials. Arthur Ripley had directed "The Chase" for Nebenzal, and John Brahm had directed "The Locket."The film suffers from somewhat disjointed narrative flow in parts, although this may be due to damage to the surviving copies. Whatever its faults, it is better than many reviews suggest, and is surely the weirdest amalgam of exotic "eastern" and film noir that you will ever meet.

This film is a combination of a subtle adventure and love, mystery and revenge and abandonment in the unforgiving Sahara desert.The mystery queen Antinea, of the lost Atlantis, has a penchant for embalming her lovers and using them as ornamental statues in her gallery, until finally, she met a lover who could resist her charms. It is a real pity that this movie is not available on VHS or DVD.