Poloney

Marco the Magnificent looks great on paper. It has a big budget, seven famous names (Anthony Quinn, Horst Bucholz, Omar Sharif, Elsa Martinelli, Orson Welles, Akim Tamiroff, Gregoire Asian), and a hero who was one of history's great adventurers: Marco Polo. On film, unfortunately, it looks terrible.

The script is a riddle. Why eliminate practically all of the exciting events described by the 13th century Venetian in the chronicle of his travels in Cathay, and introduce instead 100 minutes of substandard horse operatics that resemble polo more than Polo? What's more, the cutting looks as though it had been done by a Mongolian headsman; the dubbing is so wildly out of sync that occasionally a word spoken by one actor seems to come out of another actor's mouth; and the color print looks like a fresco restored with the assistance of Clorox.

The actors are plainly demoralized. Quinn, who plays a head-shaven Kublai Khan, just sort of sits there on his throne looking like Yul Brynner with a nasty case of jaundice. Welles, who plays a Venetian savant, is all dressed up to look like Leonardo da Vinci, but then he queers the pitch by muttering something about a navigational device he calls an "astrolobe." Horst Bucholz, who plays the acrobattling hero, obviously doesn't have the thighs for this sort of work, but he makes up for that with some of the niftiest karate ever seen in medieval Persia and in general upholds his hard-earned reputation as the German Tony Curtis.

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