Marco the Magnificent (1965)

Original title:  La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo

Directors:  Denys de La Patelliere, Noel Howard

Writers:  Denys de La Patelliere, Raoul Levy, Jacques Remy, Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Composer:  Georges Garvarentz

Starring:  Horst Buchholz, Gregoire Aslan, Robert Hossein, Elsa Martinelli, Akim Tamiroff, Omar Sharif, Anhony Quinn, Orson Welles, Massimo Girotti

More info:  IMDb

Tagline:  It's ADVENTURE at its highest with the star-studded cast of the year!

Plot:  Young Marco Polo travels to China to help Kublai Khan fight against rebels, headed by his own son, with a new invention: gunpowder.

My rating:  5/10

Will I watch it again?   No.

That image wasn't meant to fool anyone into thinking this movie is worthy of being seen.  It's not.  I'm surprised this near two hour epic is as dull as it is.  The first half gets pretty damn boring.  For a while it almost seems like a longer version of the kind of films you'd see in middle school classrooms back in the 60s and 70s, where the AV kid would roll in the 16 mm projector and we'd all fight to stay awake.  That first hour has LOTS of narration by a narrator and not someone from the film.  That contributes to the school film vibe.  Marco meets a lot of people along the way and the film spends waaaayyyy too much time with The Old Man of the Mountain (as seen wearing the gold mask above).  Why they devoted so much time on this character and Marco's role with him (Marco was captured by The Old Man and briefly imprisoned) is beyond me.  I guess it was an excuse to sex up the picture a little with those sexy and definitely 13th Century slave girl outfits.  They don't look mid-60s at all.  The real meat of the story is in the last half hour (or less) when Marco finally reaches his goal of meeting with Kublai Khan (nicely played by Anthony Quinn).  That's when Khan and Marco discuss politics and philosophy.  There's a brief battle that closes the film where Khan uses gunpowder for the first time in history which is ludicrous.   He lights firework rockets at the oncoming infantry which have the effect of 20th Century mortars.  The hell was that?  Some of the dialogue is cheap but that's not as bad as the disjointed film, made up of what sometimes feels like random scenes that are either over done or under cooked.  There's little that feels like it was ready to be a part of a large epic tale of adventure.  I get the idea that whoever spearheaded this thing was ill-equipped to handle a production on this scale; at least that's how the finished product looks.