Morocco Time

Of all the movies supposedly set in Morocco, this is the worst – I’m watching it right now on TCM, and I can’t look away, it’s that bad!

Boyer, playing a Trappist monk on the lam (Boris Androvski), wants to live and love, after feeling, well, trapped in the order. Yet he is the only one who knows the secret recipe of the monastery’s famous liqueur, not to mention that his marriage to the church is a vow unto death. Meanwhile, Dietrich, as heiress Domini Enfilden, is newy freed from her own prison of caring for her just deceased father and also seeks the frisson of the North African desert to nuture her soul (actually, Yuma, Arizona), travelling on a comically rendered model steamship.

They inevitably meet, and strike up sparks that, while not exactly visible to the viewer, are attested to in speeches with a wooden fervor. Perhaps marriage will cure their separate sadnesses? This is duly, if reluctantly, arranged by the local priest (odd, in this Muslim land), after which the newlyweds are whisked off in a preposterous camel-mounted billow of fabric into the scorching desert- a trip that the local sand-diviner has inconveniently forecast will come to a bad end.

Perhaps I should have consulted a “sand-diviner” before my own Moroccan marriage – must suggest this to Hamou tomorrow. Also must tell him that I was only seeking the “frisson” of the desert. He’ll think it’s a bad word.