Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

utgard14 Venetian Marco Polo (Gary Cooper) travels to China and meets the famed ruler Kublai Khan (George Barbier). While there he learns about all kinds of nifty things like spaghetti, gunpowder, and firecrackers. He also falls in love with Khan's beautiful daughter, Princess Kukachin (Sigrid Gurie). Unfortunately he must deal with the evil machinations of Khan's scheming adviser, Ahmed (Basil Rathbone).Diverting adventure drama with a slightly miscast Cooper having a good time. Rathbone is great as a villain. Ernest Truex is good fun as Polo's comic relief sidekick. Sigrid Gurie is lovely to look at and listen to. Best scene is where Cooper teaches her how to kiss. As a history lesson you could probably wipe with it. As entertainment, it's enjoyable and fun.

bkoganbing Gary Cooper had a most interesting relationship with Sam Goldwyn. He did seven films with Goldwyn and a cursory glance at the titles shows that Goldwyn was constantly giving him better and more suitable material for him. With The Adventures of Marco Polo he could hardly have done worse.How can I say it, Gary Cooper just does not suggest a renaissance Italian Man. Unless they all had that Montana drawl. Contrast his performance here with Tyrone Power in Prince of Foxes or in The Black Rose where he plays an Englishman in the China of Kublai Khan. Power in this part would have made it believable. But Darryl Zanuck wasn't giving Ty Power's services away.To complete the film, cowboy Cooper is given a Smiley Burnette like sidekick in Ernest Truex. The two of them as the history books tell us, go off to the court of Kublai Khan to negotiate a trade agreement for Venetian merchants, particularly the House of Polo.There the real history stops as Cooper gets involved in all kinds of palace intrigue.Here's some of where Sam Goldwyn's casting gets positively zany. George Barbier is Kublai Khan and Goldwyn must have seen Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades where Barbier played King Sancho. Worked for C.B. it'll work for me. Sigrid Gurie was another Scandinavian import, another one trying to be another Greta Garbo. If Anna Sten didn't work, we'll make Sigrid a Scandinavian Mongol Princess. Best of all is Basil Rathbone as Ahmed, his Saracen adviser who plays the part just as if he was playing Guy of Gisborne. Rathbone carried it through however, he must have seen how all around him looked so he could hide in the crowd.H.B. Warner had the year before played the High Lama Chang in Lost Horizon. Here he's a clever fellow who shows Marco Polo this latest thing the Chinese have invented called gunpowder. Actually they'd had it for some time and the west had had it also, a fellow named Roger Bacon had written extensively and experimented even more extensively with the stuff a couple of centuries before. Never mind it took Gary Cooper to see its possibilities.Sam Goldwyn's sets were lavish and the battle scenes at the end very well staged. That it has nothing to do with any history is only a minor criticism, it does not succeed because of the unbelievable plot and incredible casting.

edwagreen The above statement is what one critic referred to when the film came out in 1938.It is simply an awful amateurish-like production by Samuel Goldwyn. Mr. Goldwyn produced an absolute bomb here in his depiction of Polo (Gary Cooper) going to China.By the way, with the exception of a map stating Cathay, ancient Cathay is referred to as China in this film. Who did the research for Mr. Goldwyn here, the 3 stooges?The acting is just awful. Gary Cooper comes across like a western star and Sigrid Gurie, his leading lady, must have thought she was doing a poor imitation of Luise Rainer in "The Good Earth."You know you're in for it when Ernest Truex, the bookkeeper, goes singing "Marco Polo" on a gondola at the beginning of the film.Alan Hale and Binnie Barnes play leaders in western China where the Kublai Khan sends them to. The Khan, played by a fellow by the last name of Barbier, sounds like a Brooklyn or Bronx truck man. Barnes and Hale are completely unfaithful to each other.Basil Rathbone, as evil as ever as the horrible Ahmed, minister to the khan, even looks disgusted and rightfully so by all this.H.B. Warner provides the firecrackers, spaghetti and gun powder for all this.Goldwyn lost a bundle on this mess and rightfully so. Since Technicolor was sparingly used in 1937, the film did not have it. It would not have helped.

wuxmup You either get it or you don't. Like most studio films, this movie was intended to make money by providing one thing - entertainment. Not a history lesson, not social commentary. Entertainment. Like the better realized but equally fake-medieval "Adventures of Robin Hood," released the same year (1938), "The Adventures of Marco Polo" (note the similar title) provides plenty of entertainment in the comedy-adventure genre that eventually led to "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Evaluating either "Raiders" or "Marco Polo" on its historical accuracy misses the point. It's like asking how Marco is able to speak what must be flawless Mandarin, plus the language of Alan Hale's presumably Turkic people. If you gotta ask, the movie just isn't your style.Cooper looks a little less comfortable in this role than in some others, but he's adequately wry and intrepid, never taking the role of Marco too seriously. The rarely-seen Sigrid Gurie, whose face reminds one of Garbo, even through the Asian makeup, is beautiful and ethereal as the daughter of Kublai, played with Midwestern folksiness by the affable George Barbier. (Remember, it's not supposed to be real.) As Kublai's evil vizier, Basil Rathbone emanates the same elegant menace as he did in the role of Sir Guy in "Robin Hood." The ubiquitous Alan Hale, Sr., plays his usual self, and if you look carefully you'll see teenybopper Lana Turner in a small but fully credited role.Why aren't there any Chinese here in leading roles? Because first, the studio had big-name actors on contract and meant to use their box-office appeal to make a bundle. Second, despite the potentially impressive Asian-American talent pool in California no greed-driven executive would have counted on white audiences in 1938 to shell out Depression-era cash to watch Asian unknowns acting the leads in for-profit motion picture. "The Adventures of Marco Polo" is not "The Last Emperor," and it doesn't pretend to be. Nor is it a misconceived turkey like John Wayne's Mongol epic "The Conqueror" (1961). Instead it's only a great "family film" and simple adventurous fun in the pulp-magazine tradition.