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The Garden of Allah
Original Italian film poster
Directed by	Richard Boleslawski
Produced by	David O. Selznick
Written by	William P. Lipscomb Lynn Riggs Robert S. Hichens (novel)
Starring	Marlene Dietrich Charles Boyer Basil Rathbone C. Aubrey Smith Joseph Schildkraut John Carradine
Music by	Max Steiner
Cinematography	Virgil Miller
Editing by	Hal C. Kern Anson Stevenson
Distributed by	Selznick International Pictures United Artists
Release date(s)	15 October 1936
Running time	79 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

The Garden of Allah is a 1936 film made by Selznick International Pictures, directed by Richard Boleslawski and produced by David O. Selznick. The screenplay was written by William P. Lipscomb and Lynn Riggs, based on the 1905 novel by Robert S. Hichens. The music score is by Max Steiner.

The film stars Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer with Basil Rathbone, C. Aubrey Smith, Joseph Schildkraut, John Carradine and Lucile Watson.

Hichens's novel The Garden of Allah had been filmed twice before, as silent films made in 1916 and 1927.

This melancholy romp through the desert is stunningly photographed in Technicolor and lushly decorated and costumed, garnering an honorary Academy Award for cinematography.

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.

And so it does, in the form of straggling legionnaires who pant into camp, only to recognise the liqueur, and the man, as the Trappists they are. Truth must out, and thence to a heart-rending conclusion, at least for the presumed lovers. Excellent turns by Basil Rathbone, Vincent Price, and especially Joseph Schildkraut as Dietrich's sidekick Batouch relieve the obscurity of the plot and the rather haughty treatment of a large cast of "locals". The beautiful desert color and cinematography presage what was to come in Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

• Garden of Allah mansion built by Alla Nazimova on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles that later became part of apartment-hotel complex built by her.

• The Garden of Allah at the Internet Movie Database