If you're looking for a film version of Romberg's 1920s operetta, don't look here. You'll be very disappointed.
If you decide to watch this movie, which was released in Dec 1943, one year after *Casablanca* by the same studio, Warner Brothers, do keep that fact in mind, however. In November, 1942, while this movie was being made, we invaded North Africa (Operation Torch) as the beginning of what would lead to D-Day and the liberation of Europe. Morocco was therefore very much in the news in the U.S. Romberg's original operetta had been about a Frenchman who worked with the Riffs, a Berber group in North Africa, to drive off the occupying French. It was easy to update that to a story about an American, played by Dennis Morgan, who fights with the Riffs against the French Vichy government - the same one represented by Capt. Renault in *Casablanca* - and plans for a German-financed railway. The script is nowhere nearly as good as the one in *Casablanca*, and neither is the acting, though it's fine here. But this is very clearly a movie designed to take advantage of the recent interest in Morocco, as well as to assure at least some of the Moroccan people that the newly arrived Americans were good guys on their side.
If you decide to watch this movie, which was released in Dec 1943, one year after *Casablanca* by the same studio, Warner Brothers, do keep that fact in mind, however. In November, 1942, while this movie was being made, we invaded North Africa (Operation Torch) as the beginning of what would lead to D-Day and the liberation of Europe. Morocco was therefore very much in the news in the U.S. Romberg's original operetta had been about a Frenchman who worked with the Riffs, a Berber group in North Africa, to drive off the occupying French. It was easy to update that to a story about an American, played by Dennis Morgan, who fights with the Riffs against the French Vichy government - the same one represented by Capt. Renault in *Casablanca* - and plans for a German-financed railway. The script is nowhere nearly as good as the one in *Casablanca*, and neither is the acting, though it's fine here. But this is very clearly a movie designed to take advantage of the recent interest in Morocco, as well as to assure at least some of the Moroccan people that the newly arrived Americans were good guys on their side.