Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Programmed and co-presented by the Chicago Film Society  Officially, Fazil is an adaptation of Pierre Frondaie’s 1922 play L’Insoumise, but not because Hollywood was actively scouting the French boulevard for source material. The film really owes its existence to the ostensible posthumous box office power of prototypical heartthrob Rudolph Valentino. As star of The Sheik and Son of the Sheik, Valentino had fired up demand for bodice-tearing desert pictures, and Fox hoped that the embers could still be stoked even two years after his death. Variety assured exhibitors that Fazil might look like a ho-hum ‘woman’s picture,’ but boasted “large and liberal doses of good solid box office sex and sheik stuff.” Charles Farrell stars as Prince Fazil, an Arabian potentate who must reconcile his resolutely traditional ways with the more liberated mores of his new Parisian wife, Fabienne (Greta Nissen). Can Europe’s swankiest night clubs compete with a desert harem? Fazil is assuredly an outlier in the filmography of director Howard Hawks, who only took the studio assignment reluctantly. Hawks fancier Dave Kehr observed that the director “seems to be experimenting with a gauzy, Sternbergian style … totally at odds with his pragmatic personality,” but who wants pragmatism when a beautifully designed, saucy continental fable is on offer? Fox sold Fazil as “Hot as Sahara,” and it remains a naughty vision of culture clash and changing sexual mores. Preserved by the Museum of Modern Art. (CFS) 16mm from the Museum of Modern Art, permission Disney | Not available on disc or streaming!  Preceded by: Laurel & Hardy in “Bacon Grabbers” (Lewis R. Foster, 1929) – 20 min – 16mm