How perfectly charming: a Cairo guide named Jamil has returned Diana Standing's (Myrna Loy) lost Pekinese. She doesn't know that Jamil stole the dog so he could get close to the beautiful tourist. Writing in her biography (co-written by James Kotsilibas-Davis), Loy recalled: Every woman's dream of heaven in the twenties was to be carried off to an oasis by Valentino, Ramon Novarro or any reasonable facsimile. Well, that's just what happened to me in The Barbarian. Novarro plays the rakish Jamil, who traverses the desert dunes - with captive Loy in tow - in this exotic pre-Code romance made even more exotic by Loy's famed sequence in the flower-strewn waters of an oasis bathing tub.
