When Tony Martin was discharged from the Navy he was looking for a vehicle that would reestablish him as a top musical lead in Hollywood and decided that a musical adaption of Algiers was just the ticket. He gathered a good supporting cast and the results, while entertaining were a mixed bag.
The best thing that Casbah had going for it was the great musical score that Harold Arlen and Leo Robin wrote for this picture. Four numbers were sung by Martin and co-star Yvonne DeCarlo. Every one of them became a big hit and were a staple of Tony Martin's nightclub act for years. Hooray for Love, What's Good About Goodbye, For Every Man There's A Woman, and It Was Written in the Stars are the songs that Martin does. The last one was identified by Ella Fitzgerald as her favorite Harold Arlen tune and one she insisted on including in her Harold Arlen songbook album.
The score greatly benefited Tony Martin's singing career, but he never did reach the heights on screen as a musical leading man. Acting wise Peter Lorre steals the show as the wily, serpentine Inspector Slimane. Lorre's Slimane is charming, cunning, and treacherous as he uses all of his "little gray cells" to bring down arch criminal Pepe Le Moko, played by Martin who is unassailable in the Casbah section of Algiers.
Yvonne DeCarlo is the tobacco shop owner who's crushing out on Martin and I'm sure that given the location of the story, one could probably get more than tobacco to smoke from her place. The other lead is the jet setting Marta Toren who Martin is panting after and forces him to make a life or death decision. Toren was extraordinarily beautiful woman in the Hedy Lamarr tradition who after a short stay in Hollywood went back to Europe and died there way too young of leukemia in 1957.
If you are a fan of Tony Martin's singing as I am, this is an absolute must. Martin had not yet met and married Cyd Charisse who became wife number two. I think the film might really have been a classic had she done it with Tony. As it is she never did anything together while she was at MGM with her husband and we're the worst for it.
