If Maria Montez wasn’t gorgeous enough to melt your TV screen, this clumsy set-bound exotic adventure would be rough going. Her flawless face, shapely figure and proto-Bettie Page hairstyle are shot lovingly in a film that otherwise doesn’t know what to do with itself. Without her, all you’ve got are Dennis O’Keefe and Jean-Pierre Aumont (Montez’s real-life husband) debating endlessly with each other about ambition and loyalty in dull two-shots. They’re Foreign Legion men who happen to find a hidden passage to the lost city of Atlantis somewhere in the African desert. Montez is the queen who runs the place like Ming the Merciless while O’Keefe and Aumont try to figure out which one of them is Flash Gordon. Meanwhile, eternally cold and stuffy character-actor Henry Daniell plays Montez’s manservant, who the film suggests, with 1949 discretion, is a eunuch (after all, she did cut out the tongue of one of her other underlings). The smartest thing about this little blip of a film is that Montez doesn’t play the queen as an evil-eyed scenery chewer. Rather, she’s stately and dignified. She’s not looking to expand her power; she’s looking for a worthy man whom she can stand being around without having to chop off parts of him.