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It sounds vaguely familiar. If I'm not mistaken, there is a scene where the villain is actually impaled in the chest with a sword and laughs it off because his heart is somewhere else.
I too would like to know the name of this film. At first, I thought it might be The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, but none of the descriptions mention a villain like this.
Thank you, Flah! You've given me the keyword I needed: "Sinbad". It seems that it was the movie "Captain Sindbad" (1963). Here's a quote from an IM Db user review:
I forget where this scene occurs, but a special power of the bad guy is that he has magically removed his heart from his chest and placed it in the tower with the hand. At one point in the movie Sindbad actually stabs him through the chest with his sword and the bad guy just laughs because he can't be killed. The whole point of the movie is, if I remember it correctly after all this time, for Sindbad to travel to the tower, where the heart is stored, guarded by the giant hand, so that he can destroy it and kill the bad guy.
So I was right about the date, the Arabian Nights setting, and the evil wizard. However, Sinbad was played by Guy Williams, born in 1924; perhaps he had a young sidekick that I identified with.
Edited by Fred_H
There have also been several movies with the title "the Thief of Baghdad", I feel like at least one of these had this motif of a villain who had removed his soul and so couldn't be killed. (And the hero does eventually find where the sould is hidden, and so kills the villain).
After years of search, for personal reasons, I found yesterday that the mentioned movie where the villain had is soul held in an artefact is indeed The Thief of Bagdad, 1978, with Kabir Bedi as the hero.
(Possibly a film broadcast on TV.) Long, long ago—probably between 1965 and 1970—I saw a program that involved a villain who could not be killed because he had removed his heart and hidden it in a safe place. Thus it was an instance of the Soul Jar trope. Here's what else I think I remember (no guarantees): The setting was lavish and baroque, like something from the Arabian Nights. The bad guy was a ruler or a wizard (or both). The protagonist(s) was/were young; no more than teen-age. It was shown during the "family entertainment" block that used to exist on Sunday evenings.
All very vague and so long ago. Does anyone else recall something like this?