A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, August 31, 2024

Saladin the Victorious (Youssef Chahine, 1963)

Ahmad Mazhar in Saladin the Victorious

Cast: Ahmad Mazhar, Salah Zulfikar, Nadia Lutfi, Hamdy Gheith, Layla Fawzi, Ibrahim Ehmarah, Zaki Tolemat, Mahmoud Al Meleji, Umar El-Hariri, Ahmed Louxor. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Abderrahman Charkawi, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef El Sebai, Mohamed Abdel Gawad. Cinematography: Wadid Sirry. Film editor: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. 

Youssef Chahine's Saladin the Victorious is not quite like any other historical epic about the Crusades that you've seen, and not just because it looks at its subject from the "other side" of the usual Hollywood versions. Oh, it has the usual cast-of-thousands battle scenes, the romantic subplot, the hissable villains,  the stirring soundtrack, the opulent sets and costumes. And it has the historical inaccuracies and anachronisms we've come to associate with the genre. There's no evidence, for example, that the Arabs used Greek fire against siege towers in defending Jerusalem. Handheld telescopes were not commonly used to spy on the enemy until 500 years later. And in a scene set at Christmas, the muezzin's call to prayer segues into Christians singing "Adeste Fideles" ("O Come All Ye Faithful"), the tune of which has been traced to the 18th century but no earlier. Chahine also departs at one point from the conventional documentary style of storytelling and shows simultaneous meetings of the opposing camps not with a split screen but by putting them side-by-side on an obvious soundstage set, using the lights to switch back and forth between the two groups. It's a neat trick, but a theatrical, not a cinematic one. Chahine obviously wants his movie to do more than to tell a rousing story, and he's helped by an attractive performance by Ahmad Mazhar in the title role. It's a film designed partly to promote Arab unity in the mid-1960s, when Egypt and the Middle Eastern countries were flexing their muscles and taking on the colonialist powers. Chahine ignores the fact that the historical Saladin was a Kurd, not an Arab, but even that serves his more humanistic aim, to persuade people to set aside religious and ethnic differences in favor of peace and human unity. Saladin's chief opponent, Richard I of England (played by Hamdy Gheith in an unfortunate red wig) loses his bigotry and hot-headedness in the face of Saladin's peace-making. Yes, it's a message movie, but a watchable one.   


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