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| Laila Mourad and Yehia Chahine in Lady of the Train |
Youssef Chahine's fourth feature film, Lady of the Train, is a musical melodrama that starts out like a film noir. Laila Mourad plays a famous singer married to a compulsive gambler played by Yehia Chahine, the director's cousin. When he gambles away the family fortune, she boards a train for a concert date, and is thought to be dead when the train crashes. Learning that she survived the crash, he persuades her to go in hiding so he can collect her life insurance. When his scheme threatens to be revealed, he disappears, leaving her to fend for herself and taking their young daughter with him. Twenty years pass, as an awkwardly inserted voiceover tells us. The daughter grows up to look exactly like her mother (and is played by Mourad, of course). The usual reconciliation soap operatics ensue. Chahine uses some sophisticated filmmaking techniques to make this nonsense work, though they sometimes contrast almost comically with the film's naïve narrative and cost-cutting effects. The crucial train crash, for example, features an obvious model train, and the sets for the musical numbers, which include a tribute to the Egyptian textile industry, are sometimes cheesy. In one scene, set in an office, a picture on the wall has been crudely blotted out, leaving a jittery, fluttering patch in the background behind the characters. It was apparently a portrait of King Farouk, who fell from power in 1952 while the movie was being made. Lady of the Train is an entertaining mess, but it's full of the promise that Chahine would fulfill a few years later.
