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

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Showing posts with label Hind Rostom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hind Rostom. Show all posts

Friday, June 19, 2026

My One and Only Love (Youssef Chahine, 1957)

Farid El-Atrash and Hind Rostom in My One and Only Love

Cast: Shadia, Farid El-Atrash, Hind Rostom, Abdel Salam El-Nabulsi, Mimi Shakib, Seraj Munir, Abdel Aziz Ahmad, Zinat Sidqi. Screenplay: Abul-Suood El-Ibyari. Cinematography: Ahmed Khrshed. Music: Farid El-Atrash. 

Youssef Chahine's musical romantic farce My One and Only Love (aka Inta Habibi) is an Egyptian equivalent of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies like The Gay Divorcee (Mark Sandrich, 1934), screwball comedies that burst into song. Two initially mismatched people, in this case Yasmine (Shadia) and Farid (Farid El-Atrash), go through a series of misadventures before they finally realize they love each other. Farid has a belly dancing girlfriend, Nana (the comically voluptuous Hind Rostom), and Yasmine has her heart set on a would-be oil millionaire, Semsem (Abdel Salam El-Nabulsi). But they're forced by their families to wed each other because they've been left a substantial legacy on the condition that they do so. After much ado, they decide to marry, collect the fortune, and go their separate ways after a divorce. Much more ado and quite a few songs follow before the inevitable happens. The movie was probably inspired and shaped by Chahine's stay in Hollywood. The character of Semsem has the earmarks of the role Ralph Bellamy used to play: the fiancé who gets dumped. And Farid has a comic sidekick, Shalabi (Abdel Aziz Ahmad), in the manner of Edward Everett Horton. In short, good noisy fun.  

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