The Devil of the Desert (Youssef Chahine, 1954)

Omar Sharif and Maryam Fakhruddin in The Devil of the Desert 

Cast: Omar Sharif, Maryam Fakhruddin, Lola Sedki, Tawfik El Dekn, Hamdy Gheith, Abdelghani Kamar, Salah Nazmi. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Hussein El-Mohandess. Cinematography: Alevise Orfanelli, Bruno Salvi. Art direction: Maher Abdel Nour, Hussein Helmy, Abdel Mohem Shokry. Music: Fouad El-Zahry. 

In The Devil of the Desert (aka Devil of the Sahara or Shaytan Al-Sahra), Omar Sharif plays Essam, a masked avenger not unlike Zorro, except that instead of leaving the letter Z as his calling card, he leaves a twisted palm frond -- or as the subtitles call it, a "knitted frond," a phrase that elicited puzzled amusement every time I saw it. This frond is also a way of communicating his whereabouts to his followers, chief among them the "gypsy"* Shaden (Lola Sedki). But it's only one of many things that puzzled and amused me about Youssef Chahine's movie. Basically, it's a lively romp, an adventure movie that could have played in the Saturday matinees of my childhood. Essam even has a comic sidekick, and he swashbuckles his way through the plot twists while trying to decide between the sultry Shaden and the lovely Dalal (Maryam Fakhruddin). Unfortunately, it needed a better fight choreographer -- Sharif sometimes seems to buckle when he should swash. It also suffers from clumsy editing, a muddy soundtrack, and a few too many unnecessary scenes, including three musical numbers. So much is stuffed into its 110-minute run time that it's a surprise when it ends in a breathless rush. It left me feeling that Chahine was bored with the film and wanted to get on to something better.  

*Many Romani consider "gypsy" an ethnic slur. It was derived from the fact that their people were once thought to be descended from an exiled Egyptian tribe. I use it here because it's the way the subtitles to The Devil of the Desert translate it, and being ignorant of Arabic, I don't know what word is used in the film.   

The Blazing Sun (Youssef Chahine, 1954)

 

Omar Sharif in The Blazing Sun

Cast: Omar Sharif, Faten Hamamah, Zaki Rostom, Farid Shawqi, Abdulwareth Asar, Hamdy Gheith. Screenplay: Ali El Zorkani, Hilmi Halim. Cinematography: Ahmed Khorshed. Art direction: Maher Abdel Nour. Film editing: Kamal Abul Ela. Music: Fouad El-Zahry. 

With his big brown eyes and gleaming smile, Omar Sharif was a natural for the movies, and making his film debut, billed as Omar El Cherif, in Youssef Chahine's The Blazing Sun, he proved he could act too. Chahine's melodrama gets off to a bumpy start with some clunky exposition and a bit of scenery chewing from the villains in the piece, wealthy landowner Taher Pasha (Abdelwareth Asar) and his nephew Reyad (Farid Shawqi), but once Sharif appears on the scene and encounters his leading lady, Faten Hamamah, things begin to come together with enough plot twists, suspense, and romance to satisfy even a jaded movie-watcher like me. Sharif plays Ahmed, trained as an engineer, who returns to his village to help his father, Saher Abdel Salam (Abdulwareth Asar), and the peasants harvest a sugarcane crop. But Taher Pasha and Reyad are conniving to keep the peasants from making money and getting uppity. Reyad, whom we first see shooting a cat running across the lawn of his uncle's palatial estate, suggests dousing another poor cat in gasoline, setting it on fire, and letting it loose in the sugarcane. The Pasha is somewhat less sadistic: Just flood the fields, he says, and Reyad complies. Saher and the peasants are ruined. Meanwhile, the Pasha's beautiful young daughter, Amal (Hamamah), is returning home after an absence of many years. While Reyad is driving her from the station, Ahmed spots her and calls out her childhood nickname, "Potatoes." She's delighted to see her childhood boyfriend again, especially since he now looks like a 22-year-old Omar Sharif, much to Reyad's disgust. And so everything is set up for a fateful conflict, which involves a wrongful murder conviction, several other deaths, and a Western-like showdown in the ruins of the temple at Luxor. Handsomely photographed and well-acted, The Blazing Sun doesn't have as much social comment as other films by Chahine that I've seen, but it's thoroughly entertaining.

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia

T.E. Lawrence: Peter O'Toole
Prince Faisal: Alec Guinness
Auda Abu Tayi: Anthony Quinn
Gen. Allenby: Jack Hawkins
Sherif Ali: Omar Sharif
Turkish Bey: José Ferrer
Col. Brighton: Anthony Quayle
Mr. Dryden: Claude Rains
Jackson Bentley: Arthur Kennedy
Gen. Murray: Donald Wolfit
Gasim: I.S. Johar
Majid: Gamil Ratib
Farraj: Michel Ray
Daud: John Dimech
Tafas: Zia Mohyeddin

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Based on the writings of T.E. Lawrence
Cinematography: Freddie Young
Production design: John Box
Film editing: Anne V. Coates
Music: Maurice Jarre

It's often said -- in fact, it was said in today's San Francisco Chronicle -- that David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is one of those films that must be seen in a theater. That statement kind of gets my back up: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? As it happens, I first saw Lawrence in a theater in the year of its release (or at least its European release, which was 1963), but it was a theater in Germany and the film was dubbed in German. Only moderately fluent in spoken German, I don't think I followed the dialogue very well, though I certainly appreciated the spectacle, especially Freddie Young's Oscar-winning cinematography. It took some later viewings on TV in the States for me to grasp the movie's story, though the film was trimmed for time, interrupted by commercials, and subjected to atrocious panning-and-scanning because viewers objected to letterboxing of wide-screen movies. So this viewing was probably my first complete exposure to Lean's celebrated film. And though I watched it at home -- in HD on a 32-inch flat screen TV -- I think I fully appreciated both the spectacle and the story. Which is not to say that I think the movie is all it's celebrated for being. The first half of the film is far more compelling than the latter half, and some of the casting is unforgivable, particularly Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal and Anthony Quinn as Auda. Guinness was usually a subtle actor, but his Faisal is mannered and unconvincing. Quinn simply overacts, as he was prone to do with directors who let him, and his prosthetic beak is atrocious. Omar Sharif, on the other hand, is very good as Ali. The producers are said to have wanted Horst Buchholz or Alain Delon, but they settled on Sharif, already a star in Egypt, and made him an international star. His success points up how unfortunate it is that they couldn't have found Middle Eastern actors to play Faisal and Auda. In his film debut, Peter O'Toole gives a tremendous performance, even though he's nothing like the shorter and more nondescript figure that was the real T.E. Lawrence, and it's sad that screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson couldn't have found room in the script to trace the origins of Lawrence's obsession with Arabia. I recently read Scott Anderson's terrific Lawrence in Arabia: Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which not only depicts Lawrence's complexity but also the madness of the spy-haunted, oil-hungry wartime world in which he played his part. It's beyond the scope of even a three-and-a-half-hour movie to tell, though maybe it would make a tremendous TV miniseries some day.