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.   

Next of Kin (Tony Williams, 1982)

Jacki Kerin in Next of Kin

Cast: Jacki Kerin, John Jarratt, Alex Scott, Gerda Nicolson, Charles McCallum, Bernadette Gibson, Robert Ratti, Vince Delitito, Tommy Dysart, Debra Lawrence. Screenplay: Tony Williams, Michael Heath. Cinematography: Gary Hansen. Art direction: Richard Francis, Nick Hepworth. Film editing: Max Lemon. Music: Klaus Schulze. 

Next of Kin is an Australian creepy old house horror movie, with all the improbabilities, plot holes, and clichés of the genre, but if you stick with it you're rewarded with a literally smashing finale. When her mother dies, Linda (Jacki Kerin) inherits the big gloomy mansion her mother had converted into a nursing home in the rural small town where Linda grew up. She doesn't want the property, though it seems to be capably managed by a woman named Connie (Gerda Nicolson) with a physician, Dr. Barton (Alex Scott), seeing to the medical needs of the residents. After taking a look at the books maintained by her mother, which are something of a mess, Linda is inclined to sell the place and return to the city where she's been living. Even the presence of an old boyfriend, Barney (Alex Scott), doesn't really persuade her to stick around. And then a strange death of one of the residents occurs, and Linda's inspection of her mother's papers stirs her suspicions, particularly where the unexplained disappearance of her Aunt Rita is concerned. Of course, things get creepier, though the way writer-director Tony Williams sets them up is a little slow and clunky. The movie has its admirers, including Quentin Tarantino, who compared it favorably to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). Only the payoff at the end, I think, really measures up to that standard. 

The Sixth Day (Youssef Chahine, 1986)

Dalida in The Sixth Day

Cast: Dalida, Mohsen Mohieddin, Shouweikar, Hamdy Ahmed, Sanaa Younes, Salah El-Saadany, Mohamed Mounir, Youssef Chahine, Abla Kamel, Hasan El-Adl, Maher Esam. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Hasan Al Geretly, based on a novel by Andrée Chedid. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Tarek Salaheddine. Film editing: Luc Barnier. Music: Omar Khairat. 

The French-Italian pop star Dalida, who was born in Egypt, plays Saddika, a middle-aged woman living in a village during the cholera epidemic of 1947. She takes in washing to support her second husband, who is disabled, and her small grandson. Saddika catches the eye of Okka (Mohsen Mohieddine), who is 20 years younger. He's a street performer who works with a trained monkey, and he idolizes Gene Kelly -- to whom the film is dedicated. Okka doesn't have Kelly's talent as either a singer or a dancer, as a fanciful musical interlude demonstrates, but he is energetic in his wooing of Saddika. When her grandson is stricken with cholera, he helps her hide the child from the public health authorities. A bounty is awarded to anyone who reports a cholera victim, and the village is alive with people willing to snitch on their neighbors. Saddika may have good reason to conceal the boy's illness: The sick are taken to a site in the desert that is rumored to be nothing more than a death camp. The film's title comes from the belief that if you survive six days with the disease you're in the clear. Saddika and the boy end up on a river boat accompanied (reluctantly on her part) by Okka. The Sixth Day is mostly coherently narrated, and it has some fine moments of comedy and suspense, but it also contains some incidents that don't quite fit the main story. I'm not sure, for example, what's going on in a scene in which a drunken British soldier is hustled into a bright red car whose passengers are women. Dakka witnesses the incident, but it's not clear what it has to do with his story or Saddika's. I suspect that it's a scene in Andrée Chedid's novel that Youssef Chahine didn't quite integrate into his screenplay. 

La Prisonnière (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1968)

Laurent Terzieff in La Prisonnière

Cast: Laurent Terzieff, Elisabeth Wiener, Bernard Fresson, Dany Carrel, Dario Moreno, Claude Piéplu, Noëlle Adam, Michel Etcheverry. Screenplay: Henri-Georges Clouzot, Monique Lange, Marcel Moussy. Cinematography: Andréas Winding. Production design: Jacques Saulnier. Film editing: Noëlle Balenci.   

La Prisonnière (aka Woman in Chains) was Henri-Georges Clouzot's last film, but in many ways it feels more dated the ones he made a decade earlier, the classic The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955). It's about a couple, Josée (Elisabeth Wiener) and Gilbert (Bernard Fresson) in an "open" relationship that actually seems to be open only on his side. He's an artist, working with visual effects and geometric sculpture, preparing for an exhibition of op art and kinetic art in a gallery owned by Stanislas Hassler (Laurent Terzieff). His preparation includes sleeping with a prominent woman art critic, which Josée tolerates grudgingly. Meanwhile, she becomes involved with Stanislas, which stirs Gilbert's jealousy. She visits Stanislas in his apartment over his gallery, where he puts on a slide show of some of the works in his collection, one of which is a photograph of a nude woman in chains. Josée's curiosity is aroused, in part because she's a film editor working on a documentary about abused women. The photographer is Stanislas himself, and she lets herself be persuaded to watch him photograph one of his models. Josée reacts with a mixture of revulsion and desire. Unfortunately Wiener is not up to the demands of the role: As she tries to portray a woman breaking free from conventional morality, she looks dithery and awkward. Stanislaus taunts Josée that she's a bourgeoise (which the subtitle inadequately translates as "housewife"), and his bullying begins to break down her resistance: She becomes an active participant in his shoots and falls completely in love with him, with disastrous results. One problem with the film is that the depiction of Stanislas's sadomasochism feels timid: We've seen much more disturbing images than these, of topless women in mildly tortured poses, "glamour porn" at worst. (Luis Buñuel gave us more convincing perversity a year earlier in Belle de Jour.) Clouzot seems to be trying to make both a fable about repression and liberation and a cutting satire of the art world of the 1960s, but he fails to make the two aims coalesce.   

The Other (Youssef Chahine, 1999)

Hanan Turk and Hani Salama in The Other

Cast: Hanan Turk, Hani Salama, Nabil Ebeid, Mahmoud Hebeida, Lebleba, Hassan Abdel Hamid, Ezzat Abu Ouf, Amr Saad, Ahmad Wafiq, Edward Said, Hamdine Sabahi, Tamer Samir. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Khaled Youssef. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Hamed Hemdan. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Yehia El Mougy. 

Youssef Chahine's The Other is a mess of a movie, but in a way the mess is its message. It begins with a symbol of unity: the United Nations building, where Adam (Hani Salama), a UCLA graduate student working on a thesis about religious terrorism, meets with a friend to prepare for their interview with Edward Said, the celebrated Palestinian-American literature professor at Columbia. During the interview, Said reiterates his concern about the way contemporary civilization is torn by disunity, by the tendency to treat one's opponents as "the other" instead of recognizing their common humanity. And so Chahine introduces his theme, which amounts to an exploration of such immense topics as global capitalism, cultural appropriation, and terrorism. Chahine tries to develop his theme through a love story: Adam falls in love at first sight of the pretty Hanane (Hanan Turk) waiting in an airport. She's a journalist out to interview a man who wants to build an interfaith retreat on his land in the Egyptian desert. Adam is on his way to visit his parents in Egypt, who just happen to be backing the project. So he facilitates the interview and wins Hanane's heart. Unfortunately, Adam's cynical and corrupt parents are only looking to make money off the project, acquiring the land and then selling it to a hotel company. Margaret, Adam's mother (Nabil Ebeid), is an American who married a wealthy Egyptian, Khalil (Mahmoud Hebeida), for his money. Her real -- and creepy -- love is for her handsome son, and naturally she is appalled when he marries Hanane, who comes from a lower class family. The complications ensuing from this familiar star-crossed lovers trope are perhaps enough for a romantic drama, but not to develop Chahine's larger theme, especially since he underscores the love story with a kind of "Ballad of Adam and Hanane" sung off-screen during key moments in their relationship. There's also an extended scene of dancing and singing at their wedding, partly to emphasize Margaret's distaste for the whole thing. And when Margaret causes a break between the couple, it stirs Adam, whom we have seen as smart and affectionate, to violence: He strikes Hanane and rapes her. The scene feels inconsistent with the characters, especially when Hanane, whom we have seen as tough and independent, forgives him. In short, The Other provides an object lesson on the danger of overreaching.   

The Public Eye (Howard Franklin, 1992)

Joe Pesci and Barbara Hershey in The Public Eye

Cast: Joe Pesci, Barbara Hershey, Stanley Tucci, Jerry Adler, Dominic Chianese, Richard Riehle, Richard Schiff, Jared Harris. Screenplay: Howard Franklin. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Marcia Hinds. Film editing: Evan A. Lottman. Music: Mark Isham. 

Before they were paparazzi, they were shutterbugs, and the most notorious of them was Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee. Fellig's ability to get to a crime scene first, often before the police, made him famous, but he also thought of himself as a serious documentary photographer. Howard Franklin based the protagonist of The Public Eye, Leon Bernstein, aka Bernzy (Joe Pesci), on Fellig/Weegee, including the character's willingness to cheat a little to make his pictures better. Bernzy, for example, coming upon a corpse before the cops arrive, rearranges the body a little to make the composition of the shot better. Once, he asks a bystander to toss the victim's hat into the frame: "People like to see the hat," he says. Weegee likewise knew how to pose and frame his pictures: One of his most famous documents the arrival of a pair of bejeweled and befurred dowagers at the Metropolitan Opera opening night in 1943, while a drab and frowzy woman gawps at them. It was published in Life magazine and in the following year was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, where the reaction to its comic juxtaposition gave the shutterbug a reputation as an artist. But it was not a candid photograph: Weegee and his friends had found a barfly, plied her with wine, and shoved her into the frame at just the right moment. Franklin gives Bernzy some of Weegee's duplicity, but he's more intent on making his shutterbug into a hero who uses his street smarts to foil a plot by the mob to muscle in on the distribution of gasoline rationing coupons -- the film takes place in 1942. He also falls in love with Kay Levitz (Barbara Hershey), a beautiful nightclub owner. In short, the movie is slick when it should be gritty. Pesci gives a restrained performance, almost as if he doesn't want to repeat himself, having just won an Oscar as the volatile Tommy DeVito ("What do you mean I'm funny?") in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). There are good performances by Hershey, Stanley Tucci as a young mobster, Jerry Adler as a newspaper columnist friend of Bernzy's, and Jared Harris as a doorman at Kay's nightclub. But the movie never builds the tension it needs for the story to have much payoff at the end. 

Scattered Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1967)

Yuzo Kayama and Yoko Tsukasa in Scattered Clouds

Cast: Yoko Tsukasa, Yuzo Kayama, Mitsuko Kusabue, Mitsuko Mori, Mie Hama, Daisuke Kato, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Yu Fujiki, Tadao Nakamura. Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada. Cinematography: Yuzuru Aizawa. Production design: Satoru Chuko. Film editing: Eiji Ooi. Music: Toru Takemitsu. 

As Scattered Clouds opens, Yumiko Eda (Yoko Tsukasa) is as happy as a married woman can be: Her husband has just had a promotion that will take them from Tokyo to Washington, D.C., and she has just learned that she's pregnant. And then he's killed in an accident and she loses the child. It's a mark of Mikio Naruse's masterly control of tone that he chooses neither to show the accident happening or to make explicit how her pregnancy ended -- whether it was a miscarriage or an abortion. The cause is less important than the effect: Yumiko's utter devastation. And then we switch from her point of view to learn that the driver who killed her husband, Shiro Mishima (Yuzo Kayama), was devastated by the accident in his own way. Although he is exonerated -- he was in no way responsible for the death of Yumiko's husband, the result of a blown-out tire that caused him to lose control of the car -- he suffers at work: His company wants to avoid scandal and transfers him to a less-desirable location. He also suffers from guilt: Desperate to make amends, he arranges to send Yumiko a monthly stipend. She needs the money: Her husband's family coldly distances itself from her, and the insurance isn't enough to live on. But she proudly rejects Shiro's offer, regarding it as "blood money," until it's apparent that she needs it to survive. To that point, Scattered Clouds is a probing look at the nature of grief and guilt. And then melodrama sets in: Shiro's transfer coincidentally puts him in the neighborhood of the inn that Yumiko's sister-in-law runs, and Yumiko takes a job as hostess at the inn. As their plot-crossed paths intersect, Shiro and Yumiko overcome their initial antipathy and fall in love. But what matters in Scattered Clouds is not the familiarity of the tropes of melodrama but the skill with which Naruse, his actors, and his crew -- especially composer Toru Takemitsu -- handle them. It's an irresistible film, no matter how contrived its plot, and if you're not a little teary-eyed when it ends, I feel sorry for you.   

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.   

Baba Yaga (Corrado Farina, 1973)

Carroll Baker and Isabella De Funès in Baba Yaga

Cast: Carroll Baker, Isabella De Funès, George Eastman, Ely Galleani, Daniela Balzaretti, Mario Mattia Giorgetti, Sergio Masieri, Angela Covello, Cesarina Amendola. Screenplay: Corrado Farina, Giulio Berruti, François de Lannurien, based on the graphic novels of Guido Crepax. Cinematography: Alace Parolin. Art direction: Giulia Mafai. Film editing: Giulio Berruti. Music: Piero Umiliani. 

If this silly attempt at an erotic horror thriller hadn't been botched in pre-production by changes in producer, production company, and cast, and if it hadn't been heavily cut in post-production without director Corrado Farina's involvement or even knowledge, it might have been more coherent and involving. But even that's doubtful. It was only Farina's second feature film as director, and he never made another. Moreover, it's based on a tiresome and offensive trope: the predatory lesbian. The title character, played by Carroll Baker,  has no resemblance to the hag of Slavic legend. She's a mysterious recluse living in a decaying mansion in Milan. One night, she runs into -- literally, in her car -- the fashion photographer Valentina (Isabella De Funès), whom she begins to cast a spell over, partly by hexing Valentina's Hasselblad. Weird stuff involving a doll in S&M garb that comes to life ensues, and Valentina has to be rescued from Baba Yaga's clutches by her boyfriend (George Eastman). People familiar with Guido Crepax's adult comics may appreciate the film more than those who aren't. I'm not, and I found it more tedious than titillating.   

Flowing (Mikio Naruse, 1956)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Isuzu Yamada in Flowing

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Hideko Takamine, Mariko Okada, Haruko Sugimura, Sumiko Kurishima, Chieko Nakakita, Natsuko Kahara, Seiji Miyaguchi, Daisuke Kato. Screenplay: Toshiro Ide, Aya Koda, Sumie Tanaka, based on a novel by Koda. Cinematography: Masao Tamai. Production design: Satoru Chuko. Film editing: Eiji Ooi. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Having been a college English teacher and a print journalist, I know something about what it's like to be in a dying profession. So I have some empathy with the women in the geisha house in Mikio Naruse's Flowing. Their story is told largely from the point of view of Rita Yamanaka (Kinuyo Tanaka), whose name the owner of the house, Otsuta (Isuzu Yamada), finds too difficult to pronounce, so she calls her Oharu, a name that will have resonance for anyone who has seen Kenji Mizoguchi's 1952 masterpiece, The Life of Oharu. But unlike Mizoguchi's heroine, this Oharu is a simple woman in a profession that will probably never vanish: a maid. Her quiet ubiquity in the house enables her to see and hear things that heighten her mistress's financial struggles and the household's eventual doom. Equally valuable is the role of Katsuya (Hideko Takamine), Otsuta's daughter, who was trained as a geisha but doesn't want to be one. She regards her mother's profession as a commodification of self. Unfortunately, Katsuya has no marketable skills and is struggling to find her way in a male-dominated world. Naruse's film is a poignant and searching commentary not only on the disappearing way of the geisha but also on the role of women in a society trying to redefine the relationship between the sexes. Tanaka, Yamada, and Takamine are three of the greatest Japanese actors; it's a treat to see them working together, and they're beautifully supported by the rest of the cast.