Film in the shadow of the pyramids.

The Egyptian film is the dominant African cinema and appears to have been since at least the 1920s. It has been distributed to Arabic speakers worldwide through that period.

Chahine

IMDB runs a list of the hundred most important Egyptian films (earliest 1930) and after a lifetime’s effort I recognise about a dozen, mainly the films of Youseff Chahine who has acquired Token Arab Filmmaker status. The Paris Cinémathèque did an Egyptian season ten years back. Among fifty, they found one 1930s film. I knew four in their lineup. I suspect those totals put me well ahead of most professionals. Paris now has a Center of Arab Culture doing regular screenings.

SBS did manage a run of Chahine’s best films and festivals pick up a few widely spaced hits - The Yacobian Building, The Nile Hilton Incident and Chahine’s handsome French co production El masar/ Le destin. Things looked up briefly in the DVD era with shops in Punchbowl and Brighton le Sands offering a range of  then recent product (I found al Raghba, / Desire, a 1980 version of  “The Great Gatsby” with Nour El Sherif from Le Destin) and, rather better, a multiplex in Merrylands aired first releases in new, theatrical, English subtitled copies. Of course, those doors slammed shut.

Menna Shalabi & Mohamed Henedy.

However before that happened I ran into the films of Mohamed Henedi who has been described as the Robert De Niro of the Middle East - a bit far fetched. He seems closer to Jim Carey. Henedy turns up in Chahine’s accomplished 1990 Iskanderija, kaman oue kaman/ Alexandria Again and Forever but his impact is as a silly ass comic in a string of increasingly ambitious vehicles, which are generally the most common items where Arab cinema is offered. His YouTube entry runs to pages and, point of the story, a small selection of his work is now on Netflix with good English sub-titles.

Muhammad Yasin’s 2003 Askar fi el-mu'askar/Asker Fel-Moasker/ Askar at the Camp/ Sodiers of the Camp, the earliest of the translated  Henedi films, runs to some ambitious staging. It is done mainly in brief comic sketches, linked by scattered plot elements - military training, (cf. Bob Hope in Caught in the Draft among others) a blood feud (think Ugo Tognazzi in Questione d’onore), the friendship with chubby army buddy Maged El Kedwany (like Aamir Kahn in Laal Singh Chaddha),  Moh’s wedding to the appealing Lekaa El Khomaisy or the disillusion of finding his history teacher uncle Salah Abdulla become Hassan Kolonia the Perfumer, a night club entertainer.

Soldiers of the Camp.

We move from service comedy to Moh’s home leave in Luxor. After he tells El Khamisy / Saadeya, his lady friend, about Egypt as “the center of the world”, they plan their wedding, despite her agro relatives setting the cornfield where they are meeting on fire. In-laws are a problem in these films. The shadow of his family feud hangs over their plans.

The wedding is the film’s high point with chanting women, a blazing torch parade, Moh on horseback with an AK 16, armed guards protecting the ceremony and checking guests while the couple huddle in a sandbag shelter. Complications involve Moh’s dad giving the bridal couple’s bedding to the bodyguards, along with the TV.

Our hero’s army buddy Maged El Kedwany naturally turns out to be the son of the enemy family. Despite all the security, El Kedwany is admitted as a friend of the groom just by flashing an I.D. and comes under fire in his own relatives’ raid, before he can do any avenging.

Moh and the bride flee by train to Cairo, seeking once respectable uncle Salah Abdulla. However he now shares a Cabaret stage with an energetic redhead shimmy dancer, who is ambivalent about having the pair move into her flat. She drags the bride into the bedroom and leaves the couch to the men.

Uncle gets the newlyweds a job as costumed players in a pharaonic show for tourists but the murderous feud catches up with them. Fleeing to a waste ground shanty, the lovers’ attempts to get it on are again thwarted. Sharing a truck load of sand has them once more frustrated, dumped on a building site.

For a bit of cultural dissonance, how about Saadeya, the new wife, who Moh had to threaten with a knife to get her to come across, now complaining that she’s been a bride for three days and she’s still a virgin?

Moh’s attempt to get a transfer away from the camp, where Metawali is also a soldier, is rejected. Sharing the same bunkhouse proves fraught and Moh finds himself on prisoner detail, hand cuffed to a soldier returning to his home to be engulfed by his old neighbors before a suitably happy ending.

The leads are winning and their material serves them well. Wide screen colour production values are good and the unfamiliar setting catches attention, rural local colour - Buffalo in the river, Moh saluting a historic sculpture he passes - contrasted with metropolitan landmarks - the Pointing Statue, the 6th of October Bridge or the the fakey Cairo tourist show the pair are recruited into. This goes with material like the scenes of military training - black uniforms in choreographed hand to hand  combat curiously like Beau Travaille. Just when we are accepting the similarities with our own world we get Moh protesting when his new wife goes marketing with her hair hanging loose or the Sergeant’s first wife finding about the second.

Also on show is Henedy’s most widely offered film, the 2004 Fool el seen el azeem /The Great Chinese Beans directed by Sherif Arafa.

Here the young Moh, who just wants to use his 51% college pass to get an education, is have trouble sleeping, when a burglar breaks in and demands the whereabouts of his gang Czar grand father. At this point, his murderous uncles appear, telling him he’s failed the courage test. They are barely restrained from offing the kid, instead getting him up in a padded muscles suit to conduct their drug buy, where he escapes leaving them behind. So it’s a matter of packing him off to his singer mum who he blinded (!) when he dropped the chandelier on her, during one of her performances in a B&W flashback.

His father in law has Moh substitute for him in an Iron Chef competition in China (actually Thailand) sending him off with a note in Chinese that says he is carrying drugs, stolen by his hapless fellow passenger while our hero is sucked into the jetliner loo for five hours.

Moh is collected by the fetching girl translator in a cab, whose driver keeps on throwing away cell ‘phones with unwelcome messages. Our hero finds a fellow Arab from Beirut in the finals but a Chinese gang, knowing his mob background, figures Mohamed must be there as a hitman and hires him to off the judge, which he avoids by slipping the passenger’s laxative into the meals - ho ho.

The Great Chines Beans

The payoff, delivered by the granny, who holds up threatening messages during the competition, proves to be blank paper and a bomb. His translator hides our hero with her family in the country, saying he’s a suitor, and they set tests for him like eating grasshoppers (close up), Sumo wrestling and leaping off high places. The acupuncturist Grandfather encourages him to use inner strength, which comes in handy when the gangsters show up. The girl will only give her stick-fighter dad his pole if he agrees to help our hero.

At the cooking contest in disguise, Moh emerges from behind the pillar in his chef outfit and wins, scarpering from the assassins but helping a family to victory by using his falling out of tree skill. These films are not strong on logical development.

There’s some obvious wire work, which they demonstrate under the end credits and a few alien moments like the lead encouraging “pray to the prophet!” and joining the Lebanese chef in Arabism.

The locating stock shots are fuzzy digital transfers, like the Egypt Air in-flight material but technical standards are quite good and the pacing carries things, with the leads appealing.

The showpiece here is the new El Ens W El Nems / Humans vs. the Mongoose, again directed Sharif Arafah and clearly a prestige product from its home industry. This big screen, contemporary piece kicks off with Henedi’s family trying to reassure the Parks Inspector that their Kids Fun Fair haunted house exhibit is not scary, despite jump shock figures dropping out of the ceiling as they tour.

We shift to domestic comedy with the family sharing the crowded home bathroom over Mohamed’s objections. Out on the street, he stops a bus hitting not quite pretty Menna Shalabi - who proves a remarkable screen presence. Turns out she’s a Djinn (think Three Thousand Years of Longing) who now can’t get enough of him, being under pressure having aged past the point where she qualifies for an arranged marriage. She invites Mohamed to visit her family home, reached through a fog bank past submerged sculptures, under the guidance of identical, towering, formal dress butlers.

Humans and the Mongoose.

At the spooky mansion, he is greeted by a carnival of monsters, with her parents Sabeen and Amr Abdulgalil, unimpressed among the devil and goblin characters. “We are another race superior to the savages.” After their spooky dance Moh’s awarded a gold bar by Abdulgalil, given to remarks like “I’ll separate his flesh from his bones” and ripping the head off fellow demons. Told not to leave his bedroom at night, Mohamed of course wanders the corridors confronting Shalabi’s chubby sword-wielding, young brother, a zombie and the mongoose, leaving its framed portrait, to swell into a monster which chases him before he finds a lava pit at the foot of a bat filled circular spiral staircase pit. Dad erases his memory, leaving him think it was a dream.

He recruits Mohamed for his confrontation with tailed genie Bayoumi Fouad, who ends up back in the scummiest bottle on earth with the prospect of being buried under a toilet for the next thousand years.

Shalabi is anxious to get on with the fecundation (a light shines under the bedroom door) but Moh, who’s been told her dad will eat him afterward, is somehow reluctant. However she assures him she won’t let that happen to the father of her offspring and her brother adds to his defense, with the now liberated genie joining his team. “If death is inevitable, it is a shame to die a coward.”

Moh’s long-lost father also shows up to guide him to the magician who produces the leather incantation and the bottled spell to be dropped into one of the lava pits (which one?) to stave off the Djinns.

Some nice urban drone shots as punctuation, lots of CG, which is good enough (battle with the Mongoose) in an area where spectacular is common. This one constantly evokes Hollywood models, Jim Carey, Ghostbusters, Men in Black, along with an abrupt Bollywood number, and is paced by inscrutable references like Hano Bavela. The mix is one of the things that hold attention along with backing the winning leads with talented (unfamiliar to us) comics and superior production values.

From the indications in this small sample, Henedi’s films become more ambitious and more approachable as they go. Their scatology without nudity is not for all tastes but kids will devour these.

Ismail Yasine

We got some way down this road before - English sub-titled copies of the fifties comedies of  Ismail Yasine -  his “Cat & the Canary” knock off, Tarzan impersonation or Haram alek spun off Abbott & Costello meet the Ghosts.  They were quite modest black & white affairs and not exactly side splitting but, for some unaccountable reason, they persisted as bootleg DVDs  and they got to be pretty well all the black & white era Egyptian films circulating in the English language market.

Henedi is a more gifted career comedian. I’d place him middle of a scale above Toto, Cantinflas and Jerry Lewis, on a par with Red Skelton before he expanded into TV and maybe shaded by Bob Hope, Lino Banfi, Fernandel and Adam Sandler.

Significantly these comedians are handled dismissively by critics and never make it into festivals. When the horror films were treated this way, their admirers started their own festivals and the work was accepted into the fold. This has never happened with the comics.

However there’s another buzz to be had out of watching Mohamed Henedi’s films. It’s like being faced with Mehboob Kahn and Nargis in the fifties or Sammo Hung and the Shaw Brothers in the seventies. Those films were a bridge into a whole world of film going which we vaguely knew existed but had never been invited to enter. There’s the lure that maybe we can repeat that experience. It could be misleading but Henedi projects an enormously sympathetic personality. His comic timing is impressive and he occupies a space at once familiar and surprising to us. It can’t be a bad idea to discover the way the Arab world thinks of popular entertainment. I enjoy that.

Barrie Pattison 2023

Sprocketed Sources: Badlands

 The Art Gallery of New South Wales has launched a new film season, calling it "Badlands."  These turn out to be films with a 1970s esthetic that an habitué of the Electric Cinema Club or La Rue Champollion would have  recognised. They evoke that period rather than examining the cinema evolution of their "unruly characters, boundary riders and rule breakers." Don't look here for William S. Hart torching Hells Hinges, Friedrich Gnass sassing the St. Pauli cops or Alan Ladd's Raven bringing destruction to The Organisation.

Well, for a city that hasn't had a functioning Cinémathèque this Century, it's still pretty good. It provided a chance to have another look at Akira Kurosawa's 1961 Yôjinbô / Yojimbo - The Bodyguard on a cinema screen with a near capacity audience. 

Once again we kick off seeing unkempt Toshiro Mifune's back, here as he comes to a cross road and, tossing a branch, takes the fork it's fall indicates, continually scratching himself under his coarse robe. Like those predecessors, he's not your clean cut pioneer hero - Erroll Flynn in Dodge City. 

Our so macho lead  finds himself in the village where timber shack inn-keeper Eijirô Tôno stakes him to a plate of rice and fills Mifune in on the feud visible outside his sliding windows. Local merchants Daisuke Katô & Takashi Shimura (that's two out of seven samurai) compete to control the silk fair, having recruited rival mercenaries, including mallet weilding giant Tsunagorô Rashômon. This is where we get the once celebrated (and copied) shot of the dog walking down the street with a man's hand in its mouth.

When he takes down three of the hired goons (glimpse of severed arm still holding a sword) Mifune / Yojimbo becomes a desirable recruit, his price escalating from two to a hundred ryo. “I'll get paid for killing, and this town is full of people who deserve to die.” Soon he's climbing the post to watch the conflict he provoked below and alerts town cooper Atsushi Watanabe  to the fact that his coffin business is about to pick up.  

 Yojimbo - Toshiro Mifune

However Mifune discovers that one boss has carried off the wife of the local his heavies rough up, despite the attempts of their child to see her, and super cool Tatsue Nakadai shows up with the three shot pistol.

Mifune signs on with that lot and then takes down the six henchmen they left watching the woman. When his new boss shows up to survey the chaos (created in a single shot) Toshiro observes that he’d warned that there weren’t enough guards. Saki brewer Shimura's vats catch fire but Nakadai's firepower leaves Mifune bloody and contused to be rescued by the inn keeper and the cooper, hidden in a barrel coffin which they convince one of the bosses to help carry to the cemetery in all the mayhem. Our hero recuperates, impaling fluttering leaves with a kitchen knife (unconvincing effect) to kill time.

This one is really funny and the nice thing is that everyone is in on the joke. Cobweb Castle's Lady MacBeth, Isusu Yamada has a brief comic turn as one leader’s wife. There’s a deliberately super tacky entertainment by the camp follower geishas. The great Masanu Sato score pounds away, but breaks out in Twentieth Century instruments to undercut the drama.

Yojimbo - Kurosawa & Eijirô Tôno

Director Kurosawa's Master Craftsmanship provides unobtrusively complex compositions, characteristically introducing the Elements - wind, rain, dust - even indoors where Mifune stabs the grain storage in the hut ceiling to create an on going shower of rice. It's one of master cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa's least conspicuous outings but his camera finds telling compositions in unremarkable environments.

Yojimbo is, and I'd guess always will be, a model movie entertainment. I'd like to be in the audience watching it in another sixty years. It's quite disturbing when we find participants in this classic samurai adventure turning up in the credits of Godzilla pictures.

With 1964's  Per un pugno di dollari / Fistful of Dollars ripped off from this one and Star Wars from Kakushi-toride no san-akunin / Hidden Fortress, Kurosawa formatted two of the major lines of Twentieth Century cinema. Sergio Corbucci did make his own start on spaghetti westerns and Star Wars is Flash Gordon revived, right down to the tapering roller titles, but it is the point where they adopted the Kurosawa model that these cycles became phenomena.

The copy of Yojimbo screened was an old 35mm. off a second generation negative with its sub-titles printed in. Well, OK but, with these once only chance shows, it would be nice to get best quality. Films like Dragon Inn, The Searchers, The Misfits and The 38th Chamber of Shaolin derive a lot of their impact from best lab work. Don't know about their season's new Australian entry, Echo 8.

Barrie Pattison 2023

The return of Jugnot.

As star or director, Gérard Jugnot has run up a a body of work that has made him one of the most impressive (and agreeable) presences in film. Moving from bit parts (in 1977 he was in Tavernier's Enfants gatés and Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo), through the Bronzés films with his cabaret chums, to solo efforts like Pinot simple flic (1984) and Scout toujours (1985) and  to the peaks of M. Batignole (2002), Fauberg 36 and Les brigades du Tigre (both 2006) and Rose & noir / Fashion victim (2009). It's alarming just how little of his extensive filmography has filtered through to us. Despite loading up on European DVDs, I hadn't seen him on screen since his walk-on in The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir.

Special Correspondents - Jugnot & Gérard Lanvin.

 Now he's turned up in Nicolas Cuche's Pourris gâtés / Spoiled Brats on Netflix, without fanfare, in an excellent, sub-titles copy.

 Spoiled Brats is a re-make of  Gary Alazraki's, 2013 Mexican comedy Nosotros los Nobles. The first impression is that this seems slight after the best we've seen from Jugnot. 

The plot is immediately predictable. Widower industrialist Jugnot’s three adult children Stella Bartek, Artus and Louka Meliava are living wasteful, indulged lives. 

 We know that dad is going to straighten them out and his plan of faking destitution will put them back on the right track. We saw this one in with Kirk Douglas in Jonathon Lynn’s 1994 Greedy for one. However about half way, we realise that there’s intelligence characteristic of Jugnot’s best other movies coming into play. He marches them off to hard times in dreaded Marseilles, as well wishers try to help the impoverished family and charm-loaded fortune hunter Tom Leeb sees through the deception and provides his fake solution to the fake problem.

The surprise aspect of this one is that we get to like the obnoxious offspring and start to share their take on Jugnot, who we’ve been conditioned to give actor recognition approval. We begin to to see that their problems start with him. This is not a particularly profound statement but it is made to play out agreeably with some clever writing - Artus learning what his father couldn’t teach him from a fellow tuk-tuk pedicab driver, now-waitress Bartek joining in spitting on the haricots verts of her abrasive customer and Meliava displaying craftsman skills he developed diverting the college toilets into the dean’s shower.

Spoiled Brats - Tuk tuks in Marseilles.

Resurrecting the dilapidated original family home, as the piece runs, and the wedding climax, complete with a signing translator, support the content.

The craft aspects are excellent with Tristan Tortuyaux'  sunny, wide, colour images and Alexandre Azaria's cheery score. The whole cast are on top of their task. We can see why they gave the last word to Leeb. This one ends up being a polished exercise in feel good. I still feel that Gérard Jugnot is punching below his weight but that’s his decision. It's good to know he's still out there.
 

Spoiled Brats - Bartek and Jugnot.

Barrie Pattison 2023.

Wellman and Wicked Woman

Wellman & Wicked Woman.

You Tube remains heaven’s gift to the serious movie watcher. I never stop finding things there that I never knew existed or thought I’d never get to see. Quite often they look like they were filmed in a blizzard and developed in weak tea but every so often they are stunning sharp and well graded. That’s the lottery aspect of the game.

It's just as well it only surfaced comparatively recently. I find the time I spend between dialing it up and closing it down spreading  to fill whatever leisure I have. I just chalked up William Wellman's first Paramount movie and an example of the fifties Japanese exploitation cinema both of which came as surprises, despite all the time I've spent mining all the other sources I've encountered down the years.

Dokufu Takahashi Oden / Wicked Woman, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa in 1958, comes out of the void. It has the interest of being an isolated example of the Dokufu or femme fatale movies from what was the Golden period of Japanese cinema. A couple of these dealt with real life Oden Takahashi, the last woman to be beheaded in Japan. Films like this were more familiar in the ‘States, where Japanese producers had their own chains of cinemas in the fifties - Toho La Brea anyone? The copy’s English language sub-titles probably date from that period.

The only recognisable name in the credits is busy Tetsurô Tanba (Five Man Army, Suna no utsuwa / Castle of Sand) who does an authoritative turn as the lead’s pimp-gangster employer-lover. As with other infamous women of fifties movie history (Martine Carol doing Lucrezia Borgia, Rita Hayworth as Salomé) then thirty year old Katsuko Wakasugi as Oden is presented as a victim of evil men, a spineless drunk husband, an ailing lover, a seduced policeman and Tamba, who has a line in kidnapping women off the street to stock his below ground brothel.

We kick off with Wakasugi outwitting a Tokyo jeweler, whose diamond she steals by gumming it to the tip of her parasol, where a diligent body search doesn’t find it. However a sharp eyed constable spots the gem and soon she’s dragging him behind the paper screen - less physical than Betty Amann in Asphalt. Her drunken rickshaw-man husband claims he needs money to care for the daughter she abandoned but the mite succumbs, believing she’s going to join her beloved dead mum in heaven.

The action shifts with whore-monger Tamba to China, where Wakasugi becomes queen of his

gambling palace, joining the roulette and strip poker game and taking a brief but uncharacteristically sensuous spa bath (close up of her tattooed back going into the water and long shot where she appears naked cf. the Everybody Pays episode of Tokyo Vice. The cop is on hand to rescue his superior’s sister, who has been installed in the cellar and our heroine ends hands roped, on the train to pay for her sins.

You Only Live Twice - Tamba and Sean Connery.

This mash up of soap opera and sub-noir thirties gangsters derives some interest from the Meiji period plot and settings, all tailored to a formula we are not familiar with. Director Nakagawa handles the variety of subject matter with mechanical assurance. His rickshaw sequence drew praise from those who presumably didn’t think it was a poor man’s version of the set piece in Inagaki’s 1943 Muhomatsu no issho. The film is a must for the curious and has interest for the casual viewer. The copy is passable. 

A more inviting discovery was William A. Wellman’s 1926 You Never Know Women. Though well before his famous work, this one is already a piece of sophisticated film making, even with its formula scripting. 

Walking at night, elegant Florence Vidor is just missed by a falling girder when a workman pulls her out of it’s path. Passing playboy in evening clothes Lowell Sherman takes the credit and later shows up at the theater, where she is appearing with Clive Brook’s Russian (!) circus, bribing the doorman to let him in and offering a replacement for the umbrella that was crushed in the accident - like Mozjoukine in Manulesco.

She is one of the ensemble appearing in doll make-up and masks, along with comic El Brendel, accompanied by a goose wearing glasses, strong man Joe Bonamo coming on twirling a dwarf like a spun parasol and devoted star Brook, doing a Houdini act where they chain him and lower him into a water filled tank in a trunk - which doesn’t trail bubbles.

Lowell moves on Florence, complete with romantic encounter on the studio moonlit terrace and his top hat being dropped over Clive’s Pierrot mask. To simplify the situation, Clive fakes drowning in a failure of his new act, where they dump his trunk into the harbor.  No one seems too worried about the effect on the theater company’s future. It’s only a movie, Ingrid!

Rejected bounder Lowell stays in the theater after everyone has gone and moves on Florence, pursuing her with a convenient flashlight. Film’s best moment is when she pauses in the illusion cabinet and believed-dead Clive appears in her place, halting Lowell’s advances.

You Never Know Women - Vidor and Brook.

Film making is particularly stylish in the staging of the show - curtain propelled by the performers wearing it, legs visible under its edge, the line of made-up players removing their mask-hats. We get Bonomo seeing, through the opened legs of his on-stage partner, bit playing Eugene Palette moving on his tootsie at the party.  Growing intimacy is shown by dissolving (in camera) to a closer medium shot view of the leads or Brook’s attention closing in on Sherman by blacking out the other half of the frame. (I though that was stylish when I saw it first in Thorold Dickinson’s 1949 Queen of Spades) The cast emerge with credit, offering Brendel probably his best role, plausibly Russian and switching to knowing and serious in his last scenes.  

You Never Know Women is not a great film but it is remarkably assured and stylish and a marker in its director’s career. Wellman buddy and later director, Charles Barton worked in Hans Dreier’s art department here and Brendel appears again in Wings.

Though the passable The Boob does beat out the film as the earliest of the Wellman features to survive, this one's You Tube copy is tinted and taken from a sharp original. That’s worth a look on its own account.

Incidentally, as predicted, the copy of  The New Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford has been taken down. You Tube is treacherous, like the ocean. Never turn your back on it.

    

Barrie Pattison 2023