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THE SLAPS FELT AROUND THE ARAB WORLD: FAMILY AND NATIONAL MELODRAMA IN TWO NASSER-ERA MUSICALS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2007

Joel Gordon
Joel Gordon
Affiliation:
Joel Gordon is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Ark. 72701, USA; e-mail: joelg@uark.edu.
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Extract

This essay is an attempt to read popular melodrama as a reflection of changing societal appreciations of sentimentality, romance, family relations, and, ultimately, political authority over the course of a tumultuous decade in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history, the 1960s. I focus my gaze upon two particular films that were in their day popular hits, one of them an unprecedented blockbuster, and that remain genre classics. Both feature popular screen icon ءAbd al-Halim Hafiz, the greatest vocalist of his generation, a recording and performing artist who came of age with the onset of the July 1952 Free Officers' revolution and was intimately associated with the Nasserist project. Both films treat generation gaps relating specifically to issues of dating and courtship—what might be called, in the context of their era, “free love.” Both are concerned with troubled relationships between a son and his disapproving, authoritarian father. Halim's father in both films is played by the same actor, ءImad Hamdi, and Halim's love interest—albeit in very different contexts—is played by the same ravishing starlet, Nadia Lutfi. Finally, both films turn upon a single powerful dramatic act of parental discipline, a slap (or series of slaps) delivered by an outraged patriarch across the cheek of a rebellious, yet ultimately dutiful, son.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , May 2007, pp. 209 - 228
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© 2007 Cambridge University Press

This essay is an attempt to read popular melodrama as a reflection of changing societal appreciations of sentimentality, romance, family relations, and, ultimately, political authority over the course of a tumultuous decade in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history, the 1960s. I focus my gaze upon two particular films that were in their day popular hits, one of them an unprecedented blockbuster, and that remain genre classics. Both feature popular screen icon ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz, the greatest vocalist of his generation, a recording and performing artist who came of age with the onset of the July 1952 Free Officers' revolution and was intimately associated with the Nasserist project. Both films treat generation gaps relating specifically to issues of dating and courtship—what might be called, in the context of their era, “free love.” Both are concerned with troubled relationships between a son and his disapproving, authoritarian father. Halim's father in both films is played by the same actor, ʿImad Hamdi, and Halim's love interest—albeit in very different contexts—is played by the same ravishing starlet, Nadia Lutfi. Finally, both films turn upon a single powerful dramatic act of parental discipline, a slap (or series of slaps) delivered by an outraged patriarch across the cheek of a rebellious, yet ultimately dutiful, son.

Both films were produced by private sector impresarios in the second decade of rule by Gamal Abdel Nasser, leader of the secret military organization that toppled Egypt's monarchy, ended Britain's seventy-year occupation, and established the authoritarian republic that still governs the country. The Nasser era was characterized by heady optimism—dreams of modernization, social welfare, and regional and global prestige.1

Joel Gordon, Nasser: Hero of the Arab Nation (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006).

What makes the two films of particular interest is that they bookend the regime's second decade. Al-Khataya (The Sins, 1962) appeared at a time when Egypt had been shaken by Syria's secession from the ill-starred United Arab Republic but when the Nasserist dream remained very much alive. Abi fawq al-shagara (Father's Up a Tree, or, idiomatically, The Apple Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree, 1969) appeared two years after the devastating naksa (setback) of June 1967 that so undercut those dreams and a year before Nasser's death.2

Due to the aural nature of the primary texts utilized in this essay, films scripted and pop songs sung in colloquial Egyptian dialect, I have opted to utilize the colloquial “g” in place of the fuṣḥā “j” that is normally rendered in this journal: thus, Abi fawq al-shagara (rather than shajara). All other standard transliteration conventions are observed.

It was filmed in color, still the prerogative of a limited number of private sector moguls. To many critics who had hoped to see the state promote a higher art form for cinemagoers, Abi fawq al-shagara represented, much like the naksa in broader terms, a stunning retreat. Because Abi fawq al-shagara was the more notorious and by far greater hit, and because it also proposed a greater shift in normative behavior (on a variety of social and “artistic” levels), I foreground it and treat it in greater detail—even though it completed production and screened in theaters seven years after al-Khataya.

MELODRAMATIC IMAGININGS AND SLAPS AROUND THE WORLD

Popular melodramas, by definition, play off of viewers' expectations and innate hunches about plot and character development, problem, and denouement. Mise en scène and actors playing to type contribute to a predictability that is, when everything works, ultimately satisfying. Frank Rahill's now classic definition of melodrama as “hodgepodge” cuts across global and artistic boundaries:

Primarily concerned with situation and plot, it calls upon mimed action extensively and employs a more or less fixed complement of stock characters, the most important of which are a suffering heroine or hero, a persecuting villain, and benevolent comic. It is conventionally moral and humanitarian in point of view and sentimental and optimistic in temper, concluding its fable happily with virtue rewarded after many trials and vice punished. Characteristically it offers elaborate scenic accessories and miscellaneous divertissements and introduces music freely, typically to underscore dramatic effect.3

Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park, Pa./London: Pennsylvania University Press, 1967), xiv.

As “fable,” melodramas carry a moral in which “behavior finds its reward or comeuppance” in terms of some ultimate “justice” about which receivers—viewers, in film terms—“must somehow agree.”4

John L. Fell, “Melodrama, the Movies, and Genre,” in Melodrama, ed. Daniel C. Gerould (New York: New York Literary Forum, n.d.), 187–88.

The requisite happy ending is, according to Stanley Kaufmann, “both a theological affirmation and a social emollient.”5

Stanley Kauffmann, “Melodrama and Farce: A Note on Fusion in Film,” in Melodrama, 172.

The critique often explicit in such an understanding of genre films in general is that they are “easy to imitate and have been debased by stale mechanical repetition. Genre conventions are mere clichés unless they're united with significant innovations in style or subject matter.”6

Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999), 350.

They are “eclectic, vulgar and impure,” a “saleable commodity” that can be “fabricated by anyone,”7

Daniel C. Gerould, “The Americanization of Melodrama,” in American Melodrama, ed. Daniel C. Gerould (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1983), 8.

and “machine-made entertainment dealing in vulgar extravagance, implausible motivation, meretricious sensation and spurious pathos.”8

James L. Smith, Melodrama (London: Meuthen and Company, 1973), 6.

Even when the audience is appreciated as an “interpretive community” rather than passive consumers, the product remains derided for its tendency to “enforce a single pre-determined reading or at least to increase the probability that certain other interpretations will remain unexplored.”9

Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987), 2–5.

Once we move past disparagement, however, it is possible to explore the meaning behind shifts in convention, especially those that change “for reasons entirely out of the control of filmmakers and film critics,”10

Andrew Tudor, “Genre,” in Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1995), 10.

or to appreciate popular, “totally successful” films that “derive their power from the traditions of a genre rather than from any distinctive directorial contribution.”11

Edward Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre in American Cinema,” in Film Genre Reader II, 19.

We can attempt to read and appreciate melodrama as a barometer of social tastes and transformations, a reflection of a broader politic as well, at times, as a swipe at elite criticism. We might even recognize how audiences may at once be both “oppressed” by an affirmation of normative behavior and simultaneously “liberated” by the very suggestion of a possible alternative narrative—even if that narrative remains unfulfilled by the filmed script that audiences view.12

The terms “oppressed” and “liberated” are from Robert Lang, American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 4.

Even within a genre that by nature does not represent “a call for radical change,” one can still, as Robert Lang argues, hope for “some sort of adjustment to the dominant culture.”13

Lang, American Film Melodrama, 8–9.

Particularly in its purest cinematic form—the film musical—melodrama raises special questions about the social function and impact of sentimentalism. As Martin Stokes has written, “the term sentimentalism registers, very negatively, a reordering of public space: of once active citizens now passive consumers, individuated and atomized in front of cinema screens, radios or television sets, of women, once noisy and confident in their place in the scheme of things, now silent, tearful and insecure before the new silver screen gods, all male.”14

Martin Stokes, “Adam Smith and the Dark Nightingale: On Twentieth Century Sentimentalism,” Twentieth Century Music (forthcoming).

Stokes reinforces classic presumptions that melodrama—and especially “family” or “domestic” melodramas, a category that fits both Halim films here under study—are fundamentally directed toward the female viewer, more specifically “the traditionally heterosexual female viewer.”15

Lang, American Film Melodrama, 5.

In attempting to understand not only the “ideology of emotionalism and the aesthetics of spectacle”16

Ibid., 7.

but also cinema as a window through which to view shifting representations of state authority, my gaze is toward “Hollywood on the Nile,” Egypt's oft-maligned studio industry that has dominated Arabic language cinema for over a century. As with the recording industry, and to a certain extent theater, it was in Egypt that aspiring actors, technicians, directors, and studio bosses discovered fertile ground to create new personas and establish commercial empires. Working primarily in the Egyptian dialect of spoken Arabic, albeit in stylized elocution, native sons and daughters, as well as costars from throughout the Arab world, set standards for beauty, glamour, sexuality, and desire. To a great extent, notwithstanding the trials and tribulations of recent decades when industry output has waned, this remains the case today.

In their glory years, from the end of World War II through the middle 1970s, Cairo-based studios churned out upward of fifty films per year. With the onset of the Nasser revolution following the 1952 Free Officers' coup, a series of long-standing taboos against treating social and economic ills (in addition to certain political realities, such as colonialism, foreign domination, and royal and parliamentary-era misadministration and oppression) were swept away. Egypt's filmmakers, who had been pushing the edges of censorship in the early 1950s, jumped at newfound opportunities to depict more explicit poverty as well as sexuality. They criticized lingering societal norms and practices both amongst rural and urban, poor and middle-class sectors.17

Joel Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser's Egypt (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, 2002), 59–61, 100–16.

In the late 1950s, responding to criticism of the film industry as genre-laden, frivolous, and escapist, the state began to play a greater role in encouraging more artistic cinematic endeavors. The sweep of Arab socialism in the early 1960s did not result in total nationalization of the industry, but a parallel public sector began to compete with Egypt's free-market studios. The debate over whether the public sector promoted or stifled artistic endeavors remains volatile even today. “Many Egyptian intellectuals remember the period as the golden age of Egyptian cinema, when state sponsorship of the industry gave filmmakers a freedom from constraints imposed by the marketplace”18

Walter Armbrust, “Bourgeois Leisure and Egyptian Media Fantasies,” in New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, ed. Dale Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), 113.

; others recall increased intrusion of bureaucrats that chased some of Egypt's leading directors and stars to foreign shores, especially Lebanon. Many of the most highly esteemed public sector productions, classics in retrospect, bombed at the box office. To read melodrama as socially and politically significant—and revealing—requires, therefore, a suspension of certain critical standards as well as a willingness to broaden the vista of what constitutes the “political,” the “social,” and the “revolutionary” film.19

Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama.

As noted above, the films I examine share many features, not least a cathartic moment of paternal violence: the confrontation and dramatic denouement, a sudden open blow to the cheek in a father-against-son encounter, which cuts across cultural boundaries. The two filmed father-son encounters between ʿImad Hamdi and ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz provide intriguing frames of reference for social and political transformations in the world of Nasser's Egypt that existed behind the cameras and outside the movie theaters. In each film, social commentary is neatly wrapped in melodramatic gauze, with a celluloid oedipal struggle engaged on twin levels, those of movie stars as film characters and movie stars as box office idols. In cinematic context, the encounter is enhanced by the star power of the players involved, the “rhetoric of fame,” in which viewers relate simultaneously to the actors as fictional film characters and as movie stars with public lives and résumés of prior film characterizations.20

George Custen, Bio/pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 34.

In this particular male-on-male confrontation, a younger virile leading man, paired romantically with a hot female lead, plays against an aging screen star who in his earlier career may well have played the role of the rebellious son. There are other intertextual references to earlier films and prior stars, but it is the violent paternal act that freezes the frame—and that has kept it frozen in the imagination of several generations of viewers.

Abi fawq al-shagara

Scene 1: The Cabaret

The setting is a smoke-filled, alcohol-spilled cabaret in Alexandria's beach district. ʿAdil's father, in a rumpled suit, sits at a table with a plump, once attractive, bargirl. A bottle of champagne sits by their table, on ice. Silhouetted in red, ʿAdil enters and approaches his father. ʿAdil's father looks up, startled, and asks ʿAdil what he is doing there—ironic in that he has come to Alexandria, and the cabaret district in particular, searching for his son, who is reportedly living with a dancer. “I've come to take you home, Dad,” ʿAdil asserts gently.

He has learned only moments before that his father is in Alexandria and inside the cabaret. He is angry at Firdaws, his lover, for having kept the secret from him and stunned to realize that his father, like him, has fallen. ʿAdil's father commands his son to leave. When ʿAdil resists, his father reprimands him for insolence. Increasingly agitated, ʿAdil tries to reason with his father.

“Can't you see what's going on?” he asks. “She's already ordered another bottle, yet this one's still half full!” He pours the remaining champagne on the floor.

His father jumps from his seat, decrying ʿAdil's lack of manners. He strikes his son across the face. Three times ʿAdil protests, each time receiving another slap—and never raising his hand in self-defense. By now, ʿAdil's tears are flowing profusely. As his father raises his hand to strike yet again, Firdaws rushes over and stops him. Looking him square in the eye, she informs him that ʿAdil is right: the bargirl has been playing him for a fool.

When released in 1969, Abi fawq al-shagara was the biggest hit of Egyptian cinema history. It ran for an unprecedented full year at the Diana Theater in downtown Cairo. In popular parlance both the theater and the nearby bus stop became known by the film's name. In later years the movie became something of a cult classic. Because of its racy, “naughty” plot and an unprecedented number of kisses between ʿAbd al-Halim and his two costars, Nadia Lutfi and Mervat Amin, the film has never been shown on television (with the exception of musical clips that are frequently broadcast). Young men and daring young women could see it in recent years in seedy theaters in “popular” districts. As Walter Armbrust has described, they recited lines, often in bold anticipation, and sang along with Halim, much as young people in the United States once did at midnight screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.21

Walter Armbrust, “When the Lights Go Down in Cairo: Cinema as Secular Ritual,” Visual Anthropology 10, nos. 2–4 (1998): 423–26.

It has, of course, long been available on video in the Middle East—a forbidden fruit for some, like a housekeeper of mine one year in Cairo. In the Arab diaspora, it has retained its special status, perhaps even among young Arab Americans raised in urban ethnic enclaves. As Arkansas-based poet Mohja Kahf has written, “I moved here from New Jersey and I like it just fine, although I miss belligerent store clerks and being able to rent Abi Fawq el-Shagara at the Egyptian video/pizzeria/travel agency/check cashing service/grocery store …”22

Mohja Kahf, “Fayetteville as in Fate,” E-mails from Scheherazad (Gainesville, Fla.: Florida University Press, 2003), 6.

The plot is not complex. ʿAdil, a 19-year-old law student, heads to Alexandria for an annual summer vacation with school chums. He is sent off with Polonius-like advice regarding frugality from his father (which he later mocks), extra money and sweets from his mother (which he leaves on the train), and a lecture from his jealous 16-year-old sister about the relative maturity levels of boys and girls (which, through his actions, he ultimately validates). At the beach, ʿAdil runs to meet Amal (Mervat Amin), the younger sister of his best friend, Khalid. She bounces into his arms—they are unofficially engaged—but she rejects his repeated entreaties that they try to spend time alone so they might “get to know each other better.” Amal is trying to follow her mother's advice to be, in a cultural and older generational context, “a good girl.” From ʿAdil's perspective (recall that ʿAdil has already mocked his own parents' send-offs) Amal's reticence smacks of both emotional immaturity and, increasingly, priggishness. She is not ready for private intimacy, preferring the company of the group. After a series of frustrating encounters on the beach, ʿAdil loses heart. He falls in with a looser group of mates, with whom he takes up drinking alcohol and visiting nightclubs. At one club he draws the attention of Firdaws, a belly dancer who is attracted to his innocence.

Without so much as a farewell, ʿAdil abandons his friends. He moves in with Firdaws, sharing her bed in her rented flat, loses his pin money by playing cards with her hashish-smoking “manager,” and accompanies her on a performance tour to libertine Lebanon. To a long song-over they cavort in discos and at tourist sites, always on the margins of indecency. ʿAdil is having the time of his life, but back in Alexandria he finds it increasingly difficult to tolerate Firdaws' constant flirtation with cabaret denizens or her parties to raise rent and living expenses—at which he is introduced as her brother. At one point he tries to reconnect with his old chums, but they snub him. When word of ʿAdil's philandering reaches home, his father sets out for Alexandria to find him, asserting ominously that he knows all the likely nightspots.

Making the rounds in search of his son, the father falls under the influence of a bargirl whom Firdaws, terrified of losing ʿAdil, has enlisted to divert his attention. ʿAdil is on the verge of breaking with Firdaws when Khalid, Amal's brother, informs him of his father's condition. ʿAdil runs into the cabaret and sees his father sitting with the courtesan. A greeter, perhaps the bouncer, confirms that his father has been coming for a week and leaving with the same woman. He also affirms that Firdaws is complicit. ʿAdil then confronts Firdaws, who admits her part in the deception. Then, in the climactic encounter, he confronts his father directly in front of those drinking and dining in the cabaret.

The film is based on a story idea by Ihsan ʿAbd al-Quddus, one of the most influential authors of his generation. The son of a popular stage and film comic and an actress who abandoned the theater to found Rose al-Youssef, still the leading journal of politics and the arts in Egypt, ʿAbd al-Quddus started as a political essayist. He was close to the Nasser regime in its early years but backed the wrong horse during the power struggles of early 1954, after which he spent some time in prison.23

Joel Gordon, Nasser's Blessed Movement: Egypt's Free Officers and the July Revolution (Oxford/New York: n.p., 1992), esp. 139–40, 152–55.

Thereafter he retreated to fiction, penning a series of best-selling novels and short-story collections, many of which were scripted into successful melodramas for the silver screen. ʿAbd al-Quddus' prose was simple—for many foreign-language Arabic students he was the first writer we ever read—but he spun a good yarn, and he became the literary voice of middle-class youth. His characters express their material and romantic desires for upward mobility and modern love, battling social conventions such as arranged marriage and chaperoned dating as well as rigid class consciousness.24

Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama, 133–48.

ʿAbd al-Quddus became known in particular as a women's writer. His office, even at home, remained open to women, who brought him tales of marital grievances, broken hearts, suppressed desires, and frustrated ambitions.25

Personal interview with Ahmad and Muhammad ʿAbd al-Quddus, the writer's sons, 15 December 1995.

His most famous female characters are a series of volatile, independent “bad” girls—ʿAliya in Ayna ʿumri (Where's My Life), Nadia in La anam (I Can't Sleep), Amina in Ana hurra (I'm Free), Layla in La tutfiء al-shams (Don't Put Out the Sun), Maddy in al-Naddara al-sawdaء (Dark Glasses)—who challenge social taboos by embarking on forbidden relationships, seeking employment in the growing professional sector, or participating in wild parties in mixed male–female company. Their endings are at times socially conventional; many find comfort in the arms of strong, sympathetic males (Ayna ʿumri, La anam). This common critical cry is even more pointed with regard to changes made for the screen treatments (most notably in Ana hurra; in the book Amina lives with her lover, but in the film they are both arrested for revolutionary activities and marry in prison). Yet, in print and on screen these rebellious female characters resonated with middle-class women (and, no doubt, with young men as well) who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, because of their nonconformity. They suggest an alternate reading of melodrama in which the “destination,” the conventional expected finale, may be of far less import to the receiver than the “rebellious route” traveled.26

Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama, 137.

Abi fawq al-shagara does not really fit into the category of ʿAbd al-Quddus' “women's fiction.” The primary dramatic—and climactic—conflict in the film concerns male (father-son) bonding, and here ʿAbd al-Quddus' males get away with things that no female could. Yet, if we accept the common critical designation of melodrama—“family melodrama” in particular—as a women's genre, albeit recognizing that such films are usually made by and also appeal to men, such distinctions blur.27

Lang, American Film Melodrama, 30–31.

Moreover, the fundamental “problem” in this film concerns changing notions of male–female courtship and rules of propriety. In the frolicking song and dance number “Qadi al-bilaj” (Judge of the Beach [plage]) near the beginning of the film, the grievances raised by the kids against parental interference in matchmaking, as well as the fears they express of long-term commitments that are not rooted in romantic love, are enunciated more clearly by young women. Whereas the men complain that they are rejected by their sweethearts' fathers on economic grounds, the women complain that even after graduation their parents still treat them like kids. They assert resistance to thoughts of matrimony. “Men without marriage are like glassless windows,” mock the girls, who at no point evoke metaphors for unmarried women.28

For a more detailed treatment of the number, see Armbrust, “Bourgeois Leisure and Egyptian Media Fantasies,” 116–18.

There is, however, one example of an unmarried, sexually powerful albeit socially vulnerable woman who is given voice. This is the fallen Firdaws, who turned to dance (and, it is implied, prostitution) after a series of unsuccessful and abusive relationships. Although she loses again in the end, her positionality remains sympathetic throughout, even when she is trying to keep ʿAdil separated from his father and even as ʿAdil accuses her of trying to ruin his family, specifically to impoverish his mother and sister.

If this film speaks to problems suffered by prior generations that surely have been depicted in earlier films, Abi fawq al-shagara is, nonetheless, both in terms of stylistics and thematic content, a film that is highly representative of its era. In broader popular culture, the beach has long figured as a site of “bourgeois leisure” and “media fantasies.”29

Armbrust, “Bourgeois Leisure and Egyptian Media Fantasies.”

In al-Khataya, for example, university students go on a field trip to the Red Sea, during which hero and heroine flirt in relative freedom, far from parental gaze. However, Abi fawq al-shagara is a full-fledged beach movie, in which virtually all the action is set on and around the seashore. It is not the only one to be produced in middle to late 1960s Egypt, but it is far and away the most visually spectacular—and the most sexually charged. Although some adults are present—in an early scene ʿAdil jousts verbally with Amal's parents over the unique problems faced by the younger generation, arguing gently that it is no longer proper for men and women to become engaged without first dating unsupervised—the beach in Abi fawq al-shagara provides a vast sanctuary in which both adventurous and more reticent boys and girls may find breathing room to explore their blossoming sexuality and mutual attractiveness. If this film, more than any other in the Egyptian corpus, looks like an Elvis, Gidget, or Frankie Avalon—Annette Funicello vehicle, this speaks both to Egypt's place in the global sexual revolution and to the interconnectedness and intertextuality of global cinema.

The film was a watershed in the career of its director. Husayn Kamal had made several critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful films in the years just prior to this project. A 1968 film, al-Bustagi (The Postman) is a recognized masterpiece.30

In the mid-1980s, leading critics ranked al-Bustagi eighth in a list of ten best Egyptian films; al-Funun 5, no. 10 (1984): 61–64.

Pegged as an art director, Kamal faced resistance from ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz's business partners, who produced Abi fawq al-shagara.31

Magdi al-ʿImrusi, Aʿazz al-nas (Cairo: ʿAdil al-Balak, 1994), 115.

Halim, however, persuaded them to give Kamal the nod, and the film turned the director's career in new directions. Serious critics, long worried about the state of the commercial film industry, were outraged. To them the film represented the “worst tendencies in international cinema.” It was, wrote one, “alluring and colorful”—a swipe at the unprecedented E£150,000 budget, which underwrote the use of still-rare color film—produced for an audience of “adolescent simpletons” who “want nothing more than to relax and fantasize all day at the cinema, numbed by kaleidoscopic colors.”32

Sami al-Salamuni, “Sinima Husayn Kamal wa-l-bahth ʿan uslub,” reprinted from al-Masaء, 26 April 1969, in al-Aʿmal al-kamila li-l-naqid al-sinimaءi Sami al-Salamuni, 1969–1975, ed. Yaʿqub Wahba (Cairo: al-Haiءa al-ʿAmma li-Qusur al-Thaqafa, 2001), 40–41.

Kamal was blasted as a “turncoat” for having “gone commercial,” charges that rankled even years later.33

Kamal insisted that although the film had grossed millions, he earned only E£2000. He clearly relished the turnabout that some leading critics made when looking back on the film's historic import. See his comments extracted from Rafiq al-Sabban, Husayn Kamal ʿashiq al-mustahil, a special feature on the DVD of Abi fawq al-shagara (Alam Al Phan, 2003).

If foreign observers accused him of pandering to the worst traditions of the Egyptian cinema—songs, dances, and “vapid melodrama”34

Raymond William Baker, “Egypt in the Shadows: Films and the Political Order,” American Behavioral Scientist 17, no. 3 (1974): 412.

—some Egyptians pointed accusatory fingers at Bollywood. Kamal's career change—he made a string of hits in following years—points to the heart of the ongoing battle within the film community between art and commercialism.35

Among his most renowned—and successful—films are Tharthara fawq al-Nil (Chatter on the Nile, 1971), Impuraturat mim (Empire of Ms, 1972), and Ihna bituʿal-autubis (We Are the Bus People, 1979).

His retort was constant throughout the rest of his life: he preferred to see his name emblazoned on marquees throughout Egypt than exclusively at the downtown Cairo cinematheque.36

Samir Farid, Hiwar maʿal-sinima al-Misriya (Cairo: Mahrajan al-Qahira al-Sinimaءiyya al-Dawli, 1993), 113.

ʿABD AL-HALIM AND COSTARS

Above all else, Abi fawq al-shagara, a vehicle for 'Abd al-Halim Hafiz, was the last of sixteen movies, all musicals, the singer made between 1955 and 1969. The leading singer of his generation, overcoming the resistance of purists who regarded him as overly sentimental compared to the musical giants he succeeded,37

Martin Stokes, “Abd al-Halim's Microphone,” in Music and the Play of Power: Music, Politics and Ideology in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, ed. Laudan Nooshin (London: Ashgate Press, forthcoming).

Halim was and remains a cultural icon of the Nasser era. As if scripted for a melodrama, he bombed in his initial outing just prior to the Free Officers' July 1952 coup. He made a small splash thereafter, then was introduced to the nation a year later at an anniversary fete as the “voice of the revolution”—and never looked back. The village boy who made good through a mixture of innate talent and incredibly hard work, he sang the greatest torch songs of the day, as well as the most influential, and often recalled, nationalist and socialist anthems. He starred in three films released in 1955. In two he had second billing; from the third onward, all with varying degrees of light and heavy melodrama, he romanced the most glamorous leading ladies and stood decidedly stage center. Not all of his films resonated with his fans. Dalila (1955), Egyptian cinema's first color venture, did not score well, nor did Fata ahlmai (My Prince Charming, 1957), in which Halim, much against character, played a bon vivant. Most Halim ventures, however, were sure hits—a point director Husayn Kamal raised with his nervous producers in initial contract negotiations.38

al-ʿImrusi, Aʿazz al-nas, 115.

In the great majority of his films Halim personified the upwardly mobile new professional middle-class youth, the “poor hard-working boy whose dreams will come true if he struggles.”39

The description evoked by a frustrated girlfriend in reference to her hopelessly optimistic boyfriend in Alaa al-Aswany's blockbuster novel, The Yacoubian Building, trans. Humphrey Davies (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 47.

Often he is a struggling singer; such films represent the popular “backstage” or “realist” musicals popularized in particular by Farid al-Atrash during that singer-star's heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s. In some of his films, true to his own life story, Halim plays a harried public school teacher dreaming of his big break. In many of his most popular films, however, he plays a lawyer, engineer, or architect, glamour professions associated in the middle 1950s and early 1960s not with the swelling public sector—a sector caricatured in countless films, dramas, and comedies—but with newly independent Egypt's growing technocratic expertise. At the early end of the 1960s, in al-Khataya, Halim's character is a star student in the engineering faculty. In Abi fawq al-shagara, ʿAdil studies law.

Halim's character, whatever his specific career trajectory, often suffers the pangs of unrequited first love or the frustrations of trying to romance a beautiful girl who is above his station in life. He is the boy on the bicycle who has fallen for a beauty who drives (or is driven in) her own car. Most Halim films follow a conventional story progression in which he sings five to six solos (in the three films in which he appeared with Shadia, they also sang a duet). Halim's films were each scored by a variety of Egypt's finest musicians, most notably Kamal al-Tawil, Muhammad Mugi, Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhab, and Baligh Hamdi.40

Martin Stokes develops this in “Listening to Abd al-Halim Hafiz,” unpublished paper.

The mood of these numbers shifts, following the story line, in a progression that is anticipated by audiences familiar with the genre. The first few songs in a Halim film are generally light, playful. One of these finds the singer rapt in love with his object of desire. If Halim is a musician, there is one major production number, usually at the Cairo Opera, the venue that marks the apogee of achievement. In the semiautobiographical Hikayat hubb (Love Story, 1959), this number is performed midway through, after which the rising star collapses from a seemingly incurable disease. In his debut, Lahn al-wafaء (Song of Fidelity, 1955), it is, more predictably, the number that closes out the film. In virtually all Halim's films (most of which are not backstage musicals), the last song, often scored by Mugi, is mournful, a dark night of the soul number in which the spurned lover wanders alone and forlorn, visiting sites of love lost. Mugi's “Ahdan al-habayib” (The Embrace of the Beloved) in Abi fawq al-shagara fits this pattern. Such numbers prolong and heighten the dramatic catharsis, which is subsequently resolved, according to genre convention, in a spontaneous happy ending that offers the audience “emotional pleasures equally clear-cut and extreme.”41

Smith, Melodrama, 9.

In this regard, one cannot discuss Halim's life without noting his early, tragic death. Halim suffered from bilharzia, also known as schistosomiasis, which he presumably contracted as a poor child in the Delta village in which he was born. The parasitic disease, which became part of his iconic persona, linking him to the rural heartland in a cruel manner, began to impact his life increasingly in the 1950s, shortly after his big break. His own life story became one of torment and affliction, a driven artist and perfectionist forced to spend extended periods of time abroad in hospitals, where he received blood transfusions and underwent incessant testing. After 1962 he made only two films. Maʿbudat al-gamahir (The Peoples' Idol, 1968), his second color film and an immensely popular one, took over three years to complete. In Abi fawq al-shagara he is certainly too old to play a 19-year-old, for he looks far older than his thirty-nine years.

Halim died in 1977, at age forty-seven, in a London hospital. The news prompted outpourings of grief, including the rumored suicide of several teenage girls. His was the last of the great public funerals of the decade (along with Nasser's, in 1970, and Umm Kulthum's, in 1975). Nearly thirty years later, the month of March remains a monthlong commemoration on radio, television, and in the print media. Halim also retains immense iconic power to those who came of age in the Nasser era and who, whatever the faults of the leader and his regime, look back with nostalgia toward a golden age of national purpose and optimism. For the current generation of filmmakers, the stylistic placement of an image of Halim or snippet of one of his songs represents a key symbol of that lost imagined community.42

Joel Gordon, “The Nightingale and the Raءis: Abd al-Halim Hafiz and Nasserist Longings,” in Rethinking Nasserism: Revolution and Historical Memory in Modern Egypt, ed. Elie Podeh and Onn Winckler (Gainesville, Fla.: Florida University Press, 2004): 307–23.

He has recently been the subject of a feature-length biopic, Halim (2006), starring the late Ahmad Zaki, and a Ramadan serial, al-Andalib (The Nightingale, 2006), in which an unknown actor, a striking look- and sound-alike, plays the superstar.

In Abi fawq al-shagara Halim plays against two primary costars, ʿImad Hamdi and Nadia Lutfi, both celebrated actors with whom he had worked on prior occasions. (All three had acted together once before, in al-Khataya.) Hamdi (his father in both films) was one of the preeminent leading men of the prior generation (along with Anwar Wagdi and Kamal al-Shinawi, who starred primarily in musicals and light romance, and Husayn Sidqi, who starred in far fewer roles). In the mid and late 1950s, when a new crop of male leads emerged—Omar Sharif, Shukri Sarhan, Rushdi Abaza, and, in musicals, ʿAbd al-Halim—Hamdi could still romance a younger woman, although more often than not he lost her in the end. To add to the filmic complexity of the stars' familial onscreen relationship, in the 1956 melodrama, Mawʿid gharam (Appointment with Love), Hamdi plays rival to Halim for the affection of Fatin Hamama, a former child star who had blossomed into the industry's leading lady. In this case the elder Hamdi bows out and helps the young lovers reconcile differences.43

For an analysis of this film, see Stokes, “Adam Smith and the Dark Nightingale.”

By the 1960s, Hamdi had become primarily a supporting player, but in many respects his roles grew more interesting.

Nadia Lutfi (Firdaws) was one of the great leading ladies of the 1960s, as well as one of the sexiest, and in many respects the quintessential “bad” girl. Born Paula Shafik, she was renamed for the screen by a producer after the protagonist of Ihsan ʿAbd al-Quddus' novel La anam (the role played in the 1957 film adaptation by Fatin Hamama). She played equally memorably in comedy and light romance. By the late 1960s, more mature in face and body, she undertook a series of roles as the virtuous prostitute, the most famous of which was Firdaws.44

One of Hamdi's last great leading roles, with Fatin Hamama, was in Bayn al-atlal (Amidst the Ruins, 1959). Among his “more interesting” character roles in the 1960s and early 1970s were in Miramar (1969) and Tharthara fawq al-Nil (Chatter on the Nile, 1971). Nadia Lutfi's best comic role is in Li-l-rigal faqat (For Men Only, 1964); her other well-known “fallen” role is in the adaptation of Nagib Mahfouz's al-Siman wa-l-kharif (Autumn Quail, 1967). According to director Kamal, the part was offered originally to Hind Rostam, who turned it down (DVD special features).

PATHOS AND PATRIARCHY

As a family melodrama, Abi fawq al-shagara turns on the ability of viewers to relate or aspire to the predicament faced by its central figure. ʿAdil is a university student who appears destined to surpass his frugal middle-class father, presumably a pensioner who most likely worked in the civil service that has now become so unfashionable (even as it continued to guarantee employment to all university graduates). ʿAdil lives at home with both parents and his teenaged sister. He is in many ways a more typical middle-class youth than the lead characters in other Halim films, in which the star appears either too poor to have such professional aspirations (in several films he lives in very modest straits with a widowed mother and much younger male sibling, markers that always enhance his virtuousness) or, more often, too independent of family, living in bachelor pads, alone or with a roommate, situations that belie his supposed lack of social standing. Still, one critic wondered on what planet the film's scriptwriters (including the highly respected Saءd Wahba and Yusuf Francis) lived: who in their right minds would indulge one child with a two-week beach vacation while they sat sweltering in Cairo?45

Sami al-Salamuni in Wahba, al-Aʿmal al-kamila, 41.

The rebuke may have been more social than artistic criticism. ʿAdil is the elder child—and the son—and his privilege is validated on both counts. It is his younger sister who packs his bags in the opening scene. Her resentment at her own exclusion from the pleasures of a beach vacation, rooted just as much in male prerogative as in the family's limited finances, is expressed playfully but vocally in gendered terms. She is the first “woman's” voice in the script inspired by ʿAbd al-Quddus, even as she enables her brother's journey, contributing in a sense to the patriarchal contest that will ensue.

Husayn Kamal insisted that he set out to make a musical different from others, including those in which his star had previously played.46

See his comments extracted from Rafiq al-Sabban in the special features of the DVD release of the film.

In strict terms he did not quite succeed. The musical numbers follow the classic progression. The final number, “Ahdan al-habayib,” as noted above, expresses the climactic catharsis of romantic disillusion prior to the resolution of conflict. Several numbers closely replicate songs in al-Khataya, so much so that they might even be said to be direct references to the earlier film. The beach party number, “al-Hawwa hawaya” (Ardent Love) matches with the earlier “Maghrur” (Stuck-Up). “Ya khali al-qalb” (Heartless One) replicates the game of blind man's bluff, with Halim wearing the blindfold and seeking his sweetheart, in “al-Hilwa” (Sweet One) from al-Khataya. Even “Qadi al-bilaj” appears to reference, albeit through inversion, the elaborate opening number in al-Khataya, “Wa hayat qalbi wa afrahu” (O Love of My Life), in which the university students sing optimistically about their bright future.47

That this number “became a theme song during graduation seasons over Arab radio and television” underscores the optimism of both it and the movie in which it was featured; Sami W. Asmar with Kathleen Hood, “Modern Arab Music: Portraits of Enchantment from the Middle Generation,” in Colors of Enchantment: Theater, Dance, Music, and the Visual Arts of the Middle East, ed. Sherifa Zuhur (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2001), 301.

At the same time, reflecting Halim's artistic development as well as changing styles in the industry, all are substantially longer than the norm, approximately twelve to eighteen minutes each (constituting approximately one hour of the 155-minute film and perhaps adding to the Bollywood comparisons).48

Most Halim films from the 1950s included approximately thirty minutes of musical numbers. By the early 1960s this had increased to around forty to forty-five minutes. The songs in Ma ʿbudat al-gamahir run around sixty minutes, but one, “Gabbar” (Tyrant), is substantially longer than the other four numbers.

The first four numbers—all save the soulful last song—are more elaborately staged than any prior Halim musical. “Qadi al-bilaj,” with its mock trial followed by twirling pop-art beach umbrellas, is a full-fledged operetta number filmed on location. “Ya khali al-qalb” jumps from the starlit beach—a real beach, in contrast to the obvious studio set in the al-Khataya beach number—to a backlit bare stage replete with changing color and costumes. The song is reminiscent of wedding dream sequences in Layla Murad films from the 1940s but here has a decidedly 1960s look that clearly reflects the proto music videos of films like the Beatles' Help. Halim for the first time sings in the background without mouthing the words on screen. “Ganaa al-hawa” (Love Came to Us), the “Lebanese” number, is likewise characterized by quick cuts, here between tourist sites, all shot on location. Again, Halim sings offscreen for much of the song, while onscreen he is engaged in romping and smooching with Firdaws, who appears for the only time in the film without her heavy dancer's makeup and, although older than ʿAdil, looks every bit like a proper girlfriend.

In terms of plot and theme Abi fawq al-shagara is clearly atypical in key regards, prompting speculation that even as he made what proved to be a last stab at eternal youth, Halim was looking to broaden his acting résumé. In the popular imagination, the film bordered on the pornographic. It may seem tame by international standards of the day, but the implicit and relatively explicit sexuality titillated audiences and prompted jokes about outraged fathers chastising sons for going to see “a film with a hundred and twenty-three kisses”—the punch line referring to the father knowing the specific count.49

Armbrust, “When the Lights Go Down,” 424.

ʿAdil's “problem” is that his girlfriend, Amal, under her mother's influence, is stuck hopelessly in the past. Even her friends try to persuade her that it is perfectly all right to spend time alone with her boyfriend. ʿAdil's subsequent liaison with Firdaws is not condemned outright. Their sexuality is celebrated; their romps in the sack—clothed but conspicuously in a shared bed—and on the road, disco dancing and drinking, are depicted as naughty but glamorous fun. Firdaws lives loosely, but she has been pushed to it and tries to make ends meet the only way she knows how.

In many Egyptian films from the monarchical through the Nasser eras, whether musicals or not, nightclubs and social drinking are depicted as normative for the middle and upper classes. Excess consumption, if not portrayed for comic purposes, is frowned upon. Upstanding young men down on their romantic luck and driven to drink by despair, or innocents newly arrived in the city and goaded by unscrupulous bargirls, imbibe alcohol for the first time, with disastrous results. Al-Khataya is a classic example, but Abi fawq al-shagara is not. If ʿAdil is taken in by the more mature woman in this film, it is not their shared sexual activity that is the problem but rather the implicit immorality of the parties that Firdaws throws to raise rent money. Introduced to her male guests as her brother, ʿAdil longs for a purer, more innocent relationship with Amal and begins to drift from his attachment to Firdaws. As he grows distraught, his drinking and smoking—the latter a first for a Halim character—begin to signal more traditionally negative character traits, especially when he imbibes alone in private quarters.

The jokes directed at fathers are in keeping with the film's theme of patriarchal hypocrisy. If ʿAdil's romantic relationship with Firdaws is celebrated, his father's fall is surely objectionable. ʿAdil's father is a married man, overly proper and a bit stingy in his relationship with his children, his oat-sowing days long past. When, upon his departure to search for ʿAdil, he assures his family that he knows all the likely beach spots, he signals his own youthful straying. Worst of all, he now falls into an obvious trap with a woman who is neither attractive nor good-hearted. He is somewhat cognizant of this, especially as he parts with his savings, yet remains powerless to stop himself. The anger he exudes in his climactic encounter with ʿAdil is rooted in embarrassment, the shame of having his hypocrisy so suddenly and starkly unveiled.

Abi fawq al-shagara is often recalled, and may be read, as a post 1967 critique of the authoritarian nature of the Nasser regime. This is an ironic critique because this movie does not fit in with—and is never considered to be part of the corpus of—so-called “green light” films that treated, allegorically and increasingly literally, the revolution's errors, inadequacies, and broken promises.50

Duriya Sharaf al-Din, al-Siyasa wa-l-sinima fi Misr, 1961–1981 (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1992); Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama, 210–32.

In the aftermath of the defeat, when many began to undergo radical ideological reorientation, most notably a turn toward resurgent Islamism, the regime did tolerate, even sanction, a greater degree of pointed, often political criticism in the arts. Most films, however, as Doriya Sharaf al-Din has noted, continued to depict common diversionary apolitical themes, perhaps with even greater urgency.51

Sharaf al-Din, al-Siyasa wa-l-sinima fi Misr, 128.

Those who criticized Abi fawq al-shagara for titillating audiences with sex, drugs, and drink—the ultimate diversionary melodrama—tended to view the film as indicative of the degree to which the nation, as well as the film industry, had fallen. In hindsight, the film looks different, reflective of a prevalent social malaise, the dispirit of a nation that had invested so much in a father figure whose promises and paternal advice now seemed cloaked in hypocrisy, as dated and conservative as the advice ʿAdil receives when he sets out on his vacation.

There are, however, other compelling reasons to read Abi fawq al-shagara as allegory for the naksa. In the postwar era, with students (and others) taking to the streets and calling for the heads of “traitors,” demanding greater civil liberties and accountability, it is hard to read it otherwise. Nasser, after all, stood in as father of the nation. ʿAdil, who is awakening to his own depravity, cannot believe that his father would fall to such depths, even after he sees him in the cabaret. The bouncer insists that ʿAdil's father has been leaving in the arms of his lover every night for a week, the same amount of time in which Egypt's dreams, the long-term promises of fidelity and the wartime proclamations of victory, were undercut.

ʿAdil, tellingly, accuses the man of lying and, thereafter, Firdaws of deceit. When she attempts to turn his charge, by insisting that his father is a grown man, capable of making choices (this is an angry swipe at ʿAdil), he retorts by condemning her ability to charm her victims. “I know your ploys. You nearly wrecked my future and now you want to wreck my home!” All of a sudden the responsible male, ʿAdil says, “You want my mother and sister destitute.” For a moment Firdaws, as temptress, replaces his father, the fallen patriarch, as symbolic deceiver and destroyer of the nation. ʿAdil punctuates his outburst by slapping his lover across the cheek, then turns to confront his father and accept his own physical punishment.

Al-Khataya

The earlier collaboration—and confrontation—between the same father and son, with the same lover in the background, makes this all the more pointed and poignant. Directed by Hasan al-Imam, the king of Egyptian melodrama, al-Khataya is in most respects a conventional genre picture. Yet it too broke certain cinematic—and Halim musical—conventions.

It is the first film in which Halim sings someone else's song, in this case “Lastu adri” (I Didn't Know), which Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhab wrote and sang in his own 1944 film, Rasasa fi al-qalb (A Bullet in the Heart).52

ʿAbd al-Wahhab was, of course, Halim's business partner in the Sawt al-Fann recording company.

Coming late in ʿAbd al-Wahhab's film career, Rasasa fi al-qalb represented a musical departure. The singing star, the first in Egyptian film history (he made his first film in 1933; Umm Kulthum followed in 1936), here for the first time performed songs that advanced the narrative flow of the story.53

ʿAdil Hasanayn, Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhab (Cairo: Tubi ʿa ʿala Matabiʿ Sharikat Tirikirumi li-l-Tibaʿa, 1991), 98–99.

The song comes about midfilm, when the hero's fortunes turn. It follows immediately upon another song, “Ahibbhu mahma ashufhu” (I Love Her Whenever I See Her), which he sings suddenly accompanied by a small ensemble in a nightclub where he seeks solace and where he sips from only one drink. Then, after bemoaning his life to the bartender, he exits and roams the streets singing “Lastu adri.” By the end of this second song, he has left the lights of the city behind and wanders down a dark, tree-lined street. In al-Khataya Halim will reprise the well-known song, but as his final number. In ʿAbd al-Wahhab's movie, happier songs were to follow.

What really marks the Halim film, though, is its explosive treatment of dark family secrets, adultery and illegitimacy, not themes unique to Egyptian film but also not the usual hurdles facing this particular musical star. The film opens starkly, even before the credits roll, with a wife (Madiha Yusri) returning home—on a dark and stormy night, no less—to find her husband (ʿImad Hamdi) in another woman's arms. Following the credits, the film jumps ahead. The couple, apparently reconciled, now have two young sons, Husayn and Ahmad. When the film reaches its present tense, Husayn (Halim) is a well-mannered popular academic achiever in the engineering faculty at Cairo University. Early on he wins the presidency of the student union, defeating the attractive new girl, Suhayr (Nadia Lutfi), with whom he carries on a buoyant, competitive repartee on campus and on a field trip to the Red Sea. Suhayr, it turns out, not only has moved in next door; she is also the daughter of an old friend of Husayn's father. After the requisite flirting, Husayn and Suhayr fall in love. Husayn shares his secret with his mother, who is delighted, but he cannot raise the courage to face his dad.

The problem is that his father has always favored the younger Ahmad and held a secret grudge against his elder son. There are hints of this in one early scene, when the father disciplines his young sons, unfairly chastising Husayn for what had been a case of normal sibling rivalry. Much the opposite of Husayn, Ahmad (played by Hasan Yusuf, who specialized in the role of the irresponsible youth) is a playboy who cares little for academics.54

He played the role, most notably, in screen adaptations of Latifa al-Zayyat's al-Bab al-maftuh (The Open Door, 1963) and Nagib Mahfouz's Zuqaq al-Midaq (Midaq Alley, 1963) and Khan al-Khalili (1966).

He does, however, share a deep bond with his brother and champions Husayn's relationship with Suhayr. Both brothers will be stunned to learn that their father has arranged a match between Suhayr and Ahmad. To offset the impropriety of marrying off his younger son first and to persuade Suhayr's father, who knows of her feelings for Husayn, the boys' father confides in his friend that Husayn is not his biological but rather his adopted son. Suhayr's father, a torn but traditional patriarch (and a single parent), reveals the secret to his daughter and through force of paternal authority persuades her to break off ties to Husayn and accept her engagement to Ahmad. For a time she behaves, but shortly thereafter, at Ahmad's instigation, elopes with Husayn and secretly marries him.

Husayn had earlier tried to express his feelings to his father but been silenced. Now, returning home from his secret wedding, he learns that his father has made plans for him to be sent abroad for studies. Husayn has no choice but to reveal—and compound—his disobedience.

Scene 2: The Study

Husayn, in his wedding suit, stands before his father in the latter's study. Suddenly gone pale, he is torn by confusion and suppressed rebelliousness. Composing himself, he informs his father—deferential yet defiant—that if he is to travel abroad his wife will accompany him. If the father is stunned at the revelation of his son's betrothal, he is outraged to learn the identity of Husayn's spouse. With explosive anger he lashes out at Husayn verbally and delivers a single open-handed blow across his cheek. In shock, Husayn cowers momentarily, his hand covering mouth and cheek.

Tearfully summoning his last reserve of dignity, Husayn demands his rights as a member of the family. “You have no rights,” his father informs him. “You are not my son!” Husayn learns that he is a foundling and is ordered from the home by the stern patriarch, while mother and brother look on helplessly.

The image of the still youthful, pretty Halim holding his cheek and then standing in shock, devastated by the revelation of his shattered identity, a family wrenched apart at the elemental level of blood kinship, is powerful.55

The scene is repeated on several occasions in Radwan al-Kashif's Lay ya banafsig (Violets Are Blue, 1993), a film that is full of Halim allusions; Gordon, “The Nightingale and the Raءis,” 316–18.

The authority of the tyrannical, unjust patriarch tied to traditional notions of familial honor/shame momentarily retains force. It has been underscored, of course, by the collaboration (and culpability) of Suhayr's father, and it is further reinforced when Husayn sees the outer gate to the villa slam shut in his face. To melodramatic strains that may have been familiar to film audiences who knew the older canon, he begins to sing “Lastu adri.” Inverting the action from the film in which ʿAbd al-Wahhab sang this song, Husayn walks first down a deserted, tree-lined street. Coming upon a mosque, he observes a mother leaving her swaddled child on the doorstep and its discovery, immediately thereafter, by a man who brings it inside. Husayn then wanders into the heart of the city, where he seeks refuge in a bar—no alluring images here—and takes his first of many unhappy drinks, far more than ʿAbd al-Wahhab in the earlier referenced film. The bar bill gets larger, and when he is unable to pay, Husayn is hauled off to the local police station.

Loaded as it is with familiar melodramatic tropes, including alcohol/bars as the symbol/stage of the virtuous hero's temporary downward spiral, al-Khataya may also be read as a classic forward-looking Nasser-era social film. The film's problematic, replete with issues of modern love, social class, patriarchy, sin, and redemption may be a bit timeworn, but as an artistic product of Nasser's Egypt, as well as an important component of Halim's cinematic legacy, the film resonates with the spirit of the day. The early plot outline of al-Khataya hints at a broad critique of traditional family values. In viewer eyes, the patriarch is guilty from the outset on multiple counts. Not only an adulterer, without any dramatic explanation that might render him sympathetic, he shows favor to the less respectable son, even though he is critical of Ahmad's lack of ambition. Viewers may be attracted to Ahmad, whose shortcomings are depicted as innocent fun. The father's favoritism for the flirtatious playboy son, however, given his own flawed past, is discomfiting. Since viewers come to understand the reasons for the father's rectitude toward his elder, adopted son well before either of the two siblings, we, like Suhayr's father, become accessories to the “crime.” At the same time we are drawn into the guessing game of when and how the secret will be revealed and what will follow.

Husayn's expulsion from the nest following the patriarchal explosion of violence is meant to disturb. He is not the first son (or daughter) to be dispossessed on Egypt's silver screen. Most, however, are illegitimate children of aristocracy (invariably the product of the master's infidelity with a servant); they are abandoned at birth, foundlings reared in poverty, or are nurtured by loyal servants who maintain a code of silence surrounding their patrimony. They also seem to be primarily women.56

An example of the former is Dahab (1953); for the latter, Amal (1952) and al-Ard al-tayyiba (The Good Earth, 1953).

Husayn's expulsion—and from a middle-class (albeit upper-middle-class) home—makes the “sins” of al-Khataya unique. That it is Halim, the quintessential upwardly mobile independent young man of his generation, who is expelled from hearth and home underscores the cathartic flourish.

After drowning his sorrows at a bar, without concern for the mounting tab, Husayn is dragged to the local police station. The young officer on duty turns out to be an orphan himself. Offering Husayn sympathy and some spending money, the officer reassures him that in the new Egypt social status is based on achievement. You are what you make yourself. The focus is not on self-advancement or marrying down, familiar tropes from the liberal and early revolutionary eras,57

Joel Gordon, “Class-Crossed Lovers: Popular Film and Social Change in Nasser's New Egypt,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 4 (2001): 385–96.

but rather on the diminished importance of biological pedigree. That the messenger is a servant of state security should not be overstated, but at the same time his character fits within a broad corpus of early to middle Nasser-era films in which the contemporary (rather than the historically marked) state, represented by its soldiers and police, serves to protect its citizens and promote civic responsibility.58

The most recalled is Kamal al-Shaykh's Haya aw mawt (Life or Death, 1954); see Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama, 255–59.

Husayn demurs at accepting the officer's charity but takes the message to heart. He finds lodging and a job without attempting to communicate with either his family or his sweetheart, endeavoring, albeit hesitantly, to start his life anew. He works, not incidentally, as an engineer for a construction firm, utilizing his college-honed skills to help build the new nation.

Blood, however, remains the problem. With the half hour or so remaining in the film, there is ample time for some melodramatic twists and turns. Darker secrets emerge in a teary confession delivered to Husayn by his mother (after Ahmad tracks him down). Husayn is, in fact, her biological son, the product of a one-night stand with an unscrupulous cousin with whom she had sought refuge the night she walked in on her husband's infidelity. Husayn wound up in an orphanage; the cousin, who eventually sought to make amends, wound up dying in an auto crash, melodramatic compensation for his transgression. Husayn's mother returned to her husband, and, reconciled, they attempted unsuccessfully to start a family. At his wife's prompting, the husband agreed to adopt a child, never knowing that she had preselected Husayn at the local orphanage. All was well that ended well, until she conceived and gave birth to their shared biological son, Ahmad.

Husayn is naturally euphoric. He may be a bastard, but better that than a foundling! The tradition-bound patriarch, however, must never learn the truth. In a whirlwind finale, Husayn returns home to seek reconciliation with his father. He arrives in the nick of time, for his desperate mother is about to bring the house down by revealing all to her stubborn husband. Husayn thus saves his mother's honor and sparks his father's conscience. Spontaneously received back into the family bosom, he runs next door to reconcile with Suhayr. The film ends with a collective embrace of two (soon to be related) families. We know little of the broader dynamics of either family. Were Husayn's parents the product of an arranged marriage or even first cousins (which would be a cruel play on Husayn's true patrimony)? We know only that two stubborn patriarchs will become proud, satisfied fathers-in-law and that mother's dark secret will remain veiled. In requisite fashion, harmony is restored in a new societal order in which (what the fathers don't know won't hurt them) sociological kinship trumps biology and character overrules custom.

HOME FROM THE BEACH

Whatever its creators' intent, al-Khataya may thus be read as a classic pre 1967 Nasser-era film that conveys the optimism of a forward-looking society at the beginning of the 1960s, even with the residual scars of Syria's rejection of Egyptian patrimony and secession from the United Arab Republic. Abi fawq al-shagara, produced at the end of the decade and after the naksa, reflects a far greater degree of social ambivalence. Depicting youth culture in the late 1960s, the film also points toward the generational upheaval of the 1970s, even if it fails to recognize the growing Islamist trend that would soon characterize so much of that upheaval.59

Nor would most films. See, for example, Armbrust's treatment of Khalli balik min Zuzu (Pay Attention to Zouzou, 1972), the classic directed by Hasan al-Imam, in Mass Culture and Modernism, 117–25.

Contrary to the sociology trumps biology thrust of al-Khataya, the latter film actually smacks of a bit of genetic determinism. ʿAdil is, for all his endeavors to explore the world on his own, apparently his father's son. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But the generational battle that ensues—however it will be resolved—reveals the potentially dangerous extent to which patriarchal authority was being challenged.

Both films remained extremely popular, and at some point were recognized as classics, which added new life to each even as the initial dramatic power or shock value eroded. Given the regional dominance of Egypt's film industry, this carried beyond national borders. I have been told that when a West Bank theater took requests for special screenings from the owners' permanent collection (presumably when current films were unavailable), these two Halim films were crowd favorites well into the 1970s. At the same time, I have heard that by the middle 1970s in Beirut, amidst tensions that erupted in the Lebanese war, audiences already treated Abi fawq al-shagara as a campy comedy. Husayn Kamal would carry the motifs of sex and drugs even further in a follow-up film, an adaptation of Nagib Mahfouz's Tharthara fawq al-Nil (Chatter on the Nile, 1971). In Beirut, those seeking more hard-core sex, drugs, and violence could presumably opt for Bertolucci or the surrealistic action films of Samir Khouri.60

Khouri's films include Sayyidat al-aqmar al-sawdaء (Woman of the Black Moons, 1971) and Dhiءab la taءkul al-lahm (Kuwait Connection, 1973).

One striking difference between the two Halim films is the level of physical violence imparted from father to son. In al-Khataya only one blow is delivered. In Abi fawq al-shagara ʿImad Hamdi repeatedly slaps Halim until his hand is stayed by Nadia Lutfi (herself the victim of a recent slap from Halim). In neither film does the dutiful son even consider raising his hand in self-defense or—unthinkable—in aggression. The blow delivered to Husayn in al-Khataya so stuns the victim that he remains paralyzed momentarily, hand held to cheek as he cowers before parent (and camera). It takes a moment before he begins to regain his composure and cry out against the injustice. Still, when he leaves the house, he leaves defeated. In the late 1960s film, to the contrary, the son's response is more aggressive and more self-assured. ʿAdil persistently takes his father to task, and, albeit uncomfortably, he shows him up publicly.

The patriarch in Abi fawq al-shagara attempts to regain his lost authority, scolding ʿAdil even as he justifies his own behavior. Citing age and experience, the father thereby validates the rationalization offered by Firdaws in her argument with ʿAdil, who had accused her of entrapping the elder man. When the father's arguments ring hollow—and are challenged by the youth—he resorts to violence, as ʿAdil had just done. However, the son holds his ground, responding to each slap with an impassioned retort. ʿAdil's actual words are far less important than the message that his rebellion implies: I am what you made me—I may be no wiser, but at least I am able to face my responsibilities and act to right the state of affairs.

It takes the fallen woman, at once victim and victimizer, to stay the patriarch's hand. It is she who ultimately assumes responsibility for what has ensued, although she claims purity of motive. I never played ʿAdil for a fool, she insists. She truly loves him but is willing to relinquish him in order to set matters right in a broader familial–social context, for the son embodies a purity that the father has not lived up to. ʿAdil may feel he has been duped, but Firdaws implies that it is the older generation that bears greater guilt, and along with it responsibility for passing a dubious legacy on to its inheritors. This moral can be understood in either—or both—social or political contexts. And it sets up an ending that is both unconventional and ambivalent.

Scene 3: Final Embraces

Father and son, both spiritually wounded, exit the cabaret arm in arm. The camera lingers on Firdaws, the heartbroken vamp cast in red lighting, her face paint marred by tears. ʿAdil's friends, remorseful for the haste with which they had earlier turned against him, have observed everything. Amal too. Pure, still virginal but suddenly grown up, she catches his eye. ʿAdil confesses that he has traveled a “long road” but assures her that he has not changed. In this tale's final twist, she now informs him, “But I have.” In the last brief, wordless scene the two lovers run along the beach holding hands, alone at last, silhouetted—perhaps haloed—by the sun's rays, embracing and kissing incessantly, innocent lovers on the margins of indecency.

This is hardly the conventional finale, as in al-Khataya, with wounds quickly forgotten and tears instantly dried. If the ending is ultimately and abruptly happy, the pathos lingers. The road not taken, the conceptualization of a radical rewriting of the social or political script, is still vivid even as it is being unscripted.

The violence has only just passed. Father and son are reconciled, but this is hardly the point. The patriarch has been saved but not, like the son, redeemed. The old order of things has not been fully restored. Moral victory goes to the illicit dancer, the tale's true victim. Having been charged as complicit in the breakup of the family, she now stands in as Mother Courage of the battered nation. She has taken her own blow to the cheek (an act that has been upstaged and virtually erased by the ensuing male on male violence), stayed the intemperate father's hand, and reunited the family. She has validated both ʿAdil's illicit romance with her and his return to propriety, a wedding-bound relationship with a slightly younger contemporary who may well be his cousin.61

Or so suggests Armbrust, “Bourgeois Leisure and Egyptian Media Fantasies,” 115.

Yet, that restored propriety also cries out against tradition, validating those voices, including ʿAdil's, that have been telling Amal all along that a bit of private time with her boyfriend is not so terrible. Having “changed,” Amal runs off with ʿAdil, haloed, into a very different sunset than that expected by most viewers. Critics squirmed, but the public kept filling the theater. It is 1969. By the following year Nasser will be dead. The future is uncertain.

Author's note: This essay has been nurtured by encouraging pats and disciplinary smacks from Lynda Coon, Israel Gershoni, Akram Khater, Sanaa Riaz, Farid al-Salim, Charles Smith, Martin Stokes, Christopher Stone, Ted Swedenburg, the seminar participants at the National Humanities Center who heard it in pre-production, and the editors of and anonymous readers for this journal. All of them graciously helped me edit it toward the final “author's cut.”