What do Pedro Almodóvar and Iranian cinema have in common? Film historian Alexei Vasilyev draws unexpected parallels and delves into the secrets of the undiscovered Eastern cinema of the 1970s.
‘No fear of the unknown compares to the horror of a soul twisted by sin,’ repeats the voice off-screen three times. As the last words echo, the viewer sees a distorted face with twisted features reflected in a warped mirror. A minute later, a woman appears at the top of the staircase in an exquisite mansion. Plump, with a black mane and round, protruding facial features resembling the singer Irina Otieva, she begins her descent, continuing to assert, ‘I am insane, and my madness is like poisonous grass sprouting through the earth when the moon is full.’ This is how the Lebanese film Lady of the Black Moons (Sayedat al-Akmar al-Sawdaa, 1971) begins, after which the actress who played the role of the insane, wealthy woman, Nahed Yousri, becomes an icon in an unimaginable era in the life of Arab countries.
From a historical perspective, this era is more of an episode: there are only eight years between Israel's capture of the Sinai Peninsula in 1967 and the civil war in Lebanon in 1975, when flames of disaster and destruction engulfed the region, a fire that has not subsided to this day. Since that time, generations of stars have changed, the era of TV series has emerged, and fresh beauties have risen on the Arab cinematic horizon. However, the heroines of that time—Nahed Sherif, Ighraa, Nadia Lutfi, and Nahed Yousri—turned from simply movie icons into the most downloaded smartphone icons for new generations of Arab men. At that moment, and only for that time, it wasn’t the Swedes or Italians, nor Emmanuel and Madame Claude, but Arab women who showed all the local men (those who could afford a movie ticket) the kind of East that many of them, in all likelihood, would never get the chance to see—even in their own bedrooms.
The ‘madwoman’ from Beirut doesn’t keep us waiting long—there is no need to keep making guesses about her sins and twisted mentality. The same is true about guessing about the twists and curves of her body hidden under the folds of her dress. In contrast, Emmanuel, who only took to the stage two years later, tormented audiences in the anticipation of the main course significantly longer.
Aida (the name of Yousri's character) descends the stairs, immediately gets into a black hearse, puts on an operetta mask inspired by Johann Strauss II’s The Bat, and heads straight for another luxurious entrance. Behind the doors, the same madness awaits, the kind that was so meticulously recreated in Stanley Kubrick's swan song, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). At first, she is greeted by a girl in a nightgown holding a trikirion—an ornate, ritual candlestick used by the Eastern Orthodox and the Eastern Catholic Churches—who, in an ecstatic dance, leads Aida to a hall full of canoodling couples, with naked men and women striking languid poses on ottomans. The restless handheld camera emphasizes the electric atmosphere, and the hostess offers Aida the sweetest of desserts—a young man who will please the lady today, referring to him as ‘Omar’. The viewer then has five minutes to engage in a detailed study, not only of the chest and hips but also of all the details of the folds of fat on Nahed Yousri's body as well as the anatomy of her companion, the treat du jour.
Lebanon, with its impressive Christian diaspora and the laws requiring the president to be Christian (while a Muslim serves as the prime minister), occupied a special position among Arab countries. In the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, Beirut played the role of a financial intermediary, acting as a banking buffer between the East and the West. Due to this, Beirut was often referred to as the ‘Paris of the Arab East’. During this period, the most captivating, and sometimes unimaginable, adventures of characters in Egyptian and Syrian films were set in this city. The film industry in Lebanon, as well as in Egypt and Syria, flourished during this time. After the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in Israel occupying Sinai and the Golan Heights, Egypt and Syria ceased all imports from the United States, the United Kingdom, and West Germany, including cultural imports.
To the extent that after the release of the musical Funny Girl (1968), in which Egypt's top film idol, Omar Sharif, not only sang with Barbra Streisand but also became involved with her romantically. Streisand later confirmed her militant Zionism when she performed at Israel's state celebrations and conducted telebridges with Golda Meir. In Egypt, local films featuring this popular actor were banned and removed from circulation.
At that time, Egypt and Syria had oriented themselves toward a socialist model, involving the nationalization of banks and major enterprises, restricting currency transactions and foreign trade ties, with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as their main ally, where the issue of women's equality was vividly resolved long before 1974, the year of Emmanuelle, when feminists went to burn their bras at demonstrations. This had a curious, albeit temporary, effect on the local cinema, which was isolated from Hollywood. The leading Arab divas of that period saw no need to burn expensive and unaffordable (and unattainable for most of the female population then) lace bras as they simply took them off, preferring to remain on-screen without them.
Today, many lament the objectification of women, pointing to so-called sexploitation films of the 1960s and ’70s as a glaring example. For the actresses of that time, it was an act of liberation, self-affirmation, if you will—a demonstration of equality, considering, as is evident from the first scene of The Lady of the Black Moons, that their male partners parted with their undergarments just as easily, putting an end to any discussion of objectification or discrimination based on gender.
Moreover, if in the opening scene, Yousri is accompanied by an anonymous young man, as the main plot unfolds and the action shifts to the past, we are compelled to learn who this Omar is and what led our Aida to such sexually fixated behavior! She is accompanied by the gods of the Egyptian screen. Adel Adham, the king of villains and seedy characters, looking like a puppeteer's doll (and bearing a resemblance to the Soviet singer Joseph Kobzon), plays Aida's wealthy boss. Despite enjoying the charms of his secretary, he does not run around naked. However, Hussein Fahmy, who plays the law student who is hired by him as a personal chauffeur, will fully share the physical heat with the new sex siren.
Truth be told, this thirty-year-old man with red-blonde hair and huge blue eyes was also taking his first steps in cinema. However, he entered it from a completely different angle, breaking the hearts of ladies in the traditional, albeit jazzed-up with ‘the shake’ dance fad, musical melodrama Flame of Love (Nar El Shouq, 1970), where he was chosen by the Lebanese singing sensation Sabah to act as a kind of gem cutter, enhancing the brilliance of her daughter Ghuaida, whom she introduced to the public in that film.
Fahmy's subsequent trajectory will confirm that he is a high-class star; in a way, he was the Arab Robert Redford. In Egypt, he was recognized as best actor for two consecutive years, 1973 and 1974. The latter of these plaudits came for his role in the screen adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, titled Brothers-Enemies (Al-Ekhwa Al-A'adaa'), which become the largest all-star cast movie in the history of Arab cinema.
In general, Russian classics of the second half of the nineteenth century, with their explosive passions and recklessness of actions, were in vogue among Egyptian filmmakers at that time. The movies Sonya and the Madman (Sonya wal-majnoun, 1977), based on Crime and Punishment, and Lawlessness (Ashyaa Ded El Qanoon, 1982), based on Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, were hugely successful. This, in turn, says a lot about the nature of the local cinema in the period we are considering.
Returning to Fahmy in The Lady of the Black Moons, his casting for this role was one of those directorial strokes of luck that determined the success of the film. Despite the characteristic fatigue of a thirty-year-old man in the early 1970s, Fahmy, with his light mane and unclothed, looked more like a pliable youngster than a mature man. Rolling around half-naked with Yousri tirelessly—sometimes in bed, sometimes on sandy beaches—he gave the impression of Robert Mitchum in the photo where he lounges on a yacht in swim trunks with his family: as if his wife was not really his wife, and he was simply the most capricious among the children of the woman in the frame.
The plot unfolds fairly straightforwardly. Sensing Aida slipping away emotionally and physically, the boss proposes marriage. Aida decides this is best for both her and her beloved student, Omar, whom she can then support in luxury. Initially, Omar portrays himself as a self-respecting man, but under pressure from Aida, he simply gives in. While accompanying her husband on trips, she books rooms for him in the same hotels, turning him into her sex toy. At one point, he is saved from a bloody outcome only by the boss’s sister, who is in love with him. She literally pulls him out of the clutches—not to mention knuckledusters—of her brother's goons, who were ordered to deal with the hired help. Going forward, Aida continues to seek attention from paid partners, who even remotely resemble her Omar.
The plot seems typical for an Arab melodrama—a woman torn between selfless love and a calculated marriage, between her beloved and someone imposed by fate and circumstances. However, the revolutionary novelty of The Lady of the Black Moons, besides the explicit sex and the theatricality reminiscent of a living museum of wax figures, is the midnight phantasmagoria of orgy scenes that would come to characterize future films by the Italian Mario Bava (Lisa and the Devil, 1972).
However, what sets The Lady of the Black Moons apart is that Aida is not a victim. This is a scenario of her own making, a decision made through pure arithmetic, calculating what's best for all three. In scenes from the women’s brothel where she spends her nights, one recurring image is vivid: two naked strongmen holding a handsome man whom Aida castrates. It's probably just a dream, but the Freudian undertone of the gesture is evident.
Needless to say, the film exploded across the Arab Mediterranean like a bomb and sparked numerous imitations. It's intriguing to observe the transformations in depicting such a story with such a heroine. In the Egyptian film A Woman with a Bad Reputation (Emra’a’t Sayyat al-Souman, 1973), the sexual explicitness is toned down—after all, Egypt is not Lebanon. In bedroom scenes, Shams al-Baroudi, an actress with defiant, independent beauty reminiscent of Margarita Terekhova, known for her role as an avenger in the exceptional criminal film She and the Devils (Hiya wa l chayatin, 1969), covers her breasts and thighs on screen with a sheet. In real life, she contributed significantly to the image of an emancipated Eastern woman by ending a short marriage to a Saudi prince. Mahmoud Yassin, who was Hussein Fahmy’s most consistent rival for the title of Egypt's most desired actor in the 1970s, stays in his underwear in the role of a student (this time, though, in medical school). Although the embraces of these two actors are passionate by any European standard, the love triangle is complicated to the fourth power: the careerist husband sets up the heroine, Hanaa, with his boss, hoping for a promotion.
Director Henry Barakat had already established a notable reputation by the time he made A Woman with a Bad Reputation. At the beginning of the film, he boldly asserts his authorship by putting in the credit ‘Barakat's Film’, a statement more significant than the headline itself. This approach is reminiscent of Pedro Almodóvar, who, after achieving worldwide recognition, started crediting films labeled ‘An Almodóvar Film’. In the initial scene where Hanaa, driving a sporty, low-slung Ford, visits her lover returning from Paris, the camera, on a dolly, elegantly captures panoramic semi-circles behind the characters in harmony with the well-kept apartment. In scenes about the past, depicting Hanaa’s early married life when they had to get by on £22 per month, the camera shifts to manual mode, chaotically poking at the peeling walls of their tiny apartment and getting entangled at the spouses' feet, resembling a television report on a dormitory scandal.
Barakat doesn't merely juggle styles. Thoughtfully chosen, they help him unveil the social backdrop of the emergence of such a heroine and society's culpability in creating these women. However, Yassin's student doesn't need gimmicks to leave Hanaa—he isn’t willing to become a sex toy and upon discovering all her plotting, he simply takes off in a taxi. He departs to Henry Mancini’s music from the film Sunflower (I girasoli, 1970). Even earlier, Hanaa gathers her belongings, leaving her husband, accompanied by composer Nino Rota’s theme from The Godfather (1972).
The severing of relations with America in 1967 allowed Egyptian filmmakers to disregard copyright law, and the music from Sunflower became the pervasive and leading theme of the melodrama The White Dress (Al-Reda’a Al-Abiad, 1975), with a record-breaking 61 million tickets sold, becoming the highest-grossing Egyptian film in the USSR (where, incidentally, Sunflower, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ludmila Savelyeva, was also filmed). Francis Lai's theme from Love Story (1970) adorns the alcohol tragedy Don't Leave Me Alone (Wa Inhana al-Houb, 1974), a remake of Douglas Sirk's American film Written on the Wind (1956).
There were numerous remakes of these films. During this time, Egypt and Syria freely remade Hollywood classics, sometimes borrowing vice from America to justify overtly sexual character motivations and behavior, like in the Syrian film The Guilty (Al-Khatioun, 1975), based on James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), which had been used by Western filmmakers three times by then, including Visconti. They cunningly adapted Hollywood plots for anti-American propaganda and even to recruit soldiers for the war against Israel, as was the case with the film I Will Return to You (Boudour, 1974), made during the Yom Kippur War, reshaping the tearful tale of Seventh Heaven (1937), featuring James Stewart for Egyptian military interests.
In his attempt to uncover the social mechanism that places women like Aida and Hanaa in tough situations, Barakat made a misstep by portraying the student as a principled, hard-working hero, a poster character for whom the mission of a doctor is more valuable than anything in the world. The Syrian film I Will Die Twice, But I Love You (Amoot marratayn wa unibbuk, 1976) provided true realism in the same kind of storyline as Aida–Hanaa and their men. This realism extended to both the explicit sexual scenes—maximally revealing yet not posed, unlike in The Lady of the Black Moons—and the precise characterizations of figures drawn from the streets of Damascus, untouched by the morality of melodrama but vivid in texture. The credit for the latter goes to George Lutfi Al Khaouri, the cinematographer who shot all Syrian films in the 1970s and decided to try his hand at directing this film.
He never shot for anyone as well as he did for himself in this instance, seamlessly combining Egyptian opulence in the visuals, where thousands of kilowatts of light were used to make silver shimmer spectacularly on blue, yet allowing the skin to feel the brief freshness of the morning in a Mediterranean town where flowers in pots were watered on a brick porch to bring a little life to the dusty and stuffy atmosphere of local life.
These characterizations are perhaps also a result of his unbiased thinking as an innate cinematographer. Syria was undoubtedly the closest to both the USSR and the socialist model. However, even the most prolific director in the region, Mohammad Shahin, whether undertaking social analysis or critique, ultimately nullified all the truth he had uncovered. Whether it came to depicting women behind the wheel, dance, or prioritizing duty over light moral flexibility when it came to matters of well-being and career, he negated it all with a sudden principled gesture by the hero/heroine, which was not rooted in reality but borrowed from the vocabulary of melodrama and ideology (The Game of Love and Murder (Loabat al-Hob wa al-Qatl, 1983) and Summer Rains (Amfar Sayfia, 1984).
It was Lutfi Al Khaouri who depicted his young hero as lazy, clueless, and unambitious—like most Arab youth we see as boat station cashiers during the day and restaurant touts in the evening. The film emphasizes that Hamdi, by birth and social status, had no access to education. However, during a not-so-tedious workday as a tea dispenser, Hamdi has no other ideas aside from returning home to fondle his young, beautiful wife.
He is portrayed by Naji Jaber, a tall figure with a long face and nose, and a flowing mane—something like a Syrian precursor to Louis Garrel. He depicts Hamdi with humor, which not only makes watching the film more accessible and enjoyable but also adds an extra layer of life's truth to it. Arabs love to laugh, and even in Egypt at that time, there was a quota for producing a specific number of comedies. The humor in these films isn't about wit but rather about those incidents that evoke inexplicable laughter, highlighting a certain absurdity in the moment. Like the wig that suddenly flies off the hero's head in Respectable Families (A'ilat Mouhtaramah, 1968) or a naked woman slipping and falling in the middle of a bath, where she remains front stage and center during a scene in I Will Die Twice. It was clearly an unplanned gag, a ‘failed shot’ that turned out so funny that Lutfi Al Khaouri simply left it in the film, even though the scene was clearly intended to showcase the breasts and hips of a crowd of women bustling around the Syrian sex symbol Ighraa.
We will come back to Ighraa, but let's take a brief excursion into the Arab comedy of the 1970s. It is essential that we be acquainted with its king—Adel Emam. Cross-eyed and as bony as an unwrapped mummy, he became famous in 1973 after the release of two comedies: Forced Bet (Chay’min al-Houbb) and We Want a Scandal (Al-Bath'an al-Farida). In the first, he dresses up, disguising himself as a widow, but instead of helping a friend propose to the cousin of a madman with a gun, he becomes the object of persistent advances from the madman, chuckling: ‘And I would like a sip of brandy!’ In the second film, we see the character climbing balconies to his beloved's bedroom. Coming down toward him is a burglar. The hero asks him, ‘Which floor are you coming from?’ The burglar replies, ‘The third. And which floor are you going to?’ To which Emam says, ‘The sixth.’ And the burglar says, ‘Oh, I don't recommend it: it's crowded with people today, and some kind of commotion is going on up there.’
This comedy was so wildly successful in the USSR that this scene was soon turned into a whole storyline with a bothersome elevator operator in the rare Soviet absurd and equally excellent comedy Evening Labyrinth (1980). This old operator badgers hotel guests with his questions ‘Which floor are you from? Which one are you on?’ to the point that he, his chair, and his newspaper are simply moved from the vestibule to the elevator booth, and by the end of the film, his question already sounds like ‘Which floor are we on?’
Naji Jaber/AFP via Getty Images
In We Want a Scandal, there is also the beloved character of the authoritarian wife typical in Arab comedies. When a suitor asks her to introduce him to the girl's father, she responds, lighting a cigarette: ‘Why do you need the father? Talk to me. I am the mistress of the house!’ This role was played by Mimi Shakib, a Simone Signoret look-alike since Signoret appeared around 1973. And now, picture such a bulky, gloomy woman of the house. When her husband can't take it anymore and shouts at her, threatens divorce, and demands that she address him only as ‘sir’, she then fawns over guests to please him, praise a suitor he likes, and occasionally, with a subservient gaze, turns her generously made-up eyes at her husband, inquiring, ‘Am I saying it correctly, Mr Rahim?’ With no less brilliance, a similar unprincipled, tough woman is transformed in the Syrian comedy The Noble Thief (Al-Lis al-Zafir, 1968), promptly and convincingly transplanting the plot of Eldar Ryazanov's film Beware of the Car (1966) into the local context: here she started addressing her husband as nothing less than ‘Yes, master of my house!’
A true gem in Adel Emam's repertoire is the remake of the legendary comedy Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), starring George Segal and Jane Fonda, titled The Hamada and Tutu Gang (Esabat Hamadah wa Tutoo, 1982). Emam's excellent comedic support comes from the role of the thief's wife, Loubloba, a kind of Egyptian blend of Nina Grebeshkova and Nina Arkhipova. Although the remake follows the original almost literally, repeating not only scenes but also lines, as it turned out, more charmingly. This is because the movie played out in frontal mise-en-scènes set in affectionately illuminated domestic comfort, giving it a resemblance to televised performances at the Satire Theatre in Moscow.
The humor of the Arabs is vividly illustrated by a lengthy fifteen-minute scene devised by the creators themselves. Burglars, a married couple no less, seize the treasure of a prominent jeweler by employing the worthy bluff of a multi-stage fraudulent scheme that sends this elderly, plump, and unsuspecting gentleman to circumcision under general anesthesia. In the finale, reminiscent of Fonda in Fun with Dick and Jane, Loubloba stuffs her dress with banknotes from the robbed safe, and an impressive belly looms above the waist. Her husband's former boss, whom they rob this time, cannot comprehend what is happening. Only half an hour ago, he had been dancing with and rubbing against this woman and even scheduled a meeting with her in his office, yet in such a short time, she had grown such a belly! To his direct question about what had happened, Loubloba, rolling her eyes, replies, ‘I don't know. Apparently, something's wrong with my head.’ And in this inexplicable, absurd, but irresistibly funny line lies the quintessence of Arab humor.
Adel Imam/Getty Images
In I Will Die Twice, But I Love You, laughter isn't limited to the naked woman slipping in the bath. There's also an old man awakened by the ululations at weddings—in Arab countries, the mothers of the groom and bride welcome the bloodstained sheet provided by the groom after the first wedding night. He nudges his fat, quarrelsome, snoring wife, and she asks, ‘Why don't you let me sleep?’ He retorts, ‘You should be happy if spring has awoken within your husband again after hearing these sounds!’ She grumbles, ‘Well, I'm happy, I'm happy,’ and hugs him in such a way that they both fall out of bed. The humorous character is a lazy loafer, and the sex siren is equally amusing. The playful portrayal of the heroines, both in appearance and character, bears a resemblance to Stefania Sandrelli. They embody a cunning fox whose cleverness is, however, quite superficial and limited by a modest intellect devoid of any inclination toward logical thinking. This, however, has no impact on the erotic scenes: the characters fall in love with each other simply because they are young and beautiful, and Najib Jabra's slender figure perfectly complements Ighraa's luxurious bust. Adding a touch of humor to this triangle is the wealthier man, who catches the newlyweds in his apartment at night—he shows up intending to rent it out—and finds himself disturbed by the overall situation. Hamdi took the keys from the office to spend a ‘civilized’ evening with his wife, take a shower, watch TV, and have sex on soft feather mattresses. Evidently inflamed by the overall situation and the animalistic beauty of the couple, he directs his invitations first to the husband, suggesting that they should dine in expensive restaurants and spend time together.
In I Will Die Twice, But I Love You, Lutfi Al Khaouri took a familiar trope of Arab cinema—an erotic melodrama about the ‘woman who knew what was best for everyone’—and brought it to life in the viewer's sensual experience by showcasing the comedic aspects of the plot. He also displayed humor in dealing with Ighraa's sexuality. This role became the crowning achievement of her acting career, highlighting her as a witty and talented actress. The Syrian audience was already very familiar with her bust for quite some time. In detective Mohammad Shahin's The Other Side of Love (Waj Al Akhar Lil Hub, 1973), the film opens with a series of long and illogical close-ups of a bare chested Ighraa biting her lips and rolling her eyes with the simulated languor of the porn actresses of that time. She lured a decent Syrian doctor to Beirut, where he ended up being accused of her murder. As is typical for Syrian detective stories, this one involves a heavy dose of social criticism, exposing corruption and shadow businesses. In terms of detective stories, the Egyptian film Criminals (El-Moznebon, 1975) is much more interesting. The tightly knit detective story about the murder of a promiscuous movie star found dead in her bedroom seems to slide into the familiar path of a social detective during the interrogations of suspicious guests. It then somersaults back into the old realm of a paradoxical mystery a la Agatha Christie, making a pre-final nod to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966). After all, the slain woman is a film actress—with a twist.
The introductory titles of Criminals are cleverly crafted. A dozen movie stars playing suspects are presented with numbered photographs in frontal and profile views, resembling the mugshots usually taken upon arrest. Leading this ensemble is our old acquaintance Hussein Fahmy. Egyptians in the mid-1970s evidently had a lot of fun with, and excelled in, title design. In another film featuring Fahmy, The Fugitive (Al-Harib, 1974), four superstars playing people trapped in the same apartment at night, while held hostage by an escaped criminal and a secret marital infidelity, are presented differently. A black frame is torn in the middle like paper, revealing the actor's or actress's eye, and below it is a signature with their name. When the title The Fugitive appears, another small frame with a moving image of Fahmy sprinting with a runway emerges in the background. As the names of the film's creators are listed, this frame smoothly grows and eventually spills beyond the screen.
In another film by Mohammad Shahin, where Ighraa’s charms are abundantly displayed, Dancer on Wounds (Raqisa aala al-jirah, 1974), she plays a belly dancer who each time that she falls in love chooses not to ruin the life of an upright man. Here, she bared it all and added a tragic note of self-sacrifice, climbing, both literally and metaphorically, over the boundaries and into the territory of another Arab sex diva of that time, the Egyptian actress Nahed Sherif. Thematically, the title of Sherif's film The Most Honest Sinner (Ashraf Khati’ah, 1973) holds much significance for her creative work. In this movie, her character, a sex spy in chiffon robes, seduces a businessman in a hotel. The actress portrays a repentant figure, Anna Sergeevna, reminiscent of Svetlana Svetlichnaya's role in The Diamond Arm (1968), empathizing with the bitter family history of this good man.
While Ighraa resembles Stefania Sandrelli both in appearance and mannerism, Sherif appears as a copy of Michele Mercier, injecting unbearable pomp into Angelique—the marquise of angels—into a crucible of tragedy. In Don't Leave Me Alone, the remake of Written on the Wind, she reprised the role that earned Dorothy Malone an Oscar: a sister who initially indulges in debauchery and alcoholism but eventually becomes a voluntary recluse in her family home. Banished from the world of men, she feels a perilous mix of attraction and jealousy toward them. Sherif, shaking in her red wigs, dancing against the backdrop of Warhol-esque portraits of Liza Minnelli, portrayed this pathological story perhaps more vividly and convincingly than her American predecessor. She brought back a creature born of kitschy authorial logic into the realm of kitsch. In this case, it was done too literally, in an academic manner, and with the melodramatic exaggeration of applying Freudian formulas to human psychology.
With trembling hands, Sherif brings a cigarette to her voluptuous lips as she listens to the tale of her lover lost in Bangkok, recounting the horrors of war he endured while they were apart. On the screen, black-and-white photo documents unfold: napalm attacks in Vietnam, shooting in Korea, the mutilated and defiled bodies of Arab boys at the hands of Israeli soldiers piled up after the massacre in Deir Yassin. This is a scene from the film Wolves Don't Eat Meat (Zi’ab la ta’kol al-Lahm, 1973), a collaboration between the best cinematic forces of Lebanon and Egypt in Kuwait. The film incorporates all the risky styles and directions of the early 1970s: softcore, giallo, and gangster action with chases in the style of French Connection (internationally titled Kuwait Connection), a sealed-off detective story, a psychopathological thriller with sexual deviations, and the Lelouchesque formula of ‘lost and found love + politics + recent history’ as found in the film Live for Life (1967).
It's time to reveal the truth. The director of both films, Samir A. Khouri, trained in Italy in the late 1960s, and he eventually connected with one of the most unrestrained and unprincipled producers of giallo, Sergio Bergonzelli. Khouri worked as an assistant on his film In the Folds of the Flesh (Nelle pieghe della carne, 1970), where the elements of the detective genre, horror, and pathology were mixed and interwoven with cinematic and photo documents of fascist concentration camps. Similarly, in Wolves Don't Eat Meat, along with the chronicles of Vietnam and Deir Yassin, the film featured car chases and a scene of slaughter at a slaughterhouse.
At that time, European filmmakers favored Beirut, lit with neon lights, to shoot Bond-like imitations. In one notable film, Rebus (1968), Lawrence Harvey unravels a series of murders involving croupiers while Anne-Margret twirls around on the stage of a Beirut casino, shaking her legs to a catchy song with the chorus ‘Come on, take a chance, maybe lose or maybe win.’ ‘But wait,’ Khouri seems to rightly point out, ‘Beirut is my homeland, and I know it not only from postcards, and Anne-Margret isn't doing anything that Nadia Lutfi hasn't already done!' Lutfi, a pseudo-blonde resembling Tatyana Doronina with large eyes and plump lips, became famous for portraying modern ladies wearing camellias in films like Black Glasses (El naddara el sawdaa, 1963) and Men for One Face (Rigal Bila Malamih, 1972). These women, adorned with false eyelashes and—even when alone at home!—with tiaras in their hair, lighting up like a stevedore but jumping in shock into the arms of their similarly dressed friends, crying ‘Oh, who is it!’ at the sound of an unexpected doorbell, walked straight into Almodóvar's comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). In Murder in a Quiet Neighborhood (Garimah Fil Hay al-Hadi, 1967), a melodramatic spy thriller about exposing a Zionist terrorist nest in Cairo, her dance on the cabaret stage includes a long pause where she lies on her side on the floor, spreading her voluptuous legs covered in fishnet stockings. In the next scene, a couple of soldiers peep at her in her dressing room. Lutfi approaches the door, kisses each of them on the lips one by one, and then, after closing the door in front of the viewer, is left alone with them in the room. In 1967, Egyptian cinema had not yet matured beyond this point.
From Italy, Khouri brought along Patrick Samson, a fellow countryman who found himself on the Italian stage performing cover versions of English and French hits. Samson was frequently invited to sing off-screen and in Italian cinema, including in Season of the Senses (La stagione dei sensi, 1969) with Udo Kier and Bandit in a Kilt (1969) by Piero Livi. In The Lady of the Black Moons, Samson sang the song ‘Once There Was Love’, which was one of those male ballads from the 1960s that begin with melancholic reflection and, by the chorus, is drowned in the hysteria of the orchestra and a sobbing baritone. This standard was set by Matt Monro's title song from the Bond film From Russia with Love (1963), and by the early 1970s, everyone, from Elvis Presley (‘My Boy’) to Dean Reed (‘El Cantor’), was indulging in these songs.
Samson contributed his own funk composition with a nod to the yé-yé style in ‘The Wolves’, a rather boyish tune that was in keeping with the spirit of the film. The movie embodies the dream of any boy with an unbridled spirit: naked women, gratuitous dismemberment, a detective story with a mind-boggling resolution, high-speed chases, shootouts, and a bloodthirsty sadistic mercenary (played by Lebanese diva Silvana Badrakhan). The unique sense of the seventies permeates everything: to hell with it all!
The riches of Arab cinema during the confrontation with America are inexhaustible. The Arab world shamelessly plundered Hollywood during the American blockade, disregarding copyright, and combined its treasures with the discoveries of European cinema, swinging between art house and soft porn at that time. They sweetened it with their own excessive emotions, from laughter to tears, creating ‘Hollywood on the Nile’, their own world, where you could find everything that the global screen could offer at that time—and much, much more.