Dahab

DAHAB (1953)

The second movie I've seen in PFA's "Music on the Nile: Fifty Years of Egyptian Musical Films" series and it's just as delightful in its own way as the first. If anyone had told me a week ago that I would have been thoroughly enchanted by a musical cheese weighing number, I would have thought they were crazy. In fact, if they had told me that I would have enjoyed Dahab so much right before I watched it, I would've told them they were nuts because the program description of the movie included one of the more terrifying phrases I've ever seen, "the precocious child star Faryuz was Egypt's answer to Shirley Temple." For me, carpet bombing is the only sensible answer of any country to Shirley Temple, but since the previous movie in the PFA series had been so good, I decided to take a chance.

Anwar Wagdi plays vagabond musician Alfredo, who comes across an abandoned baby in the night. He tries his best to get Our Heroes (Dahab is the dinky one in the middle) someone to take it and raise it (including the extraordinarily beautiful Magda, who plays the young woman who actually abandons the baby which is her cousin). When that fails, he has no choice but to raise it on his own. He names the child, Dabab, after the beautiful woman he's encountered on the street. Years pass and Dahab grows up to be the aforementioned Faryuz, who is actually cute, talented and far less grating than our Ms. Temple. Many Chaplinesque hijinks ensue as Alfredo and Dahab play music on the streets, try to scam free food wherever they can (cue the excellent cheese-weighing number) and convince the owner of a successful nightclub (the hilarious Ismail Yasin) to let Dahab perform. The sequence in which Dahab performs a long musical number to catch the owner's attention is staggering, with Faryuz performing imitations of most of Egypt's major musical performers of the time (the old Egyptian couple next to me had tears in their eyes from laughing so hard). Exceptionally wonderful about the P.F.A. programmers and their selection is that one of Faryuz's parodies is of a musical number from The Flirtation of Girls, the musical we had just seen, so everyone who saw both movies had the context to get the joke. Really nice work on the part of the programmers. In the numbers where Faryuz parodies the woman singers, she shimmies and skitters about in such skimpy outfits that it's kind of unsettling (if Pynchon had somehow seen this movie and then built Bianca in Gravity's Rainbow, his own twisted version of Shirley Temple, I wouldn't be at all surprised).

Dahab and Alfredo get rich performing at the nightclub, get visited by the beautiful cousin Dahab, and the melodrama ensues as the evil couple, who wanted cousin Dahab to throw the baby in the river all those years ago, fall upon hard financial times and learn that the young Dahab is that child. Several cabaret numbers, and a few unbelievable court spectacles later, Alfredo and Dahab are separated, leaving Alfredo broke and broken-hearted and Dahab threatening to jump off a building. Toss in a huge tear-jerker ending and you've got yourself one really satisfying musical. A lot of it is that the Chaplin stuff is done so well, a lot of it is that the musical numbers are ridiculous and enjoyable, but much of it is the talent involved. Faryuz really is an astounding performer, but also a good, solid actress. Wagdi capably bridges the comedy and the melodrama with his performance and Yasin and Magda do great work at their respective poles.

I know, I know, what are the chances of this movie ever coming along again? But I tell you just in case; don't let an opportunity to see Dahab pass you up. If you get an offer to check out a hilarious musical cheese-weighing number, remember: you could do much, much worse.

More about this movie (and good luck finding the info, it's buried wayyy down there)