Cairo | Jeanette MacDonald, Robert Young

Cairo | Jeanette MacDonald, Robert Young | Faten Hamamah Speaks English!

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Cairo

	Cairo Jeanette MacDonald, Robert Young MGM (Video & DVD), 1995 average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Walk Like An Egyptian

This month on TCM the star of the month has been Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald, and good old Robert Osborne has been playing films by this duo every Monday night. And not just the old chestnuts either but the unusual ones that the two stars made when they were apart from each other. I suppose Mayer figured, why put two of them in the same movie, it would be more cost efficient to spread out the love. Thus last night we saw, first, the bizarre, ethereal BALALAIKA which teams Nelson Eddy with the Czech sensation Ilona Massey; and then the action switched to CAIRO, rather a different cut of cloth.

The credits tell the story better than I can. The credits play across a backdrop of Egyptian postcard pictures, the desert sands, filmy desert tents pitched at oases, the Sphinx in the moonlight, and yet schizoohrenically these postcard sketches have been tagged, as if by graffiti, for a child's hand has drawn stick figure pictures all over the scenery, a toy boy and a toy girl dance upon the sands, a dog barks, a gun goes off, with the pop exclamation "Bang" next to it. All of this indicates right away that CAIRO is one spy picture that's not taking itself too seriously.

Jeanette MacDonald isn't looking her absolute best but that's ok, she is still startlingly beautiful and chic; well, she should be, she's playing a movie star, Marcia Warren who for some reason has been stranded in North Africa since the outbreak of World War II. For company she has the incomparable Ethel Waters as her personal maid, Cleona Jones. Watch the fun as Waters attempts to steal every scene she's in from anyone who's around. In pictures like CAIRO Ethel Waters proved that she has more star power than nearly anyone else on the big screen at the time. And director WS Van Dyke nearly lets her get away with it. The looks and comments she throws at Jeanette are howlingly funny and true. Yes, she's the maid, but something fiercely independent rattles through her persona like an icy wind through an abandoned greenhouse.

Robert Young is appealing as usual. In the past few days I've seen three Robert Young pictures and have just begun to realize what a tragically overlooked actor he is! He is, simply put, always good in a variety of roles. Here he plays Homer Smith, a real Preston Sturges sort of character, the everyday guy from back home, Cavity Lake, California, who gets to play boy reporter all over the pleasure spots and bombed out convoys of the Mediterranean. Young is a good match for MacDonald and I wish they had made more films together, for she gives him sex appeal and he gives her a chance to be the homegirl sort of everyday person she always was, deep underneath the diva trappings. Or maybe I'm projecting. People called her the "Iron Butterfly," probably for good reason, but as the years go by she looks more and more like one of the premiere actresses of Hollywood; her singing is just the icing on the cake. When I was a boy I couldn't stand her singing. Now I can tolerate it. However I'd watch her reading (or singing) the phone book, she is utterly enchanting no matter what she does.

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Faten Hamamah Speaks English!

I knew that Faten Hamamah, the Egyptian superstar, played a role once in am MGM movie. But it didn't know it was Cairo until I had seen the movie. Unlike Omar Sharif, her ex-husband, who became a Hollywood superstar after Lawrence of Arabia; this movie had never been a fare chance for her.

Anyhow, still many Arabs, including myself, want to hear and see Faten Hamamah (and some other Egyptian stars at that time) speaks English!

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