A Cigarette and a Glass
Director: Niazi Mostafa
Year: 1955
Rating: 7.5
Country: Egypt
One nation's historical cinema that has never received much attention in
the West is the Egyptian film industry and in particular from the era that
is considered their Golden Age - the 1940's to the 1960's. There just don't
seem to be many of these films that are available with English subtitles
which is a shame because the ones I have seen are quite wonderful. That was
obviously a very different time than today - the films felt modern and classical
and a little bit liberated with women drinking, smoking and loving and many
of them were musicals with great performances often taking place in smoky
nightclubs. They have a resemblance to Bollywood films from that period though
the musical numbers are not nearly as elaborate.
This film is a mixture of music, melodrama and comedy that never quite jells
but is lifted constantly by the performances of three female artists - Samia
Gamal, one of Egypt's great belly dancers, Kouka who was born in Sudan but
moved to Egypt to become a singer and the very famous Dalida, who had won
Miss Egypt the year before. In this film Dalida is just at the beginning
of her career and plays a sultry nurse after another woman's husband. At
one point in the film she is at a cocktail party in a lovely evening gown
and sits down at the piano and first breaks into song and then does a seductive
come-on. She later went on to a tremendous singing career in the West.
I expect this would be considered a weepy woman's melodrama as the Cairo
It Girl and cabaret singer Houda (Gamal) gives up her career to marry a young
but poor doctor. Love is everywhere. For a while. She has a baby and begins
to get a little bored - and her husband is spending a lot of time at work
with a nurse clearly on the make. Depressed she starts drinking and doesn't
believe her husband is being faithful - and so drinks more - and it all comes
crashing down.
