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Thursday, May 13, 2021

DOA AL KARAWAN / THE NIGHTINGALE’S PRAYER (aka THE CURLEW’S CRY) (1959)

Classic ‘women’s’ meller from prolific Egyptian Golden Age writer/director Henry Barakat proves a lumpy mix in spite of its stellar rep.  Overstuffed with dramatic reversals, it hits the ground running as a pair of beautiful sisters & mother are sent into exile when the corpse of their adulterous father comes home.  Disgrace (for them and town) only avoided by shooing the women to some other village where they separately find work as servants.  But when the older, more beautiful sister is seduced by her handsome employer, all three are soon back on the road, led by a family uncle duty-bound to murder the fallen sister in an honor killing.  Motivation enough for younger sister Faten Hamamah (a top Egyptian actress and Mrs. Omar Sharif at the time) to seek revenge by taking her sister’s old position in order to drive the seducer mad with unconsummated passion.  Barakat takes a brisk, straightforward approach to all this melodramatic suffering, dropping & picking up characters willy-nilly and sending Hamamah packing whenever the plot needs a kick.  Then in the third act, grabbing story beats from the Scarlett O’Hara/Rhett Butler relationship in GONE WITH THE WIND.*  He gets his points across, but it’s all pretty strenuous and repetitious as we wait for fate to take its inevitable toll.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Darryl F. Zanuck could have used this in the ‘40s at 20th/Fox for Linda Darnell, with Gene Tierney as the older, more beautiful sister.

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