Demonstrates noir’s appeal, regardless of the time or place of origin….
The term “Golden Age” gets thrown around a lot, but when the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station arrived in cinemas in 1958, it was indeed during a dynamic cultural period in the modern history of Egypt. This was the era of renowned popular singers like Umm Kalthum and Abdel Halim Hafez. There was a thriving movie industry based in the city of Alexandria, then considered one of the Arab world’s cosmopolitan hubs. Politically, it was a heady time for the nation, just a few years removed from the 1953 revolution which saw the removal of the old monarchy and the establishment of a Republic under the leadership of future president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Moreover, Egypt had just survived an invasion by a coalition of Britain, France, and Israel during the 1956 Suez Crisis, after Nasser’s government had nationalized the vital Suez Canal. It was a hopeful time for Egyptians and many of their Arab neighbors.
For all that context however, Cairo Station tells a deeply personal story, following a disabled newspaper vendor named Kenawi (played by Chahine) who becomes taken with Hanuma (Hind Rostom), an attractive soft drink peddler at the train station where both work. When Kenawi’s love isn’t returned, he goes off the rails, leading to tragic consequences. Blending social commentary, melodrama, and film noir, Cairo Station packs a formidable punch in its trim 76-minute runtime, all set in and around the confines of a train station.
Youssef Chahine was born in 1926 to a Lebanese father (an attorney) and a Greek mother (a tailor). He later attended Egypt’s prestigious Victoria College, then eventually went abroad to study film and theater at the Pasadena Playhouse’s School of Theatre Arts in California. He returned to Egypt afterwards, finding a job at Twentieth Century Fox’s local publicity department. His filmmaking career started quickly, directing his first feature Baba Amin in 1950. By the time he made Cairo Station, he had already directed nine films. These included comedies, fantasies, musicals (Chahine was a Gene Kelly fan), and dramas. Amongst his collaborators during this period was an up-and-coming Omar Sharif, before the actor went on to international stardom with his memorable appearance in Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
Reportedly, Chahine was attracted to the darker, more thematically complex material of Cairo Station, having read the script by then unknown screenwriter Abdel Hay Adib. The romantically troubled protagonist at its center, Kenawi, echoed characters previously explored in American film noirs like Fritz Lang’s Scarlett Steet (1945), where Edward G. Robinson gets played for a sap by Joan Bennett. There are especially strong parallels to Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Vertigo (1958), released the same year as Cairo Station. There another tortured protagonist, Jimmy Stewart’s ex-detective, falls hard for a woman he’s hired to follow (Kim Novak), and his obsession leads to loss and tragedy.
As I alluded to earlier, part of the fascination of Cairo Station is the way in which it uses noir tropes while also offering a closely observed portrait of post-revolutionary Egypt. Another key character is Hanuma’s fiancée Abu Serih (Farid Shawki), a train porter and labor activist who is trying to organize his fellow train workers into a union. Along the way, we also meet feminist activists, religious conservatives, musicians, businessmen, and other representatives of various strata of Egyptian life. Kenawi himself was a poor farmer, who migrated to Cairo looking for better prospects but clearly struggles to move up the ladder. In this regard, Cairo Station can be compared to other socially conscious noirs like Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which depicted the haves and have nots of post-World War Two Japan within a police procedural narrative.
However, Cairo Station has been more prominently linked stylistically to the Italian Neorealist movement, which was borne out of the Second World War and presented a grittier, street-level view of daily life for ordinary Italians in the wake of the war’s destruction– as seen in classics like Roberto Rosselini’s Paisan (1946) or Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). While Cairo Station certainly offers a harsh depiction of Egypt’s underclass, Chahine’s polished visual style and sexually charged drama is more akin to later Italian films such as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). In that film, a group of brothers and their mother move from a small town to big city Rome in search of a better living. One of the brothers enters a tryst with a prostitute, which turns possessive, and then violent—not unlike Kenawi’s interaction with Hanuma throughout Cairo Station.
This gets to the core of what Cairo Station is really about—unrequited love, sexual frustration, humiliation, and the descent into madness. Anybody who has had a romantic crush or been in love with someone– and then rejected–can relate to Kenawi’s pain. However, this in no way justifies his actions later in the story and raises profound issues which the film strongly considers. One of them is the link between masculinity and misogyny. Part of Kenawi’s despair at being rejected by Hanuma is the implication that he is therefore inadequate as a man. This is made explicit by Hanuma herself, who mocks Kenawi for not being as “manly” as the brawnier—and wealthier—Abu Serih. It’s worth noting that the supposedly more appealing Abu Serih forbids Hanuma from continuing to work after their engagement, and later beats her after catching her dancing with a band of musicians aboard an idle train.
Hanuma herself is a complex character, and not entirely the innocent victim of the story. While early on she tells her friends she would never “lead on” the romantically gullible Kenawi and clearly rejects his proposal during a scene at a fountain, she later exploits his affections, such as at a climactic scene at a warehouse when she hides her wares from suspecting authorities. This unwillingness to simplify its characters with wholly “good” or “bad” intentions is part of Cairo Station’s brilliance.
Moreover, there is a broader cultural context which Cairo Station more implicitly suggests, and that is the still relatively conservative social and religious attitudes prevalent in Egyptian society and many predominately Muslim communities around the world. Gender inequality, sexual repression, and strict interpretations of religious dogma are by no means limited to Islamic societies (we still see these issues even in America’s own culture wars), but they are more pronounced in that part of the world for reasons historical, cultural, and political, varying from country to country.
Suffice it to say that as in many neighboring countries during this mid-century era, there were significant attempts in post-revolutionary Egypt to embrace more open, liberal attitudes toward sexuality, women’s rights, and secularization, particularly in the major cities. As we see in Cairo Station, many women dress freely without enforced dress codes. The beforementioned feminist characters demonstrate outside a train, carrying signs reading “Women Against Marriage”. Even the character of Hanuma herself, as we have discussed, is a distinctly well-drawn character, particularly compared with many female protagonists featured in male-driven Hollywood films of the 1950s. It’s impressive the way Chahine frankly addressed these issues in 1958, which are still being wrestled with to this day.
With that being said, Cairo Station offers a very acute portrait of a man who is sexually rejected, feels humiliated, and then acts out in violent, deranged fashion. In this sense, the character of Kenawi is a forerunner to later cinematic anti-heroes such as the mom-obsessed killer Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), or the loner-turned-vigilante Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Like those characters, Kenawi is obsessed with sexual imagery, as we see him adorning his room with pin-up pictures of lingerie-clad women, along with his constant gazing and stalking of Hanuma.
In addition to its thoughtful themes and characterizations, Cairo Station achieves much of its effects through its technical artistry. Chahine’s use of camera movement and visual framing is elegant, as is the black-and-white photography of Alvise Orfanelli. They vividly capture the commotion of the train station, the cramped interiors of Kenawi’s room or inside the trains, as well as the hot, glaring spaces outside. In one particularly memorable shot during the beforementioned fountain scene, we see Kenawi hunched over in the foreground, with a towering statue of the Pharoah Rameses II in the background against the bright sunlit sky (the statue is reportedly no longer there, having been moved to a museum). The musical score by Fouad El Zahiri features unique instrumentation, by turns lush and haunting. And the above-referenced musical sequence aboard the train is quite something—a rare moment of joy for our protagonists where they can just smile and dance.
For all its merits, Cairo Station was not well-received by Egyptians upon its initial release. An anecdote has it that during an early screening of the film, an angry audience demanded their money back, or else threatened to destroy the theater (the owner granted their request). Perhaps audiences were taken aback by the dark, sordid nature of Cairo Station’s story, its disturbed protagonist, and the unflattering portrayal of Cairo it presented. Egyptian film scholar Joseph Fahim implied this when he described the film’s content as “too close to us.”
Cairo Station did receive international acclaim however and was nominated for awards at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. Its fortunes within Egypt later changed as well, when it appeared on Egyptian television in the 1970s and was embraced by new audiences. Chahine went on to make a variety of other types of movies, often dealing with historical, political, or even autobiographical subject matter. Included on the Criterion Collection Blu-ray release of Cairo Station is a 1991 short film he made titled Cairo as Seen by Chahine, an inventive semi-documentary portrait of the present-day city that was banned for some time by the Egyptian government.
But Cairo Station, along with its many other distinctive aspects, demonstrates noir’s appeal regardless of its time or place of origin. Like many classics that were initially dismissed, Chahine’s film offers an unflinching look at some of the darker aspects of human experience, and like love, the truth can hurt. Alas, the real life ending of Cairo Station is a bit brighter, and it is now recognized for the riveting piece of cinema that it is.
Anees Aref is a writer on film, history, and politics based in the Los Angeles area who has published abroad as well as in the United States. His work has appeared in Film International and Noir City Magazine.
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