Egypt by Three

I'm giving this a six because the atmosphere and brilliant location camera work make this a fascinating experience. The "old fashioned" attitudes criticized by the other reviewer were not really that old fashioned for westerners in the early fifties! The film world didn't (and hasn't) budged much in its depiction of Middle Eastern societies. The three stories are fascinating, if not too well matched--how does a fairly conventional romance tale sit beside a very unusual story about the plague and a unique tale of two bumbling Yankee crooks stranded in a Coptic Christian town? The metaphorical language and strange subject matter does, however set this above the usual Hollywood fluff about the Middle East.

Again a six, mostly for the fascinating location work, which gives this film an amazingly authentic atmosphere.

A collection of three stories taking place in Egypt, it opens with the narrator taking four items out of a box. (From the introduction, I expected the four items to somehow tie the three stories together, but I was incorrect.) Each short story is like an episode of the Twilight Zone-- this film was made in 1953, but due to the poor sound and photography quality and the location, it has the look of a much older film. The credits list only 11 actors, including Joseph Cotten as narrator; for three of those actors, this was the only known acting gig shown on IMDb. It would have been interesting to know who the other characters are in all three stories. The only additional acting credit at the end of the film itself is the name of the order of monks appearing in the third story.

This old-fashioned -- even by the standards of 1953 -- and romantic view of life in Egypt tries hard to merge various plots about romantic love, jewel smuggling and the White Man's Burden as lovers try to meet and British medical services try to prevent bubonic plague among the superstitious Bedouins. The result is a bit of a muddled mess, but the whole is redeemed, in no small part, by Nicolas Hayer's dazzlingly brilliant photography. Oddities such as telephone service in tents abound, and there is a lot of poor looping in the soundtrack.

The performances are fairly stolid, which contrasts oddly with the metaphor-laden dialogue. The result is a picture worth seeing once, for the visuals.