Fatin Hamama

Fatin Hamama discovered the cinema when she was young, living with her family in the eastern Delta, where her father worked as a primary school secre­tary. Her father took her to see her first film in the provincial town of Mansura. The actress Asya was there for the opening of her new film. Young Fatin saw her from a distance, glittering in the lights, surrounded by the admiring crowd, and was captivated.

Around the same time, her father entered her for a magazine beauty contest for children. Fatin won the contest, and her father won the cash prize. Her winning picture soon found its way into the hands of director Muhammad Karim, who saw in it a delicacy he wanted for a young girl’s role in his next film with Muhammad Abd al-Wahab. The film, Yawm Sa’id (Happy Day), was released in 1940 and when audiences left the theaters, the talk was not of established stars but about the young girl who said to Abd al-Wahab, “Mama cooked some apricot preserves for you today”

Hamama grew up in the industry and married in it, twice—first to director Ezz al-Din Zulfiqar, then to actor Omar al-Sharif—before finally marrying a respected radiologist, Dr. Muhammad Abd al-Wahab.

She was especially loved by the middle-class girls of Egyptian society, even Arab society, because in almost one hundred films she created the image of the good girl, whose fate was always in the oppressive hands of others. Her character was essentially passive, never struggling against challenges, but facing them instead with a forbearance that bordered on surrender. Her films were overwhelm­ingly melodramatic, to the extent that she became known as Madame Melo.

Despite the huge number of tear-jerkers she appeared in, her image was redeemed by a sharp intelligence. She was leading lady in Henry Barakat’s best films: Du’aa al-Karawan (Call of the Curlew, 1959), al-Haram (The Sin,1965), al­Khayt al-Rafi’ (The Thin Thread, 1971), and La Azza’ lil-Sayidat (Women Can’t Come to the Funeral, 1979). In the 1993 she appeared in Dawud Abd al-Sayed’s Ard al-Ahlam (Land of Dreams), which, despite its box-office flop, is considered by many one of the best films of the decade.

A scene from Doaa al-Karawan (1959)

Adapted from a novella of the same title by Taha Husayn, The Nightingale’s Prayer tells the story of two poor orphaned sisters from the countryside. The first, sent to work as a servant, is seduced and raped by her master, an affluent young engineer, and subsequently killed by her uncle in an attempt to clear the family’s reputation. Her sister, performed by Fatin Hamama, finds refuge in a middle-class family where she is helped to acquire a certain education. Yet she does not find peace of mind and is haunted by the idea of avenging her sister’s death. She thus seeks employment by the same man and attempts to make him fall in love with her in order to be able to punish him. As time passes, ambiguous emotional ties start to link master and servant, oscillating between moral prohibition and deep desire. Eventually, they reach a dramatic climax: he dies in her arms, shot by a bullet intended for her.

The Nightingale’s Prayer includes many of the recurrent motifs and con­stellations of melodrama, such as class difference, rape, the merciless father-figure, and punished desire. It also offers some of the irrational and emotional narrative twists so typical of the genre, for instance the surprising change of the engineer from notorious womanizer to devoted lover. More­over, both the desire of the heroine and the viewer’s expectations are violently thwarted by the killing of the engineer at the very moment when he and his beautiful servant are united in his first sincere embrace. Tragedy and looming moral danger (seduction) are conveyed not only by the plot construction but also by the set design, which creates a cold, dim impression.

In particular, the engineer’s house is scarcely lit, equipped only with a few sharp-edged pieces of furniture. Its windows are shaped by small wooden frames that keep out the daylight and render the atmosphere gloomy and claustrophobic. Even exterior shots depict an unpopulated rural setting, dominated by sharply contrasted low-key lighting, isolating the human figures from their background, and heightening the sense of gloom that emanates from this doomed cross-class liaison.

Doubtless the film language in The Nightingale’s Prayer achieves, along with its plot, typical melodramatic emotionality, yet what has turned it into a modernist-oriented text—apart from its literary source—is first, its denunci­ation of a ‘premodern’ habit, the crime of honor and therefore the killing of girls who by losing their virginity were considered to have dishonored their families, and second, its preoccupation with one of the pillars of modernist thinking, namely education. It is through her education that the heroine becomes more of a match for the engineer, and it is also one of the sources of the power with which she resists his seduction. Nonetheless, the motif of irreconcilable class difference is still pivotal, due to the extreme poverty of the heroine’s peasant family as oppose to the bourgeois prosperity and indulgent lifestyle of the engineer – Viola Shafik

Cast and Production Credits

Year - 1959, Genre – Drama, Country - Egypt, Language - Arabic, Director – Henri Barakat, Cast – Fatin Hamama, Ahmad Mazhar, Amina Rizk, Zahrat El-Ola