Wednesday, March 9, 2022

A Night in Cairo

Ramon Novarro was honored in Summer Under the Stars last August. One of this movies that TCM ran that I hadn't done a post on before was The Barbarian, so I recorded it and only recently finally got around to watching it.

Myrna Loy plays Diana Standing, one of those idle rich types who's able to travel around the world even when there's a depression on, as she and her companion Powers (Louise Closser Hale) travel to Egypt, where she apparently has some ancestry. But the real reason she's there is because she's got a fiancé in Gerald Hume (Reginald Denny), some sort of engineer who is currently working in Egypt. The wedding isn't quite scheduled yet, as they could get married in England, or perhaps even here in Egypt.

Meeting Diana at the train station in Cairo is her uncle Cecil (C. Aubrey Smith), as well as Jamil (Ramon Novarro), a dragoman, which basically means somebody who is able to assist travelers who don't speak the language in various parts of the Middle East. He, unsurprisingly, is taken by Diana's beauty, and we know the two are going to meet again beacuse they're the stars of the movie. Also falling for Diana the first time he sees her, sometime later in the movie, is the Pasha (Edward Arnold), who has a much higher status than a mere factotum like Jamil.

Jamil also turns out to be a bit of a jerk, as he comes up with a ruse to see Diana again. Diana is traveling with her lapdog as well, and said dog is lost by the time they get to the hotel. Ah, but Jamil was able to find it -- or did he snatch it before Diana could get it as an excuse to go to Diana's hotel room? Diana gives him a monetary reward, and that ought to be the last time the two meet.

Except that Jamil keeps coming up with excuses to see Diana again and try to make things "convenient" for her, which includes making all sorts of trouble for Diana by showing up in the bedroom of her hotel suite unannounced, while Diana is still in bed! It should be clear to every viewer that Jamil is simply trying to put the moves on Diana, and won't take "no" for an answer, and gets increasinly forward about it. Yet another character who deserves to be smacked. Thankfully she does finally dismiss him.

But things get even worse when Diana decides to go for an excursion by camel to see Gerald, who has been called away by his work on an aqueduct. Jamil finds out about it, and gets the guide to leave so that he can take the other guide's place! Jamil then basically kidnaps Diana and takes her across the desert, still trying to woo her. She gets away, but it's only to Pasha's desert place, and Jamil, manipulative bastard that he is, gets Pasha to believe that Diana is lying about having been kidnapped.

The big problem with The Barbarian is that all of this is supposed to taken as a love story! Maybe in the days of silent movies, when the first film version of the story was made, people might have been less offended by exotic passions. And from a friend of mine who has some romance novels published to her pseudonym, I know that there are women who have some sexual desires involving some fairly taboo subjects. (Men do too, of course, but we have different taboo desires.) So I suppose some people would be turned on by the thought of Jamil ravishing Diana. But I know that there are a lot of people who wouldn't, and I'm in that group.

But if this sort of stuff is up your alley, have at it.

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