Name: Fatmah
Genre: Musical
Duration: 2 h 10 min
Rating: 5.1
Cast: Oum Kalthoum, Muhammad Kamel, Suleiman Naguib

Classic Egyptian film with iconic singer-actress

Since there's no valuable review, let me add my amateurish opinion, it might be helpful for some, although I'm neither a movie or a Northern Africa expert :)

While my "repertoire" of Egyptian films is only about a dozen, based on my experience I think it's safe to assume that the 1940s were dominated by simplistic entertaining films of jokes and songs. I'm quite sure that many jokes were puns and cannot reach the ears of non-Arabic speakers, and it's worthwhile to mention that the concept of Arabic music and its rules are quite different from Western principles. Finally, it is also essential to know that the lead, Umm Kulthum is a legendary singer.

As for the film itself, it's definitely not a great one, I've seen much better ones from the 1950-1960s, so again, while I'm no expert, I can safely tell at least that much. The plot is not really tight, 2 hours are way too long for the relatively simple story: there is a poor, but righteous woman, Fatmah in a poor, but righteous community; she falls in love with a rich and immoral guy, Fathy, and while the love is mutual, the guy's immoral environment and his own immorality pulls him back away from his love. The rest would be spoiler.

The main theme is that of a typical Capra-film, such as You Can't Take It With You (1938) or It's a Wonderful Life (1946): the poor community is righteous and strong together (and nationalistic), the rich are immoral and mime foreigners. Another theme could be Fathy's character development. Unfortunately, neither of them are really explored well enough and although the story is warm-hearted, it remains shallow. The camerawork is occasionally interesting, but most of the time it does not add much to the film. Acting is good enough for this level, and as for the songs, as I mentioned, I absolutely dare not judge them, I have zero knowledge in Arabic music.

To sum up, it feels like it's a simple, uplifting, entertaining film with a moral lesson for the masses, similar to Afrita hanem (1949). A must-see classic for Egypt, negligible for others.

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Fatmah

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