Cairo

Walk Like An Egyptian
This month on TCM the star of the month has been Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald, and good old Robert Osborne has been playing films by this duo every Monday night. And not just the old chestnuts either but the unusual ones that the two stars made when they were apart from each other. I suppose Mayer figured, why put two of them in the same movie, it would be more cost efficient to spread out the love. Thus last night we saw, first, the bizarre, ethereal BALALAIKA which teams Nelson Eddy with the Czech sensation Ilona Massey; and then the action switched to CAIRO, rather a different cut of cloth.

The credits tell the story better than I can. The credits play across a backdrop of Egyptian postcard pictures, the desert sands, filmy desert tents pitched at oases, the Sphinx in the moonlight, and yet schizoohrenically these postcard sketches have been tagged, as if by graffiti, for a child's hand has drawn stick figure pictures all over the scenery, a toy boy and a toy...

"CAIRO"
Although I'm so old as to have one foot already in the grave, I had never heard of this one before seeing it adverted in Amazon's list. I had first become old enough to go to the show alone the year this movie was made, 1942.Somehow I was fortunate enough to miss it.Musical numbers are as far apart in this movie as are water holes in a desert and good ones are non-existent. A severely truncated version of The Bell Song from Lakme'-a medley done by Jeanette,Ethel Wathers,and Robert Young(1 song) includes, "To A Wild Rose","Beautiful Ohio","Waitin' For The Robert E.Lee" and "Home Sweet Home" which would be a good place to go if it's not 'too late' in your case. Ethel Waters is out of her element in this cinematic quagmire,being so far ABOVE it, she rises to the surface like cream in milk.At one point she says to a would be swain "Don't be lookin' toward me---I aint Mecca--just bow three times and...blow!" At one point Jeanette opines to her maid Cleo,(Ethel Waters).."I"malways left...

"You can tell he don't know nothing about the movies or he'd have landed smack in them mashed potatoes."
- Sinister shop proprietor: "Are you in the habit of screaming at perfect high C?"
- Marcia Warren: "I have every reason to scream. And I don't scream flat."

Should you find your way to Cairo, stop by the Viceroy Hotel at precisely five in the afternoon. Should you glimpse a woman at the bar sipping a rainbow cocktail with two cherries in it, approach her with this coded message: "Every precaution must be taken. We cannot afford to fail." And if she starts talking all cloak and daggery, then you may have stepped into the set of CAIRO, Jeanette MacDonald's game try at farcical war intrigue. As per usual, Jeanette sings divinely. As per usual, when given opportunity, she proves to be a fine light comedienne.

What's new is that she occasionally shares the stage with Ethel Waters, whose earthy bluesy vocals provide a neat counterpoint to Jeanette's soaring operatic soprano. Too bad they don't sing together all that much. There's a very brief musical exchange...

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