My streaming gem: why you should watch Cairo Station
For anyone seeking a primer on classic cinema in the digital media era, the so-called “big three” of streaming - Netflix, Amazon and Hulu - might not be the ideal place to start. Take Netflix as an example: of the roughly 6,000 titles currently available on the platform, fewer than 20 are feature films that were released before 1970. Netflix’s interest in auteurs, meanwhile, has so far largely been confined to contemporary Hollywood (think David Fincher, Noah Baumbach, heck even Adam Sandler if you’re generous). As streaming services go, it’s the equivalent of a library with nothing but murder mystery novels – some good, some bad, but whodunnits all the same – and one dusty shelf at the back for everything else.
It was almost shocking, then, when Netflix recently added to its platform a catalogue of classic Middle Eastern films, including a dozen from a giant of Arabic cinema whose work has before now received scant exposure in the west. Netflix’s Youssef Chahine collection isn’t just a random dump of the late Egyptian film-maker’s movies, either: it’s a well-curated panorama of an eclectic, often challenging, 57-year career. There are Kazan-esque social melodramas (two of which, The Blazing Sun and Dark Waters, star a pre-Hollywood Omar Sharif); there’s a Crusades epic, Saladin, that was essentially big budget propaganda for then president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser’s panArab state project; postmodern musical The Return of the Prodigal Son, a bitter allegory about the failure of said project; and a trilogy of queer autobiographical films. Best of all, there is Cairo Station.
An accessible entry point into a kaleidoscopic filmography that frequently mixes genres in surprising ways, 1958’s Cairo Station has the feel of an Italian neorealist drama morphing into a Hitchcockian proto-slasher. It begins somewhat deceptively as a diorama of the titular rail hub, where disgruntled porters, including wouldbe union organiser Abu Serih (Farid Shawqi), and unlicensed soda sellers led by Hanuma (Hind Rostom), Serih’s bride-to-be, slog away while dreaming of better lives. But lusting dangerously after Hanuma from the margins is Kenawi, a physically disabled newspaper hawker – played by Chahine himself - whose bashfulness and “lame” leg lead the other station workers to mock, pity and ultimately underestimate the man.
Though set in a single location and running only 73 minutes, a welcome kind of economy in this age of supersized cinema, Cairo Station finds time to examine the wider society of its day and place. Chahine’s film offers a look a world that’s foreign not just to western eyes today: this is a newly postcolonial Cairo on the edge of modernity, where the sands of one of the oldest civilisations still swirl in the streets, and where sharp-suited business types rub shoulders with newspaper boys wearing little more than rags.
The film itself is located somewhere between a forward-looking present and a more conservative past. Violence is scarce though surprisingly bloody when it comes, but it’s the film’s eroticism that’s most remarkable given its age. Chahine, who spent his career finding creative workarounds to defy Egyptian censors, at one point in Cairo Station gives us a sex scene where the lovers remain entirely off-screen. As Abu Serih and Hanuma disappear into a quiet warehouse together, a heated argument turning to flirtatious giggling turning to charged silence, a lurking
Kenawi watches a heaving train pass outside, the tracks bending and straining, mimicking their sex – and hinting at the violence slowly building in him.
Though its neorealist bent places the film stylistically in the 1950s, as a portrait of troubled male psychology, Cairo Station feels almost modern. Chahine, who originally trained as an actor before pivoting to directing, took the film’s lead role himself allegedly because no other actor would dare. As a disturbed, sexually repressed loner whom the audience is challenged to sympathise with despite loathsome intentions, Kenawi anticipates the likes of Norman Bates and Peeping Tom’s Mark Lewis (and, later, Travis Bickle; naturally, Martin Scorsese is a Chahine fan).
A proud Egyptian – or, at the least, a fiercely patriotic man who took pride in the possibility of what Egypt could be – Chahine nevertheless always interrogated his country’s politics and culture in his work; here in his depiction of both the disaffected Kenawi and the film’s other male characters, many of whom think themselves entitled to women while simultaneously assuming it’s women who are always to blame for any unwanted male attention, Chahine also anticipated conversations around toxic masculinity and incel culture by some six decades. Cairo Station is a lesson in the value of classic cinema: along with Youssef Chahine’s wider filmography, much of which deals in queer subtext, it teaches that films don’t necessarily have to be new to be contemporary.
Cairo Station is available on Netflix in the US and UK
yet it was that same brilliance in these roles (for which each of them won an Oscar) that turned Lecter, Anton Chigurh and Misery’s Annie Wilkes into such inescapable, career-defining figures. The real Hopkins, Bardem and Bates almost seemed like their final victims.
Why these characters in particular? Brian Cox played Lecter in Michael Mann’s Manhunter in 1986, five years before Anthony Hopkins’s adroit wine pairing for human liver in The Silence of the Lambs. Yet Hopkins’s interpretation lives on, ever-quotably, in the common consciousness. Cox’s Succession stablemate Matthew Macfadyen played the Sheriff of Nottingham in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. Is it Macfadyen you think of when you imagine the sheriff? Of course not. The sheriff is a lithe Alan Rickman, threatening to remove someone’s heart with a spoon, and it always will be. You might argue this is because Scott’s Robin Hood wasn’t very good. But rewatch Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and you’ll find that, besides Rickman, it’s appalling.
These actors’ synonymy with villainy may appear to be an alchemic, almost accidental intersection between the perfect actor and role, but it isn’t as serendipitous as it appears. Hopkins played Lecter three times, presumably on purpose. Rickman alone is responsible for not one, not two, but three of the great baddies: the sheriff, Harry Potter’s Snape and Die Hard’s Hans Gruber. It is a deliberate, more-is-more approach pioneered by Boris Karloff in the 30s then perfected by the mighty Christopher Lee, who would cheerfully ham it up as the big evil in the majority of his 260-odd (!) films, including 10 (!!) appearances at Dracula, as well as Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, and as Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels. Through a chimera of tone of voice, fortuitous evil-faced physiognomy and sheer gung-ho enthusiasm, some actors excel at playing villains, and clearly have a ball doing it. It cannot be typecasting if the actors are typecasting themselves.
They also get the meatiest, showiest roles. Both Joaquin Phoenix and Heath Ledger’s Jokers won Oscars. Christoph Waltz bagged one for Inglourious Basterds. Louise Fletcher won best actress in 1976 as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood, Mo’Nique for Precious, JK Simmons in Whiplash, Charlize Theron in Monster – all winners. Villains are critical darlings every inch as much as they are fan favourites.
Most actors say it is much more fun playing the knave than the hero, so it’s easy to see why Lena Headey created one of TV’s great monsters in Game of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister, but also stole 2012’s Dredd as the joyously psychopathic drug kingpin Ma-Ma Madrigal. Anything in which Jason Isaacs plays a right bastard – Potter, The OA, The Patriot – is essential viewing. Gary Oldman, Helena Bonham Carter, Ruth Wilson: if they are playing a baddie in something, people will watch it for no other reason. There’s such an embarrassment of larks and accolades in being bad it’s a wonder anyone strives to be good.
An actor doesn’t have to be born with a permanent sneer and an arched brow, either. Robin Williams made a chilling nasty in Insomnia and One Hour Photo. Denzel Washington is spellbinding as the unhinged bent copper in Training Day. America’s sweetheart Meryl Streep was a next-level sod in The Devil Wears Prada. David Tennant’s ascent to full-blown national treasure has been assured by a postDoctor volte face in which he has played every manner of swine, from Dennis Nilsen to Jessica Jones’s gaslighter general Kilgrave. And the sooner Tom Cruise abandons his midlife crisis, accepts he’s creepy AF and gets back to the Magnolias, Interview With the Vampires and Collaterals to which he’s far more suited, the better.
Heroes are fine, but they come and go, more or less interchangeably: Arnie begat Bruce who begat Will Smith who begat Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Those few actors lucky enough to play ne’er-do-wells know this: that it is great villains who linger, who sink their claws into us, needle away at our subconscious, delighting and disgusting us decade after decade. Perhaps they don’t want to change. They’re not trapped at all by their God-given bastardry. They’re freed by it. Only by being bad can they get to be this good, and they love it. And who can blame them? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaa.