The Flirtation of Girls was made in the late 1940s, just after the heady wartime rush to expand film production. As previously mentioned, critics refer derisively to the filmmaking of this period as “the cinema of war profiteers.” Allegedly vast fortunes were made by hoarding scarce commodities and selling them on the black market, and then this illicit money was laundered during and just after the war through financing films. Allegations of money laundering went together with withering criticism of the aesthetic qualities of the films: they were made by people with no experience in cinema, people interested only in quick profit, people who had absolutely no regard for quality. With one or two exceptions films of the period are considered an affront to polite society—an outrageous triumph of the greedy nouveaux riches.

The ultimate source of finance for The Flirtation of Girls is unknown. This is, in many films (and not just Egyptian ones), a rather difficult question. But regardless of the film’s source of finance, The Flirtation of Girls was anything but amateurish. Quick it was, industrial even. The film uses only four or five simple sets, a very brief outdoor scene shot in the garden of a mansion and some back-projected fake outdoor scenes. But everyone associated with the film was a seasoned professional. Indeed, despite its low-budget sets, the film was probably a rather expensive production. The quick postwar expansion of the cinema might have brought inexperienced directors and producers into the industry, but for a film to be marketable it had to have stars. There were a finite number of marketable names who were in demand for a suddenly much larger pool of pictures. Consquently stars could charge higher fees, and The Flirtation of Girls featured not just one but several stars.

The plot turns on education. A rich man hires a seedy and ineffective old schoolteacher (Najib al-Rihani) to tutor his daughter (Layla Murad), who is failing every subject, but most gallingly, she has flunked Arabic. Fortunately the Egyptian educational system allows a second chance for failing students to retake at least some exams during the summer, hence the need for a tutor.

The girl is a flirt, and the old teacher, despite the disparity in age between himself and the girl, falls in love with his student. Once he is hired the rich man buys new clothes for his new employee. Resplendent in a new suit, the formerly shabby Arabic teacher stands with his student and a bevy of “companions” (really Layla Murad’s chorus). One of the companions tap-dances, the others sway suggestively, as Murad sings a saucy “alphabet song” that recapitulates the film’s theme:

Fig. 18. Layla Murad in an elegant publicity still from The Flirtation of Girls (al-Kawakib, September 9, 1958, p. 4). Courtesy of Dar al-Hilal.

Abgad, hawaz, hutti, kalamun Shakl-il-ustaz ba’a munsagimun Ustaz Hamam, nahnu zaghalin Min ghayr ginah binmil wi-ntir Wil-makri fina tab‘i gamil in ’ulna “la’i, la’i,” ya‘ni “na‘amun” In “ga’a Zaydun,” aw “hadar ‘Amrun,” W-ihna malna, inshallah ma hadarun! Lil-mubtada ha-ngiblak khabarun, Bi-nazrah wahda ha-yisbah ‘adam.

ABCDEFG,[21] Now the professor looks good to me! Professor Pigeon,[22] we’re tricksters, We flip and fly without wings, And in us, deceitfulness is a good thing, If we say “no, no,” it means “sure thing.” Even if “Zayd came,” or “‘Amr was present,” What do we care? maybe he wasn’t! We’ll get you the “predicate” to your “subject,” With one glance the whole thing will mean nothing.[23]

The music, credited to Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab, is a delightful jazz adaptation with saxophones dominating the accompaniment. The girl’s servant bangs gleefully on a grand piano. Her small white dog sits on the piano barking. Arabic grammar, the putative subject of the song, was never more enjoyable.

It transpires that the girl is distracted by a lover. She lures the old Arabic teacher out of the house by telling him she wants to run away with him. They drive off, or rather she drives (he sits in the passenger seat) in, of all things, an army jeep. Unfortunately it turns out she is only using him to escort her to a shady nightclub where her lover waits. The old Arabic teacher is crestfallen, but when he overhears other denizens of the nightclub talking about how the girl’s lover is only after her money—that she is merely the next in a long line of unfortunate victims of this nightclub Romeo—he tries to intervene. For his trouble he gets thrown out on the street. There he appeals desperately for help from a dashing young pilot who happens to be passing by. The pilot enters the nightclub claiming to be the girl’s paternal cousin, and therefore her logical suitor according to Egyptian custom. Of course, she denies it, but he precipitates a fight anyway in order to “rescue” her. Then they jump into the jeep to deliver the recalcitrant girl back to her father. The pilot starts flirting with her. The old Arabic teacher is dismayed and tries to throw him off the track by stopping at someone else’s house, which he chooses at random. He and the girl knock on the door, leaving the pilot outside.

The house turns out to be the residence of a famous actor (Yusuf Wahbi), who is entertaining a rehearsal by a famous singer (Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab). Solemnly the actor imparts words of wisdom to the youngster and to the old teacher who still accompanies her. “Just suppose,” he says, “that a man falls in love with a girl who is too young for him and who is from a different social milieu.” They start to fidget, recognizing immediately that the “just suppose” scenario spun out by the great man refers directly to themselves. By the time the actor is through with his “suppositions,” the old Arabic teacher realizes his folly, and the young girl begins to understand that she has unintentionally hurt him. The crafty actor then ushers the two into an absurdly large auditorium, where his friend the musician is rehearsing a massive orchestra, which includes strings, trumpets, male and female choruses, and even a balalaika section. It is a supremely surreal scene.^[24]

Finally the singer, holding a banjo, directs his balalaikas and piccolos, while singing a sad song about pure spiritual love:

	Oh eye, why is my night so long
	Oh eye, why did my tears pour forth
	Oh my eyes, why did the lovers leave me
	Why do all eyes sleep except you?
	. . .
	I sacrificed my joy for the lover
	(Choir) (“Oh night witness him.”)
	I will live on his memory
	(Choir) (“Oh night witness him.”)[25]

The music makes the old man accept what his heart had known all along—that a match between himself and his student makes no sense—and he gives his blessing to the romance that blossoms between the young girl and the pilot. In the final scene the three of them—the girl, the pilot, and the old man—drive off in the jeep, the camera lingering one final moment on Najib al-Rihani, who is grinning slyly. This was Najib al-Rihani’s last instant on the screen, and the bittersweet look on his face is almost enough to make one think that he knew he wasn’t going to be back. He died in May 1949 of typhoid (Abou Saif 1969, 273). In October the film was released.^[26]

The Flirtation of Girls was hugely successful, but of course that hardly invalidates the criticisms made about films of the period: they were supposed to make money, at least enough to launder the ill-gotten gains of the shadowy investors. And the film is, in fact, still popular—a powerful engine of nostalgia that everyone has seen, one that brings smiles whenever it is mentioned. However, what is interesting about The Flirtation of Girls is not just that it sustains nostalgia but that it invoked nostalgia from the very first day it was exhibited to the public. The film is essentially an all-star revue. All of the principals were extremely well known, and many of the small roles were cameos by performers who were also known, or who, intriguingly, were about to become well known in the next decade. And almost all of them played themselves in the film, either in the sense that their characters bore the names by which they were known in public or in the sense that their roles in the film as actors or singers were identical to their roles in real life.

The film was a musical featuring Layla Murad, who played the young girl. She was in fact a bit long in the tooth for this role. Layla was the daughter of a well-known singer named Zaki Murad, and she began singing as a child in the early 1930s. One of her first public appearances was in the nightclub of Badi‘a Masabni, an impresaria of Syrian origin who had been married at one point in her career to the comedian Najib al-Rihani. Al-Rihani was the actor who played the seedy old tutor in The Flirtation of Girls. Earlier in his career he was famous for a stage persona, which he performed live, on the radio, and in films, named Kishkish Bey. Al-Rihani’s Kishkish character dressed in the rustic clothes of a provincial village headman (‘umda) and was an old man with an eye for young, particularly foreign, women. The plays in which the character of Kishkish appeared were comedies known as “Franco-Arab revue,” a genre inspired by French farce that was popular around the time of World War I (Abou Saif 1969, 33–60). Another of the ironies evoked by The Flirtation of Girls lay in al-Rihani not getting the girl at the end; in most of al-Rihani’s Franco-Arab comedies the ending “celebrates his triumphant sexual union with a young beauty” (Abou Saif 1969, 56).

For a time the Franco-Arab comedy pioneered by al-Rihani played an important role in satirizing the social and political issues of the day, particularly during the heady days of the 1919 revolt against British rule. Abou Saif describes Franco-Arab comedy in largely sympathetic terms, but he also notes (1969, 76–77) that the genre was artistically limited by its tendency to string together unconnected “situations” with a series of song-and-dance spectacles.

Clearly the structure, if not the content, of The Flirtation of Girls owed a great deal to the earlier genre. The film, produced almost thirty years after the heyday of Franco-Arab comedy, is also a series of song-and-dance spectacles punctuated by the barest of plots. But the film contains few if any obvious references to politics, whereas Franco-Arab revue thrived on commentary about current events. Abou Saif quotes Badi‘ Khayri, author of The Flirtation of Girls and of many of al-Rihani’s most successful Franco-Arab comedies, as saying that Franco-Arab revues were “cinema newsreels because, whenever possible, they were connected with an important crisis” (1969, 73). There was, then, no obvious satire of the sort that could get through to an American audience. But the significance of the actors and the structure of the film may well have been quite different for an Egyptian audience in 1949. The film is, in many ways, too “different” to communicate difference cross-culturally. To an American audience it looks like little more than a cross between 1930s screwball comedy and Parisian boulevard theater. But half of the film’s fun comes from its implicit links to earlier works that were indelibly associated with specifically Egyptian meanings.

Layla Murad had appeared in a number of films—approximately twenty up to that point. Her first appearance was in Long Live Love (Karim 1938), and she was paired with none other than Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who was the foremost male vocalist from the 1920s through the mid-1940s. And ‘Abd al-Wahhab, of course, was the singer in The Flirtation of Girls who was rehearsing in the actor’s mansion that Najib al-Rihani used to try to escape from the young pilot. ‘Abd al-Wahhab sang one song in The Flirtation of Girls, and it was his second-to-last significant appearance in a fiction film, although he lived another forty years.^[27]

The owner of the mansion in The Flirtation of Girls was, in the story, a highly successful actor named Yusuf Wahbi. And he was playing himself: the real Yusuf Wahbi was, in fact, a highly successful actor, director, and playwright. Wahbi was the childhood friend of the man who directed all of the singer Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s films. Wahbi’s role in the film was to play matchmaker. He makes Najib al-Rihani see that an affair between him and this vivacious young girl is inappropriate and that she should really be encouraged to marry the dashing young pilot. At one point Wahbi scolds al-Rihani, telling him that if he really loved the girl he would step aside and let the pilot have her. But there are certain reverberations to Wahbi’s admonition: when he says, “If you really loved her you’d step aside,” he isn’t just referring to Najib al-Rihani in The Flirtation of Girls. Wahbi is also referring slyly to himself. He had already “married” Layla Murad twice before in two of their films: Layla bint al-rif (Layla, Daughter of the Countryside; Mizrahi 1941) and Layla bint madaris (Layla, Daughter of Schools; Mizrahi 1941). This kind of intertextuality was very deliberate and calculated to play on the audience’s knowledge of all of their previous work.

In the film Wahbi not only tied himself to Layla Murad, he also tied The Flirtation of Girls in to the history of Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab, the singer rehearsing his orchestra in Wahbi’s mansion. This happens as Wahbi is playing matchmaker between Layla, his former celluloid lover, and the dashing young pilot. In the middle of the conversation between himself, Najib al-Rihani, and Layla Murad, he suddenly stops and says, “‘Abd al-Wahhab is about to begin his new piece.” They go to the auditorium in Wahbi’s house and peek through the door. Layla asks him what the piece is about, and Wahbi replies, “It’s a sad tale about a man who loves a woman more than anything, but he’s forced to withdraw from her life for the sake of her happiness, and then watch them from afar, with his heart breaking.” Of course, this is what The Flirtation of Girls is leading up to: the schoolteacher is going to have to give up his dream of marrying the girl so that she can be happy living with the dashing young pilot. Then ‘Abd al-Wahhab sings his song, which once again reiterates the theme of a lover sacrificing his dreams for the sake of a woman’s happiness.

What is not so evident on the surface here in America, but was not lost on an Egyptian audience of 1949, is that Wahbi is also describing the plot of Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s first film, al-Warda al-bayda’ (The White Rose), which was made in 1933 and directed by Wahbi’s childhood friend Muhammad Karim. The man who plays Layla’s father in The Flirtation of Girls was Sulayman Najib, who was the same actor who played the father of ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s lover in The White Rose.

At this point one should remember that one of the most common excuses given by scholars and critics for ignoring the Egyptian cinema is that the commercial Egyptian cinema is nothing but a Hollywood clone. It is true that The Flirtation of Girls looks very much like an American screwball comedy starring Cary Grant or Katherine Hepburn. But beneath the surface there is an intricate architecture of references designed to evoke not an alien film tradition but Egypt’s own tradition. This was a carefully calculated effect.

No doubt it was also calculated to make money, but it is hard to see why this should exclude it and other films from consideration as a powerful force for constructing nationalism and, by extension, modernity. After all, Benedict Anderson’s focus on print capitalism made “imagined communities” practically a household word, at least in academic households, and the books and articles his insight generated are practically a cottage industry. What we are seeing in the commercial Egyptian cinema is a kind of screen capitalism that is not greatly preceded by either the printing press or mass literacy.

Anderson suggests that the introduction of a new medium in a capitalist context results in new markets, which are inevitably exhausted. When Europeans began using the printing press, the market for writing was still primarily in Latin, a wide but thin market that was tapped out within a century and a half. However, “the logic of capitalism thus meant that once the elite Latin market was saturated, the potentially huge markets represented by the monoglot masses would beckon” (Anderson 1991, 38). In the case of Arabic-speaking societies, there are no precise estimates even for the size of the market for standard language. Ami Ayalon (1995, 142) notes that a 1937 Egyptian census reports a literacy rate of 18 percent. But he cautions against generalizing from such figures on a number of grounds. For one thing, literacy was localized: educated people were concentrated in cities. Furthermore, there is no qualitative measure of literacy: “The classification ‘literate’ did not necessarily imply the ability to read a newspaper; often it was merely a designation for someone who had memorized certain sections of the Qur’an” (Ayalon 1995, 142). However, there was also an unquantifiable “multiplier effect”—literates reading to others who were not able. Estimates of the circulation of printed materials are also imprecise, but in the case of newspapers (a critical medium both for Anderson and for Arab linguistic reformers), Ayalon writes that “it is safe to assume that at no time prior to the second half of the twentieth century were newspapers bought by more than …3 to 4 percent of the population in Egypt” (1995, 153).

The standard language of mass print and the vernacular used in other media were introduced to the Egyptian public at very nearly the same time. In Europe the potential complications caused by the advent of new types of media not predicated on the written word come much later; print and the cinema are separated by centuries. In Egypt it might be stretching a point to say that print and the cinema are separated even by decades.