Roughly a year after the Free Officers toppled King Farouk in 1952, the movement abolished the monarchy in Egypt. The debate about whether it was a coup d’etat or a revolution may continue to this day, but on the other hand nobody doubts that the movement reshaped not just Egyptian but Arab and perhaps Third World history. Many filmmakers since the 1950s were inspired to make the focus of their dramas, or else they turned it into a kind of historical background for the story. Ezz El-Dine Zulficar’s Rod Kalby (Return My Heart, 1957), Henry Barakat’s Fi Baytina Ragol (A Man in Our House, 1961), Kamal Al-Shaikh’s Ghoroob Wa Shorook (Sunset and Sunrise, 1970) are some of the better known examples.
When Egypt was made into a republic on 18 June 1953, Naguib and a number of other Free Officers wanted to return to their barracks and restore the democratic multi-party system, but Gamal Abdel-Nasser and the majority of Free Officers wanted a one-party system under the guardianship of the army. This eventually led to the March Crisis of 1954. One of the earliest films to discuss the political situation during the last two years of the monarchy was Allah Ma’na (God Is on Our Side), directed by Ahmed Badrakhan. Made towards the end of 1952, it was initially banned because it gave General Mohamed Naguib a central role at a time when he posed a threat to Nasser’s vision. After Naguib was dismissed by the Revolutionary Command Council, writer Ihsan Abdel-Quddous, who had provided the story underlying Badrakhan’s script, convinced Nasser to see it and it was released in 1955.
The film is set between 1948 and 1952, with Ahmed Gamal (Emad Hamdy), a young military officer who comes back from the 1948 war against Zionist guerillas in Palestine after losing his left arm to the defective weapons supplied to Egyptian military personnel by the government — a scandal uncovered by Abdel-Quddous, who was imprisoned as a result. Like many real-life officers in his position, Ahmed returns full of rage, convinced the Arabs lost the war due to their own governments’ treason. A lobby of high-ranking officials including, as well as the commander of the army (Serag Mounir) and the chief of the royal court (Hussein Riyad), Ahmed’s uncle Abdel-Aziz Pasha (Mahmoud Al-Meligui) are responsible for the defective arms deal, but the pasha comes across as the real leader. Ahmed’s romantic interest is the pasha’s daughter Nadia (Faten Hamama), who wants to fight the good fight alongside him. And, through his sources, Abdel-Aziz knows about that relationship too.
The filmmaker never shows the king’s face. He appears only partially, mostly from the back, in scenes that bring him together with Madkour. The dialogue shows that greed is the only reason behind the deal, and Madkour says the Big Man took nine tenths of the proceeds, indicating the king’s involvement — a propaganda gesture that helped rally support for the military changing the political system. As Ahmed and some of his comrades raise the issue at the highest level, the head of the opposition Shedid Pasha attacks the government in an aggressive speech. But Shedid Pasha gives up on his campaign when Madkour promises to make him prime minister. When a member of the senate receives documents to prove the case, Madkour manages to have him impeached.
The film adopts the idea promoted by the press and the media that most politicians under the monarchy era either worked for their own individual interests or lacked the power or courage to fight corruption and tyranny. Mohsen (Shokry Sarhan), on the other hand, represents the power of the press, and he writes articles exposing the suspicious deal. But he too is attacked by an anonymous man to stop him from publishing similar articles.
By the end of the film the Free Officers movement has prevailed, and the filmmaker uses real footage of the tanks surrounding Abdeen Palace and of the king when leaving Alexandria on the ship El Mahrousa on 26 July 1952. When the officers go to Abdel-Aziz’s palace, he panics and picks up a hand grenade that had been sent to him as a sample, and throwing it at the officers ends up killing himself with the same defective weapons he gave the army. The whole film is filled with in-your-face patriotic cliches of this kind, the dialogues of the officers and between Nadia and Ahmed especially.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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