Diana Standing is forced prone while returning to Cairo so her fiancé can excavate a canal: unfortunately, her canal is dredged too. Sam Wood’s direction is workmanlike and DP Harold Rosson makes good use of some grand set designs, but the film’s fault is with its misogyny. This film hates its strong female protagonist and makes her succumb to her abuser because, well, isn’t that every woman’s fantasy? And the story also must clearly explain that Diana Standing has an Egyptian mother, so there is no fear of miscegenation.
The plot is fairly simple: Diana (Myrna Loy) and her fiancée Gerald Hume (Reginald Denny) travel to Cairo and are stalked by Jamal (Ramon Navarro), a seemingly indigent Egyptian porter whose self-effacing subterfuge seems like good intentions. But he’s secretly a Prince who takes pride in seducing foreign women and once he sets eyes upon Diana, it’s game on. So, the story involves Jamal luring Diana to the desert, playing George’s boss as potential pervert so he can swoop in and save her. When she continues to spurn Jamal’s advances, he makes her walk behind his horse through the desert, drink from the oasis after both he and the horse had their fill, then rapes her. When she later “agrees” to marry him (she’s isolated in his family’s desert abode), she throws a chalice of wine in his face! Good for her! She escapes back to her family as the entire Cairo police force is looking for Jamal, who then returns and steals her away to live happily ever after. WTF?
Myrna Loy is absolutely ravishing, and we get some nice Pre-Code shots of her barely dressed and, in one scene, immersed naked in a bath which reminds one of Claudette Colbert’s milk escapade in DeMille's classic THE SIGN OF THE CROSS. She has little chemistry with her beau played by Reginald Denny, but this is mostly the script and not their acting. Ramon Navarro balances his character’s abusive nature with self-deprecating humor, which masks this toxic masculinity. But the signs are there in his extremely narcissistic pursuit of Diana; it’s to Navarro’s credit that he doesn’t totally despoil the film. If the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) had existed in 1933, they’d probably have named the condition in which a victim forms a bond with a captor The Cairo Syndrome!
Final Grade: (C-)