Youssef Chahine's masterpiece. A street level expose of sexual obsession and working class madness that s as grimy and claustrophobic as its Cairo railway station setting. From its noirish opening scene, in which a scruffy newspaper hawker discovers a rag strewn living quarters filled with cutout girlie pictures and intones, I knew then that something was desperately wrong, it s clear that the film has departed from the upper class realms of typical 1950s Arab cinema. Chahine moves his camera as fluidly as a sleepwalker through a nightmarish world where, as luggage porters strive to unionize and all sections of society swarm along the tracks, the crippled street vendor Qinawi (played by Chahine himself) feverishly desires a brash, beautiful and utterly uninterested lemonade seller, with dangerous results. Combining Italian neo-realism, Egyptian romanticism and overheated film noir, Cairo Station was unlike anything anyone had seen on movie screens before.
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