British Noir cinema took off on the back of Brighton Rock (1947) and The Third Man (1949), and starkly monochromatic crime dramas remained popular for much of the 1950s. This vintage police thriller fits neatly into the run of Brit-Noir of the time whilst also echoing some recent Hollywood works, like The Asphalt Jungle (1949), from which it steals the “it never ends” coda in contemplating policing as a bleakly existential business, and Border Incident (1949), recalling that film’s terse blend of faux-docudrama and shadow-flooded melodrama, whilst not achieving Anthony Mann’s sense of narrative force. Cairo Road also feels anticipatory, even prototypical, in downplaying action and melodrama in favour of trying to explore the mechanics and personal dynamics of policing. It looks forward to later norms in both film and television in regarding cops, with an interest for both the psychology and the methods of crime-fighters as the subject and source of drama, rather than making policemen, as had been general practice in ’30s and ’40s gangster films (although, of course, not always), competent blank slates representing state and community force set to bring down energetically charismatic criminals. Or, if they were corrupt and bad guys, one-dimensional creeps. The setting is peculiar, Egypt before Nasser nationalism, and the detail piquant. Eric Portman is cast, unusually but effectively, as Col. Youssef Bey, the boss of the Cairo narcotics bureau, whilst Laurence Harvey is Lt. Mourad, his new subordinate who’s shifted from Paris with his wife Marie (Maria Mauban). Eager to prove his smarts, Mourad finds Bey a roadblock in his approach to policing, seemingly as arid and impersonal as the desert around the city: Bey’s mantra, mocked by Mourad, is “Let’s keep the facts tidy in our minds, never mind the theories.”
The young go-getter soon comes under the older man’s wing however, as they follow a thread of inquiry that leads from a murdered man in a dingy Cairo apartment to a drug smuggling ring operated by the fabled Pavlis brothers. One of them, Edouardo (Karel Stepanek), is about to be released from the prison Bey put him in, whilst the mysterious other is orchestrating a big new three-pronged drug shipment. Such is the grudge that the Pavlis brothers hold against Bey that they use his portrait as the trademark on their product. Director David MacDonald, who still had the lamentable Devil Girl From Mars (1954) in his future, nonetheless had talent in the crime genre, and this could be his best, shot in sharp etchings of black and white courtesy of the director of photography, the recently late and lamented Oswald Morris. This was Morris’ second film as DOP, after his impressive debut as with The Golden Salamander (1950), which similarly built its visual drama around the scourging contrasts of light and dark on North African shores. His Egyptian urban and natural landscapes are all inky black recesses of turpitude against the hot whites of whitewashed Cairo walls and desert sand. MacDonald mingles noir’s traditional palette with neo-realist flavours, aided greatly by location shooting as well as the compulsory Brit-Noir edge of restrained Expressionism. Such is particularly strong when one of the Pavlis’ agents, Anna Michelis (Camelia), is killed on board a tramp steamer by an assailant who wants to make sure she doesn’t talk to the policemen: the silhouetted killer looms in horror movie fashion as he closes in. Michelis is left for dead but survives, and Bey, in a sequence loaded with telling anticipations, interrogates her in her hospital bed whilst her doctor (Ferdy Mayne) hovers outside in increasing disquiet before deciding to intervene.
An interview with a nervous wreck who used to work for the Pavlis brothers avoids showing the ruined man’s face, but rather cuts between Bey’s imperious investigator and the man’s twitching hands. MacDonald deftly leavens a potentially overwrought sequence, in which Bey takes Mourad to a hospital ward full of burnt-out and crazed former drug addicts, and avoids sensationalism by focusing on Bey as he waits for Mourad to emerge with a newly sobered affect, but whilst Mourad is seeing the horror show, Bey without is viewed in a long shot of the hospital hallway, striated with barred shadows and locked doors, that suggests his psyche has long become a cage from seeing the horror show once too often. One sequence fascinatingly depicts a smuggling party with camels stuffed full of heroin crossing the Suez Canal at night, whilst another shows the police scanning the camels of an arriving desert caravan to see if they have metallic objects in their bellies: the moment the alarm goes off, a mad scramble for escape starts.
Robert Westerby’s script interweaves nuts-and-bolts cop business with its insights into the nature of that peculiar field of professionalism, depicting Mourad’s steep learning curve under Bey, who recognises the younger man’s smarts but tries to corral his enthusiasm to the necessities of the job, which demands focus on its own particular priorities of keeping junk off the streets as much or more than bringing heels to heel. Mourad gains Bey’s interest when he shows a gift for following the thinnest threads of investigation. He identifies the corpse whose discovery kicks off the investigation via its shoes, which prove to have been made by the same knock-off artist as his wife’s: this in turn quickly leads him and Bey to the Pavlis brothers. But Mourad screws up badly as he chases after the Pavlis’ lieutenant Lombardi (Grégoire Aslan) rather than helping Bey in securing a dope shipment, and plays into the hands of the secret drug kingpin, who uses him as the perfect tool to escape the manhunt Mourad is unaware of. Portman’s particular gift for playing rigid and repressed figures with secret lodes of pathos is well-exploited, face steely and cheerless but with eyes that display finite feeling, revealing flickers of paternal affection for Mourad and searching his assigned corner of the world with morally exhausted hope for signs of decency, bound to be constantly dashed.
Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) and many a more modern study in the lawman as emotional shell are prefigured as Bey tells Mourad about how his zeal for his job cost the life of his wife, as she got between a vengeful killer and her husband and caught a bullet. Amidst the film’s strung-out chain of vignettes, the most affecting sees Bey faced by a young Bedouin camel driver (Oscar Quitak) who pathetically begs him to spare his own hand-raised camel from a cull to extract the drugs in their bellies: Bey agrees, but when faced with evidence of the lad’s duplicity coldly orders the animal’s death. “I trusted you!” the boy screams in a tantrum, before Bey rips open his shirt and reveals the heroin satchels hidden on his person, and brushes him off with the simplest and starkest of life formulas: “I trust no-one.” Harvey is fresh-faced and tolerable in one of his more likeable roles as the talented but fallible Mourad, who’s propped up emotionally by his wife after he makes a fool of himself.
Acting honours, however, go to Harold Lang, a British character actor who appeared in quite a few Brit-Noir and horror works through to the ‘60s, including Robert Hamer’s The Long Memory (1952), usually investing his roles with a brand of streetwise insolence and shrewdness mixed with an almost fey, sexually ambiguous menace. Here he plays Humble, a glibly charming Cockney car motor importer who is caught up in the net of suspects after Anna’s assault: he later proves, not at all surprisingly, to be the psychopathic Rico Pavlis, calmly throttling a disappointing underling in punishment for his failings and using the oblivious Mourad to spirit him past checkpoints. Mourad redeems himself with a dangerous venture into the enemy’s lair, a deft little-build up as Mourad ascends a shadowy staircase whilst MacDonald cuts to his fellow policeman watching and waiting, each glimpsed in islets of chiaroscuro tension, and resolves in a shoot-out that is only heard, news of the result delayed a few brief, teasing moments, making for a conclusion that feels half-hearted. The film’s chief lack is a sense of specific propulsion, as paperback pulp story, essay in procedural detail, character musing, and travelogue don’t quite mesh with the force they might, leaving a tale that feels episodic and disjointed. Nobody ever gets into quite enough danger, none of its characters are tested quite enough. The usually impressive and specific quality of Brit-Noir, its restrained, deceptively cool but actually rather neurotic temperament, here means that excitement never really combusts in a fashion the flavourful setting and substantial story some all too ready for. But Cairo Road is still a worthy deep cut from the archives of British cinema.
