• Directed by Ray Enright
• Written by Edoardo Anton, Eugene Ling, Janet Stevenson and Philip Stevenson
• Starring
  • George Raft
  • Gianna Maria Canale
  • Leon Lenoir
  • Alfredo Varelli
  • Mino Doro

Intrigue! Danger! Dames! The Man From Cairo proves conclusively that you need more than those three elements to end up with an entertaining movie. Maybe a plot that doesn’t feel like it was made up as the cameras roll? Motivated characters? Endearing actors? A director who’s got a vision? Any of those elements would have been a boon to this production.

French officials (established as being in Paris by the obligatory shot of the Eiffel Tower) are stymied on a mission in Algiers, because to date five of their agents have shown up dead. Where is the leak? Could it be the underling who brings papers to the chief, then stands outside the door listening as they discuss their security concerns? (It’s hard to believe that this isn’t supposed to be a humorous knock at the French, but everything’s played dead serious.) Eventually they hit on a plan that’s sure to work: Hire an American agent, brief him, and release him into the field! Sure, why wouldn’t it work?

“And this black pin… No, wait, it is a fly. This black pin…”

The American investigator, currently and conveniently in Paris, is Charles Stark (Richard McNamara), and the police officials dump exposition into his and our laps, to wit: Before the Nazi invasion of France, the French government shipped its gold bullion to Algiers to hide it. One of the shipments into the desert, worth $100 million, was waylaid and never recovered. Suspicion has fallen on the General in charge, who was never seen again, and the sole survivor, Sgt. Touchard, who has the convenient identifying characteristic of a missing thumb. Stark’s assignment is to fly to Cairo, take two weeks to establish himself as an American geologist searching for oil, then proceed on to Algiers to investigate.

(Stark spends this whole scene silent and nodding, so much so that one begins to suspect a Zucker Brothers-style gag when he finally opens his mouth and speaks. No such luck; what at first appears to be a comedic setup is just garden-variety lackluster direction.)

So Stark takes a plane to Cairo, and once there he runs into his old buddy, Kinelli (George Raft) at the airport lounge. In the course of less than three minutes of catching-up smalltalk, Stark spills that he’s working on a lucrative case involving a four-fingered man. Kinelli’s just knocking around North Africa because he hasn’t anything better to do, and when Stark finds out that Kinelli’s just on a layover on his way to Algiers, he quickly backpedals with a “Forget everything I just told you!” line.

“No! Men are really wearing hats like that back home?”

And with that, we wave goodbye to Stark, not that we knew him all that well, because aging tough-guy actor George Raft is the star of the picture. So after that unlikely meeting, we follow Kinelli to Algiers, where the local underworld mistakes him for the American agent that French HQ is sending. (It’s understandable, really; I mean, he’s American! In Algiers! What are the odds that there would be two such individuals!) So first the Algierian police snag him and ask him if he knows anything about $100 million in gold, or a four-fingered man. Then Touchard (Guido Celano), the four-fingered man everyone’s asking about, sees Kinelli on the street and recognized him from when they were buddies in the war. Quite the coincidence, don’t you think? Touchard slips his hotel key to Kinelli, then scurries off to his doom at the hands of thugs — but not before he slips into one of those record-your-own-record booths and records everything he knows about the gold robbery. The record, hereinafter The McGuffin, is sent to the care of Touchard’s girlfriend Yvonne (Irene Papas), a nightclub dancer who lives in an adjoining room at the hotel.

But Kinelli knows none of that. Instead he waits in the hotel room, walks in on Yvonne having a bath (and given her casual reaction to a strange man entering while she’s in the bubble bath, I have to wonder about the character of her nightclub routine), and sips some of Touchard’s whiskey, which he discovers too late to be drugged. The next thing he knows, it’s the next morning, the room has been ransacked, Yvonne is dead, and he’s seen at the scene by Lorraine (Gianna Maria Canale), Yvonne’s friend who just happened to stop by.

I don’t care your police rank; you can’t get the respect you want wearing a fez.

You may think that this is going to be a man-on-the-run story from here on out, but no. Lorraine intentionally fails to identify Kinelli at the police station because she’s also after the gold, and thinks that Kinelli might know something worth wheedling out of him. So instead of languishing in a nice safe cell, Kinelli is out on the streets, caught between several forces searching for a link to the gold, to wit:

• the local commander of French Military Intelligence, who also thinks that Kinelli is the American agent;
• Lt. Akhim Bey — no, seriously (Leon Lenoir), who still thinks Kinelli is somehow dirty;
• Professor Crespi (Alfredo Varelli), an elderly man who seems to show up everywhere;
• Lorraine, a nightclub singer, and Constantine (Massimo Serrato), the owner of the club she works at.

There are also various thugs and goons; one assumes they’re working for the party who has the gold, but their real story value is, as Dashiell Hammett said, to have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you who attacked Kinelli or why most of the time. Not that that will keep me up at night.

“As we say in the old country, ‘Wa wa woom!’”

With all of this going on around him, Kinelli is an impossibly cool cucumber. We’re never given an inkling as to what his line of work or background is, but it’s not every man who can drop into such a seething pot of intrigue and simply work around in it, unruffled. (Note: He immediately learns everything his friend Stark accidentally spilled, as well as everything which was rehearsed for our benefit in Paris. Which means that the first fifteen minutes of the movie are complete dead weight.)

Naturally, there’s an obligatory romance between Kinelli and Lorraine which gives new meaning to the phrase “obligatory romance.” Raft is a one-note tough guy who behaves like Bogart giving the same line reading over and over; Canale is a cut-rate femme fatale who thinks that her accent takes the place of acting. There are absolutely no sparks between them, right up until the moment that they step into their first kiss; and even after, one can’t help wonder why a nightclub beauty, who has a score of men gazing at her in lust every night, pins her affections on a middle-aged tough guy who’s just passing through.

“I will NOT be bested by a guy in a fez, ya hear me?”

You couldn’t convince me that the director ever looked up from his newspaper whenever the cameras were rolling; there may be the germ of an adequate if standard story in the middle of this, but it’s told with a sense of mechanical plodding than one of urgency or intrigue. All in all, this feature falls on the scale somewhere between “timefiller” and “timewaster.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0