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• 1 2017-05-17T22:57:56+00:00 Sounds of the Exotic Orient, 1950-1969 1 Chapter 1 image_header 2017-05-17T22:57:56+00:00
  Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s set in the Middle East can be organized into five categories: Bible epics, Orientalist fantasies, desert adventures, foreign intrigue stories, and Israeli-Palestinian conflict dramas.[1] All five genres are characterized by their use of classic Orientalist motifs, both visual and aural, which reinforced ideas about the “Orient” as timeless, exotic, and barbaric, and reduced its peoples to a limited set of stereotypical stock character profiles. The epics, fantasies, adventures and foreign intrigue stories almost exclusively utilize the more romanticized Orientalist stereotypes to depict the Middle East and its peoples, while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dramas abandon romantic visions in favor of a focus on the supposed desolation of the Middle East and barbarity of its peoples. The films reviewed are largely sonically uncommunicative as compared to post-9/11 films. The soundscapes are underdeveloped, and the sounds of Middle Eastern languages, the adhan, and spoken prayer are used sparingly and very differently from their use in post-9/11 films.
   
  With the exception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dramas, the remaining four genres are overwhelmingly unconcerned with telling stories about the Middle East, rather, they use Middle Eastern settings and peoples to tell stories that would have resonated with an American audience and communicated characteristically American ideals. The Orientalist fantasies and Bible epics especially, are much more communicative of American Cold War era policy and power politics than of any coherent messages about Muslim character in particular, or of Middle Eastern character in general. Under the guise of fantasy and religious history, Orientalist fantasies and Bible epics tell classic Arabian Nights-style and biblical stories, respectively, using all the visual trappings of Orientalism to communicate themes of American moral and financial superiority over the Soviet Union. Desert adventures make use of Middle Eastern desert settings to tell stories about Western heroes persevering in harsh foreign climates in the face of Arab or Bedouin hostility. Foreign intrigue stories similarly focus on Western heroes’ interactions with mysterious, untrustworthy Middle Eastern antagonists, though these stories take place in city settings, and the obstacles are not environmental but cultural and political. All four of these genres are utterly unconcerned with depicting the Middle East in any way contrary to classic Orientalist perceptions, and make no effort to develop an image of Middle Easterners beyond those appropriated from European Orientalist traditions.
  
  It would not be until the emergence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict genre in 1960, with the release of Exodus, that a specifically American perception of the Middle East began to take shape on screen. As a result of greater American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, and Americans’ exposure to biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, American filmic representations of the conflict expressed American perceptions of Palestinian Arabs as cruel, anti-Semitic, and violently unreasonable, and the conflict as one between a righteous Jewish underdog and a vicious Arab antagonist. At this point American filmmakers began to produce films that are straightforwardly communicative of specifically American attitudes toward the Middle East, abandoning romanticized Orientalist motifs in favor of creating more realistic portrayals of Middle Eastern peoples and Middle Eastern issues. Though the Israeli-Palestinian conflict genre makes persistent use of hostile stereotypes of angry, violent Arabs, these films still lack the distinct Islamophobia so characteristic of post-9/11 films. The move toward a more negative pattern of portrayal of Arabs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict films marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of American representation of the Middle East.
  
  Very little attention was paid to Islam or the Muslim identity of the characters in the films reviewed, and, again with the exception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dramas, little effort was made to develop characters meant to represent the realities of Middle Eastern peoples, or even a Western imagining of Middle Eastern peoples beyond the classic Orientalist stereotypes. The lack of a pronounced presence of Islam, either sonic or otherwise, and the prevailing use of Orientalist motifs and stereotypes inherited from European traditions of representation to depict the Middle East, are suggestive of the filmmakers’ disinterest in creating films that would communicate negative ideas about Muslims and Islam, or in expressing specifically American ideas about the Middle East. This disinterest is a symptom of limited American-Middle Eastern relations, and more significantly of the fact that Arabs and Muslims were not perceived as a threat to the U.S. interests at the time. This is not to say that American filmic representations of the Middle East were identical to European filmic representations of the Middle East, or that American representations were strictly products of unadulterated European perceptions; rather, American films of the 1950s and 1960s should be read as examples of hybridized media, resultant of cross-cultural exchange. The films produced in this period present European Orientalist perceptions of the Middle East within American cultural configurations that would have been familiar to American audiences.
  
  The Middle East, according to the films reviewed, is all at once magical, barbaric, mysterious, alluring, exotic and dangerous, full of belly dancers, bandits, sheikhs, sultans, genies, camels, and slaves. The landscapes are concurrently lush and desolate, paradisiacal and hellish. The Middle Eastern spaces in Orientalist fantasies such as The Magic Carpet (1951), The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Omar Khayyam (1957), and Kismet (1955), and in such Bible epics as The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959) display all the typical trappings of Western imaginings of “Oriental” palaces, harems, desert oases and Bedouin caravans. Harem girls played by conspicuously Caucasian women with unapologetic Midwestern accents, sporting the popular 1950s blunt-banged haircuts, gyrate to “Oriental” sounding music within the walls of brightly colored palaces topped with onion domes and minarets, or in the middle of lavish tents erected along caravan routes from one oasis to the next. Sultans swathed in silks and sparkling jewels lounge on divans in the middle of their opulent gardens, waited on by dark-skinned slaves and more harem girls with absurd American accents and haircuts.
  
  The Middle Eastern spaces in desert adventures, such as Tripoli (1950), The Black Rose (1950), Desert Sands (1955), The Steel Lady (1953), and Escape From Zahrain (1962), and such Israeli-Palestinian conflict dramas as Exodus (1960) and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), are both desolate and treacherous. The deserts traversed by these movies’ characters seem to stretch interminably, and are full of dangers lurking behind every sand dune, whether it is the danger of marauding bandits or the danger of dying in the punishing heat. Danger lurks, too, around every dusty corner of every generic Middle Eastern city street in every foreign intrigue film such as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Sirocco (1951), and Gambit (1966).
  
  The perceived timelessness of these foreign spaces results in comically similar scenery. One country’s desert and oasis are indistinguishable from another’s, the landscape seeming to defy geographical and temporal borders. The 1950s Moroccan cityscape of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is identical to the 1960s cityscape of the fictitious “Zahrain” in Escape From Zahrain (1962), and identical still to the 11^th century Persian cityscape of Omar Khayyam (1957), all three productions’ filmographers having relied on the exact same stock scenery to portray three wildly different times and places. The street scenes of the unidentified Middle Eastern city in The Black Rose (1950) are almost interchangeable with those of Damascus in Sirocco (1951), though The Black Rose (1950) takes place in the 14^th century, and Sirocco (1951) in the 1920s. This geographical and temporal fluidity can also be seen in the portrayal of the inhabitants of these Middle Eastern places. The harem girls and belly dancers in Harum Scarum (1955), Dream Wife (1953), The Magic Carpet (1951), and The Ten Commandments (1956) all look remarkably similar to one another despite the stories taking place in the 1960s, 1950s, medieval times, and pre-biblical times, respectively. The city dwellers—in their thawbs, turbans, hijabs and keffiyehs—in the street scenes of The Black Rose (1950), Sirocco (1951), Gambit (1966), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) look as though they could have walked off one set and on to the next despite the temporal and geographical differences in storylines. The Bedouins and Arab sheikhs of The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Tripoli (1950), and Omar Khayyam (1957) could have equally shared roles and stages.
  
  The visual imagery in 1950s and 1960s film is a powerful communicator of Orientalist conceptions of the Middle East, but the films are largely sonically uncommunicative. The Middle Eastern soundscape is dramatically underdeveloped in comparison to that of post-9/11 films.  Sound design was not yet a sophisticated art in the 1950s and 1960s, and the elaborate soundscapes, which are so painstakingly crafted today by sound designers with sophisticated recording and mixing technology at their disposal, are nonexistent in these earlier films. The three sounds in question, the adhan, praying in Middle Eastern languages, and Middle Eastern speech, are underutilized, a characteristic which actually makes 1950s and 1960s films sonically remarkable when compared to post-9/11 films.

  
  Sounds of Orientalism

  The Middle Eastern soundscape in 1950s and 1960s films is quiet. Whereas post-9/11 films utilize a great deal of diegetic and non-diegetic conventionalized sounds and sound effects to represent the Middle Eastern soundscape in sonically rich detail, the films of the 1950s and 1960s make use of far fewer sounds, a symptom of industry standards at the time. New recording and mixing technologies in the 1950s enabled sound technicians with greater control over capturing and editing specific sounds independently of the image,[2] but they were still limited by prohibitive industry standards that placed paramount importance on sonic realism.[3] The accepted sound-image model precluded the use of sound that would result in a-synchronicity of sound and image, meaning if the audience heard a sound they must also see where the sound came from, and it must make narrative sense. These rigid sound-image conventions, and the fact that most of the films made during the 1950s and 1960s were light-hearted fantasies and adventures, resulted in the creation of Middle Eastern soundscapes that are dramatically different from those of post-9/11 films, which are overwhelmingly war stories and political thrillers relying heavily on sonic associations to communicate value judgments of the Middle East and Islam. The 1950s and 1960s Middle Eastern soundscapes are characterized by the sounds of people walking, talking and shouting, horses’ and camels’ hooves stepping, scimitar blades clashing, Orientalist music—used in all genres as a sort of persistent sonic recognition of the Otherness of the geographic space—and the occasional sound of the adhan—used strictly as a means of sonically identifying the geographic space. The common post-9/11 sounds of violence, war, torture, and terrorism are not present. The sonic associations of Islam and violence, Middle Eastern spaces and civil unrest, and Middle Eastern spaces and moral and physical decay, which are so frequently used in post-9/11 films are not present in the films of the 1950s-1960s. Ultimately the Middle Eastern soundscape in these films is subdued, benign, and not particularly communicative.
  
  Additionally, Middle Eastern languages are used to a lesser degree than they are in post-9/11 films, which is a function of the conspicuous lack of native speakers of Middle Eastern languages cast in these films.[4] Attempts to visually portray actors as Arabs through costumery and makeup fall short as soon as they open their mouths and project clearly Mexican or American accents. When attempts were made to include Middle Eastern languages it was most often Arabic, with few exceptions, despite the linguistic realities of the geographic location in which the stories are set. As in post-9/11 films, Middle Eastern speech is largely left untranslated, rendering it useless in terms of communicating dialogically with the audience. Unlike in post-9/11 films, Middle Eastern speech is not accompanied by the sounds of explosions, gun shots, pain, and general civil unrest. Middle Eastern language speakers in both sets of films are noise-makers, but the speech in the films of the 1950s and 1960s is not used to associate Middle Easterners and Middle Eastern countries with violence and war as it is in films produced in later decades, and certainly in post-9/11 films.
  
  Of the sixteen 1950s films and the eight 1960s films reviewed, not one includes prayer delivered in a Middle Eastern language. Prayer delivered in English by Middle Eastern characters is incredibly scarce, but for a fleeting prayer scene here or there, and it is spoken by inconsequential characters, as in The Magic Carpet (1951) when the protagonist’s sidekick is seen kneeling on a prayer rug and exclaiming, “Praise be to Allah, Allah, Allah,” all of which takes exactly five seconds. The sound of the adhan is used sparingly and diegetically to sonically place the story in space. It is left unadulterated by the kinds of violent sounds typical of the associations made in post-9/11 films, which use the adhan both diegetically and non-diegetically as a form of background music that both sets the tone of the scene and, in many cases, serves as a sort of sonic foreshadowing of danger or violence to come. The adhan in the 1950s and 1960s was used simply as a sonic geographic marker, establishing the foreignness of the setting and nothing else, as in Kismet (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Gambit (1966).
  
  The absence of prayer delivered in Middle Eastern languages, and the neutral use of the adhan as a geographic marker are sonically indicative of these films’ inattention to Islam. In addition to providing very little expression of American ideas about the Middle East, beyond the set of classic Orientalist stereotypes used to portray the locales, the films reviewed are even less expressive of American attitudes toward Islam. The absence of Arabic prayer makes sense when one takes into account the fact that the Islamic identity of the characters is either unapparent or indicated almost as an afterthought. In most of the films reviewed the Islamic identity of the characters is taken for granted as being part of their ethnic identity and is simply ignored. The diegetic use of the adhan to locate the scene in geographic space, and, more importantly, the lack of its non-diegetic use in sonic associations, is indeed a symptom of the prohibitive industry standards discussed above, but is also indicative of the filmmakers’ disinterest in presenting any kind of concerted critiques of Islam through the use of carefully crafted sonic associations. 
  
  Though 1950s and 1960s films are lacking in communicative uses of the sound of the adhan and prayer in Middle Eastern languages, they do contain interesting examples of aural caricatures. An aural caricature, like a visual caricature, is an essentialized and exaggerated imitation of the person or group being represented.[5] In the films reviewed, there are many visual caricatures including belly dancers, sheikhs, and sultans, all identifiable by their similar appearance across films, as well as instances of “Arab face,” as in Omar Khayyam (1957) and King of the Khyber Rifles (1953), which include a startling number of actors covered in brown grease paint. Many of the films reviewed also make use of aural caricatures to represent what Middle Easterners sound like. In The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), for example, an inconsequential character, himself a visual caricature of a Middle Eastern man, lets loose a bizarre utterance, a cross between ululation and yodeling, as he imitates a belly dancer, gyrating and delighting in the piles of treasure he and his crew have just stumbled upon. The sound he makes is clearly meant to imitate women ululating, but also sounds reminiscent of Middle Eastern song, though not one syllable he vocalizes could be mistaken for an actual word in any language.
  
  In The Magic Carpet (1951) a group of men sing unintelligibly while heaving bags of grain onto carts, as one of the evil Caliph’s tax collectors pokes them with a long stick, berates them for moving too slowly, and criticizes them for finding the will to sing while performing the degrading task of helping to ship away their own grain to the Caliph, who will use it to fund his frivolities as they and their families starve. The song is vaguely reminiscent of Sufi chanting, though the song’s lyrics are unintelligible and no overt indication is given as to what the song is about or why it is being sung. The audience only knows what they can hear, which is 36 seconds of a somber, quarter-tone melody sung in an unidentified language; and what they can see, a scene actually quite reminiscent of the quintessential African American slave gang, working and singing as a slave driver stands menacingly by. The song is an aural caricature, meant to sound like Middle Eastern singing, with its characteristic quarter tones, but the scene is even more significant for its representation of the effects of cross-cultural exchange. The inherent European Orientalism in this instance of American representation of the Middle East, couples with the specifically American configuration of singing laborers vs. hostile overseer, to create a hybridized image, expressive of both European perceptions of the Middle East, and American conceptions of the relation between oppressed and oppressor.
  
  Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962) and The Black Rose (1950) are full of aural caricatures, with frequent attempts by the extras to sound like Middle Easterners by shouting and singing in gibberish. The Black Rose (1950) presents a particularly perplexing aural caricature of Middle Eastern vocalization in the part of “Lu Chung,” a supposedly Arab man, played by the Mexican actor, Alfonso Bedoya. Bedoya’s thick Mexican accent results in bizarre speech, sounding neither Mexican nor Arab. Many of the films reviewed, including The Black Rose (1950) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), include aural caricatures of ululation, one of the most commonly caricatured sounds in filmic representations of Middle Easterners.
  
  The aural caricatures in 1950s and 1960s films are a form of sonic Orientalism. They represent the aurality of Middle Easterners, mediated through a limited Western understanding and imagination of what Middle Easterners sound like, and therefore communicate very little about Middle Eastern reality and much more about Western perceptions of the Middle East. The aural caricatures depict Middle Easterners as a people far apart from Americans and other Westerners. The sounds they make are strange and mysterious, sometimes even obscene. The language sounds utterly foreign, often because the language is not a language at all but Middle Eastern-sounding gibberish, and the lack of subtitles compounds the sense of separation and difference between the speaker on screen and the audience in the theatre. Even the unintelligible chatter in market place and street scenes sounds uncouth juxtaposed with the familiar and comforting English tones expressed by the lead characters. The aural caricature trends of the 1950s and 1960s are akin to visual caricature trends of the period. Both modes of caricature work to depict Middle Easterners according to traditional Orientalist ideology; communicating ideas about the Middle East and its peoples as outside the ordinary bounds of time and space, both exotic and corrupt, alluring and dangerous, and, ultimately, irreconcilably different from—and less civilized—than the West.
  
  The visual and aural elements of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood films are expressive of classic European Orientalist conceptions of Middle Eastern spaces, faces, and voices, but not of any well-developed, specifically American conceptions. L. Carl Brown attributes the American inheritance and creative reproduction of European perceptions of the Middle East first to Americans’ natural affiliation with their European origins, and second to their unwillingness to challenge their own self-image.[6] In 1950s films that were intended to represent the realities of the Middle East, the struggle to overcome European colonial power, was absent as a theme. American filmmakers reproduced European images of the exotic Middle East, rather than explore possible connections with Middle Eastern peoples. If such films were made and such similarities acknowledged, Americans would be faced with obvious parallels to historical American struggles for independence from the very same European powers. This would result in an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance between the acknowledged similarity and Americans’ self-perception of the current situation in the U.S. (one in which Native Americans and Americans of color were routinely oppressed by a system of white supremacy), as one in which white Americans were merely the stewards of less civilized peoples.[7] American dismissal of the realities of Middle Eastern efforts to overthrow their colonial yokes was compounded by limited American-Middle Eastern interaction in the interwar period. Brian T. Edwards’ analysis of American portrayals of the Middle East in film echoes Brown’s interpretation. Edwards finds very little expression of specifically American conceptions of the Middle East in Hollywood films of the 1950s, arguing that the limited interaction between the U.S. and the Middle East, and the absence of a Middle Eastern threat to U.S. interests were responsible for this absence.[8] Whether it was Americans’ unwillingness to face the many implications of relating to Middle Eastern struggles for independence or the lack of significant interaction between the U.S. and the Middle East that resulted in the reproduction of European Orientalism in Hollywood film, the films are indicative of an American disinterest in exploring Middle Eastern realities on screen.

  Cold War Orientalism

  Upon the backdrop of Orientalist imagery in 1950s and 1960s films, stories with specifically American messages were told. The films reviewed were overwhelmingly unconcerned with telling stories about the Middle East, and made little effort to construct representations of Middle Easterners beyond the passive presentation of Orientalist stereotypes. One of the most popular genres of the 1950s and early 1960s was the Orientalist fantasy. These films are characterized by the era’s technological advances in color film and widescreen formats, which made it possible to capture the vibrant colors of the costumes and sets and classic Orientalist visual motifs, such as the Sultan’s palace, harem girls, belly dancers, and exotic landscapes. At first these films seem ultimately to be simple pieces of escapist entertainment, meant to make use of new technologies and capture the imaginations of the audience, but according to Brian T. Edwards, upon further investigation these seemingly simple fantasy flicks actually communicated Cold War ideologies.
  
  Orientalist fantasies, such as Kismet (1955), The Magic Carpet (1951), Omar Khayyam (1957), and Yankee Pasha (1954), utilize the tropes of excess and female containment to communicate American Cold War ideals. The Middle East, which has traditionally been characterized in Orientalist interpretations as excessive (in wealth, cruelty, and passions), is a perfect backdrop on which to represent American abundance. Edwards argues that these films represented to American audiences the superiority of American abundance and vibrancy, over Soviet scarcity and dreariness, both on screen and by the films’ very existence. The decade’s advances in color processes and widescreen capabilities leant themselves well to producing visually stimulating scenes of the excesses of material wealth. The economic and technological ability to create such spectacles was seen as a testament to American prowess. Within a Cold War context, Edwards argues, these films would be read by American audiences as a celebration of American economic power, especially as Hollywood’s filmmaking was becoming an exercise in the globalization of American cinema.
  
  While expressing the superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism, these films also implicitly argue for the containment of said Soviet communism—while simultaneously commenting on the need to re-contain American women who had crossed the domestic boundaries during WWII in an effort to contribute—through the filmic containment of hyper-sexualized women within the harem. The women in these films, Edwards argues, represent both American abundance and, “the communist threat, which itself had been coded as feminine, uncontainable, and of questionable sexuality.”[9] The inherent conflict between the portrayal of American abundance and the containment of an abundance of female sexuality is resolved in these films by legitimizing the presentation of excessive female sexuality with the containment of the hyper-sexualized woman within the walls of the harem. In this way, Western images and conceptions of the Middle East and Middle Eastern women are used to represent complex and conflicting American ideals and national identities: Conceptions of Middle Eastern women as excessively sexual are utilized to express American economic abundance and superiority as it stood in opposition to Soviet communism and degeneracy, while images of the impenetrable harem are utilized to metaphorically re-contain American women at home and contain Soviet communism abroad. Edwards finds that although these films take place in Middle Eastern spaces and are populated by supposedly Middle Eastern characters, they do very little to present any Western ideas about those peoples and places beyond the overarching theme of “Oriental” excess.
  
  Historian Melanie McAlister finds that the equally popular Bible epics of the 1950s and 1960s, though also examples of Cold War allegories, did reveal American attitudes toward the Middle East as they pertained to the U.S. role in the Cold War. Like the Orientalist fantasies, the Bible epics portray Middle Eastern spaces and faces according to classic Orientalist conceptions, while stressing the communication of American Cold War ideologies over the presentation of a realistic picture of the foreign locales and populations. Unlike the Orientalist fantasies, which if analyzed according to Edwards’ framework can be interpreted as straightforward Cold War allegories, the Bible epics, according to McAlister, provide a more complex expression of both American Cold War ideologies and U.S. intentions in the post-colonial world order.[10] Further, films such as The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959) should be considered as products of an American exercise in the creation of history. McAlister argues that these films utilize associative reinterpretations of Middle Eastern religious history to effectively rewrite the historical record in an effort to promote American “benevolent supremacy” within the decolonizing, Cold War geopolitical arena.
  
  Through careful reconfiguration of British imperialists as Roman and Egyptian oppressors and Middle Eastern subjects as oppressed Jews and Jewish slaves, The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959) represent the geopolitical situation of the late 1950s. If the implications of the reconfiguration of roles are not clear enough, the fact that the Roman and Egyptian oppressors were played by British actors surely makes the association obvious. The exodus trope played out in both films is facilitated in each by the Americanized heroes, while the love interests and the feminized Arab sheikhs willingly submit to their leadership. According to McAlister, this willing submission to the protagonists who deliver the oppressed from their oppressors represents the American policy of benevolent supremacy, an acceptable reconfiguration of corrupt European imperialism.[11] Reconciliation of the contradiction between the simultaneous denouncement of European imperial power by the U.S., and the insinuation of U.S. power in decolonizing nations—exhibited during events like the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis—is played out in films like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur. Just as Moses and Judah Ben-Hur delivered their people from the tyranny of the Egyptians and the Romans, so too did the U.S. intend to support Middle Eastern nationalist struggles by delivering the Middle East from the tyranny of European imperialism into a much more suitable system of American paternalism, or so was the message communicated by the films.[12]
  
  The treatment of the Arab sheikhs, and of the Middle Eastern spaces in The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959) is noteworthy. Whereas the Middle Eastern characters in the Orientalist fantasies discussed above are simple Arab caricatures, the sheikhs in these two films, according to McAlister, are more complex.[13] The sheikhs, who are depicted according to the stereotypical portrayal of an Arab sheikh seen in countless Hollywood films, are nevertheless critical to the story, and communicative of something more than mere caricature.[14] The sheikhs support the heroes’ struggles for freedom, offering them food, shelter, resources, and, to Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), a wife. Their support of the heroes represents U.S. intentions for American-Middle Eastern relations, making their roles in their filmic worlds much more significant than that of the Arab characters in most if not all of the Orientalist fantasies. The sheikhs and the Middle Eastern spaces they inhabit in both films is favorably depicted. They and their homes are associated with safety, warmth, democracy, and hope for freedom from tyranny. The spaces are decorated in warm colors, the inhabitants dressed in flowing fabrics, and the scenes shot in soft lighting. These “nationalist spaces,” as McAlister refers to them, are in sharp contrast with the harsh depictions of the oppressive Roman and Egyptian spaces.[15]
  
  In these films, depictions of Middle Eastern spaces are dictated not by reality, but by the nature of the message being communicated. In The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), which communicate anti-colonial and pro-American messages, the Middle Eastern spaces are treated as rhetorical devices, used to visualize notions of democracy and freedom. In the Orientalist fantasies, the Middle Eastern spaces are used to project American economic power and wealth through the use of bright colors, gaudy fabrics, and wide screen shots of material excess and opulence. The Middle Eastern space in many films, especially foreign intrigue stories and desert adventures, is so divorced from reality that it takes on an almost anthropomorphic quality, acting as a character in opposition to the Western hero. In some cases, the personified Middle Eastern space is the most active Middle Eastern “character” in the film, as in Sirocco (1951) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), both of which depict the Middle Eastern locales as breeding grounds for all things dangerous and corrupt. In these films, the spaces are dusty, decaying, and populated by unsavory characters. They seem to suck the Western protagonists in, causing all sorts of destruction and mayhem until the protagonists manage to return to the safety of their Western countries of origin. Similarly, the desert adventures depict Middle Eastern spaces as foreboding desert wastelands with which the protagonists must contend. The Middle Eastern desert in films such as The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Steel Lady (1953), Desert Sands (1955), and Bitter Victory (1957), acts as the ultimate antagonist, while scores of nameless Arab villains are decimated by the Western heroes, who are then left with the task of surviving the unrelenting heat and unforgiving desolation of the desert. The depiction of the Middle Eastern space as sumptuous Oriental palace and garden begins to die out in the 1960s, but its depiction as sinister souk and desert wasteland is a trend that continues today. Indeed, the appropriation and reduction of Middle Eastern spaces as rhetorical device has only grown in significance, as it is now, more than ever, used to communicate increasingly hostile messages about the Middle East and its peoples. As will be made clear in subsequent chapters, the gritty, grimy Middle Eastern spaces of post-9/11 films is a great departure from the warm and welcoming Middle Eastern spaces of the 1950s and 1960s.
  
  A Middle Eastern setting is the perfect backdrop for Cold War allegories as the U.S. and the Soviet Union began to engage in Cold War tactics on the increasingly relevant Middle Eastern stage. For both nations, alliances with former colonies and politically unstable Middle Eastern countries would be key in the battle for control. According to Joshua D. Bellin however, for the greater part of the 1950s, American policy in the Middle East would remain marked by U.S. apprehension about the region, an attitude Bellin attributes to the decade’s more pressing issues and the distraction of post-war recovery.[16] Bellin finds the expression of this apprehension in the 1958 release of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, the first of three installments in the Sinbad trilogy created by the special effects master, Ray Harryhausen. Similar to McAlister’s analysis of the Bible epics, Bellin’s analysis of the Sinbad trilogy reveals the discursive relevance in their expression of American policy in the Middle East at the time of each film’s production, despite the popular dismissal of the trilogy as inconsequential escapist fantasy. American wariness of entanglement in the Middle East, Bellin argues, can be read in the subtext of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), especially in the nature of the relationship between Sinbad, the protagonist, and the villain, a mysterious sorcerer named Sokurah. Sinbad is drawn into a mutually beneficial relationship with Sokurah, though he questions the reliability of his new partner and expresses reservations at the prospect of becoming too involved in Sokurah’s schemes. Sokurah unfortunately holds the key to Sinbad’s future happiness, and so Sinbad must play along even as he becomes increasingly wary of Sokurah’s startling powers. The uncertain relationship between the apprehensive Sinbad and the mysterious Sokurah, Bellin argues, represents the uncertain relationship between the U.S. and the Middle East, effected by U.S. reliance on the Middle East for critical resources, and perhaps even more critical alliances against the Soviet Union, and Middle Eastern desire for American support. As American-Middle Eastern relations evolved in the coming decades, so too did the Sinbad movies’ representations of the Middle East.
  
  While the Bible epics and the Sinbad trilogy are more complex than the Orientalist fantasies in terms of expressing American ideas about the Middle East, none of the films reviewed make a concerted effort to communicate coherent ideas about the Middle East, Middle Easterners, or Muslims outside of an American foreign policy context and beyond the expression of classic Orientalist stereotypes. The Bible epics communicate the American desire to rule “benevolently” over former Middle Eastern colonies in an effort to curb the spread of Communism, but this is not a message about the nature of the regions or the characteristics of their peoples. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad communicates 1950s American wariness toward involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, but it does not communicate American ideas about the Middle East or its peoples beyond the expression of the classic Orientalist perceptions of the region as mysterious and dangerous. What all these films lack are clearly communicated messages about Middle Easterners and Muslims as they existed in real life. Though clearly Orientalist in nature, the portrayals of peoples and places in these films are not overtly Islamophobic or even Arabophobic. They are certainly not realistic or particularly kind portrayals, but they are also not particularly hostile, and they do not present any kind of well-defined conceptions of realistic Middle Eastern or Muslim identities.
  
  Just as the striking Islamophobia of post-9/11 films can be directly related to the state of 21^st century U.S.-Middle East relations, so the lack of Islamophobic or even overtly Arabophobic messages in 1950s and 1960s films can be related to U.S. relations, or lack thereof, with the Middle East in the 1950s. The tendency of these films to set Western tales against Middle Eastern backdrops, saying very little about the peoples and places they purport to be about, is a symptom of the U.S. having relatively little to do with the Middle East at the time. John C. Eisele and Brian T. Edwards both attribute the lack of overtly negative representations of Middle Easterners in the films of the mid 20^th century to the ambiguity with which Americans viewed the Middle East, an attitude directly related to the fact that Middle Eastern countries were not a serious threat to U.S. interests in the first half of the century.[17]

  Conclusion

  Generally speaking, the first half of the 20^th century saw either positive or ambiguous relations between the U.S. and the Middle East. United States foreign relations in the 1950s were characterized by growing American dependence on Arab oil, U.S. efforts to curb Soviet power and contain Communism by forging alliances with Middle Eastern powers, the American rise to power in the post-colonial void left by the weakening former colonial powers, Britain and France, and finally by the lingering 19^th century Orientalist conceptions of the Middle East and its peoples. All these elements are represented in the films of the 1950s and 1960s via Orientalist visual and sonic motifs, Cold War allegories, and stereotypical depictions of Middle Eastern spaces, faces and voices. The characteristic narrative structures differ by genre as do their general take-home messages, but what every 1950s and 1960s film reviewed has in common, regardless of genre, are the Orientalist motifs, stereotypes, and most importantly the lack of overtly Islamophobic rhetoric.
  
  The absence of an Islamic presence in these films, whether sonic or otherwise, is significant. It suggests that Islam was not at the forefront of American images of the Middle East. The Islamic identity of the characters was not the most important thing about them. It did not define their role in the films, as it so clearly does in films made after 9/11, and so Islamic sounds—the adhan and Islamic language—were not used to create Islamophobic associations between Islam and violence.
  
  Though Islam is conspicuously absent from the majority of the reviewed films there are some exceptions. Omar Khayyam (1957), Dream Wife (1953), Yankee Pasha (1954), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) comment on perceived aspects of Islam that have traditionally been considered unsavory by Western critics. The premise of Omar Khayyam (1957) assumes an understanding of Islam as a religion prone to fanaticism and blind worship. The villains in this movie are loosely based on the historical society of assassins active in the 11^th century. But, despite the underlying implication, it is still made clear that the villains belong to an aberrant sect, and do not represent the true nature of Islam as it is practiced by the more rational and even-headed protagonists. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Dream Wife (1953), and Yankee Pasha (1954) express the Western perception of Islam as misogynistic. In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) the protagonist’s son is scolded by an angry Arab man for accidentally pulling the veil off his wife’s face. The man’s reaction is harshly criticized, as are his religious motivations, when the boy’s parents are shocked to hear that Islam forbids the woman from showing her face. The entire premise of Dream Wife (1953) is based on the perception of female inferiority and subjugation in Islamic society. The protagonist laments the insufferable independence of his American fiancé whose commitment to her job takes away from time he wishes she would spend with him. Taking pleasure in the subservience of a Middle Eastern woman whose sole purpose in life, he is told, is to please her future husband, he at first finds the arrangement a refreshing change of pace, but ultimately recognizes the ills of Islamic misogyny and willingly accepts appropriate, Western relationship norms. While these few films certainly include critiques of Islam, they are ultimately implicit compared to those in post-9/11 films, and the films themselves are much less preoccupied with presenting those critiques than they are with telling Western stories to Western audiences.
  
  The events of 9/11 seem like a natural impetus for the proliferation of Islamophobia in Hollywood film. Indeed, quite a few scholars of Arab and Muslim representation have centered their studies around the effects of 9/11 on subsequent representations in film, and for good reason. The Islamophobic Muslim terrorist stereotype has so completely taken over theatre and television screens since 9/11 that it is difficult not to point to that day as the beginning of American filmic conflation of “terrorist” with “Muslim.” But such a conclusion is complicated by the introduction of the first incarnation of the contemporary terrorist genre not after 9/11 but in the early years of the 1960s. According to Laurence Michalak, with the release in 1960 of Exodus a new genre was born: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict drama. Exodus (1960), which tells the story, or rather one version of the story, of the struggle of the Jews to build a home in Israel despite growing tensions and hostility from the surrounding Arab population, would give rise to a series of similar stories, all utilizing the same set of tropes and stereotypes to vilify Arabs as violent, anti-Semitic terrorists, while engendering support for Jewish settlers.[18]
  
  As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict genre grew in popularity in the 1960s, the Orientalist fantasies and desert adventures dwindled. The typical Orientalist motifs were replaced by more sinister landscapes and dangerous characters. The palace harem and desert oasis morphed into barren wastelands while the belly dancers and sultans faded to the background as mobs of angry, bloodthirsty Arabs crashed into the foreground. The Middle East became a treacherous place as the Arab became an enemy, and both began to be utilized in the new genre of the 1960s, not as a canvas on which to paint Western pictures, but as portrayals intended to accurately represent reality. Where the fantasies, adventures, foreign intrigue stories and Bible epics had used Middle Eastern locales and populations as props, the conflict dramas used them to communicate messages about themselves, messages that were designed to convince American audiences of Arab villainy. But even after the Arab took on the new role of violent terrorist, still these conflict dramas of the 1960s did not include any concerted indictment of Islam. The issue of Arab terrorism in these films was presented as political in nature, motivated by the tangible political goals of garnering public recognition of Palestinian suffering, and support for the Palestinian resistance. These goals were rarely spelled out clearly to the audience, but they were at least implied. It was not suggested that Palestinian resistance to Jewish settlement was motivated by any Islamic inclinations. As in the genres discussed above, the Islamic identity of the characters in the conflict dramas was not made explicit. The adhan was scarce and then used only diegetically to sonically locate the story in space. The association of Islam with violence made commonly in post-9/11 films through the presentation of Islamic prayer just before or at the moment of a violent act was not made in these conflict dramas, though the nature of the stories would have allowed for this kind of aural-visual communication. Like the fantasy, adventure, foreign intrigue, and Bible epic genres before it, the conflict dramas were utterly unconcerned with Islam. As the 1960s came to a close and the conflict genre proliferated throughout the 1970s-1980s this trend would remain in place. 
   

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  [1] In the course of compiling a list of Middle East-related films produced in the 1950s and 1960s these five categories emerged as the most predominant. 

  [2] Rick Altman, “The Evolution of Sound Technology,” Film Sound: Theory and Practice. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 48.

  [3] William Whittington, “Sound Design: Sound Design in New Hollywood Cinema,” Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: A Critical Overview. (London: Continuum, 2007) 559.

  [4] This is a trend that persists to this day despite the more common use of actors fluent in Middle Eastern languages. The protagonist of Tyrant for instance is played by Adam Rayner, who is not Arab or fluent in Arabic, despite the fact that his character, Bassam Al-Fayeed, is both. Often the “good guy” in films produced today will be played by actors and actresses who are not of Middle Eastern descent, while the “bad guys” are played by those who are, a phenomenon which is expressive of the power politics involved in representation. Middle Eastern actors and actresses are cast predominantly as villains, or in the token “good Muslim” roles, severely limiting their ability to represent their communities in ways outside the negative standards set by Hollywood.

  [5] Author’s definition.

  [6] L. Carl Brown, “Movies and the Middle East,” Comparative Civilizations Review vol. 13-14 (1985).

  [7] Ibid., 19.

  [8] Brian T. Edwards, “Yankee Pashas and Buried Women: Containing Abundance in 1950s Hollywood Orientalism,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies vol. 31, no. 2 (2001): 16.

  [9] Ibid., 17.

  [10] Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 46.

  [11] Ibid., 79.

  [12] During the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis, the U.S. denounced the British and French invasion of Egypt, and through effective political pressure, managed to force both nations to withdraw from Egypt. Their withdrawal weakened European power in the region, leaving a space open for the U.S. to position itself as a new global power. Two months after the crisis the President Eisenhower announced the Eisenhower Doctrine, which detailed plans for U.S. financial and material support of nations in the Middle East. By supporting decolonization and national independence efforts in this way, the U.S. set itself up to rule “benevolently,” gaining financial power over emerging nations, and exercising that power through the control of nations’ purse strings. 

  [13] Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 66.

  [14] American filmic representations of the Middle East and Middle Easterners are more often than not, woefully ignorant of the cultural, ethnic, religious and regional particularities of the peoples and places they depict. The image of a richly dressed sheikh, swathed in colorful thawbs and keffiyehs, sitting in his equally richly adorned tent is characteristic of all Hollywood portrayals of the proverbial Arab sheikh in the first half of the 20^th century, regardless of time period, geographic location, or ethnicity, and willfully dismissive of the anachronism of superimposing the same temporally inaccurate imagery onto characters who exist across time and space. The portrayals of Jethro, the sheikh in The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ilderim, the sheikh in Ben-Hur (1959) are no exception. Jethro, the supposed father-in-law of Moses and a Kenite (a member of a biblical tribe in the Levant, purportedly descendent from Cain), and Ilderim, a Syrian Arab, are both dressed in colorful thawbs and keffiyehs, and presented in similarly decorated caravan tents despite their ethnic and geographic realities. Both are depicted according to the stereotypical image of an Arab sheikh, using imagery that would immediately register with a Western audience as visual markers of “Arabness” despite the fact that the Arabs as a cohesive group were certainly not clearly defined in the centuries before and decades after the advent of Christianity, and indeed continue to elude definitive categorization. 

  [15] Ibid., 62.

  [16] Joshua David Bellin, Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 78.

  [17] John C. Eisele, “The Wild East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in the Hollywood Eastern,” Cinema Journal vol. 41 no. 4 (2002): 72, & Brian T. Edwards, “Yankee Pashas and Buried Women: Containing Abundance in 1950s Hollywood Orientalism,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies vol. 31, no. 2 (2001): 16.

  [18] Laurence Michalak, “The Arab in American Cinema: A Century of Otherness,” Cineaste, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1989), 3-9.