Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...North Africa the happy trio is joined by Mrs. Lyle and her "pale and simple" son Eric who alternates between sleeping with his dominating mother and stealing from his fellow travelers. When Port dies from typhoid in a likely French Arab outpost, Kit wanders off into the desert where she is taken in by two Arab traveling salesmen whose actions prove that traveling salesman are the same the world over. Kit finally escapes from her harem when she finds that her Arab lover has to spend a few nights with some of his other wives. She then takes up with...
Maureen O'Hara may be an expert on décolletage, but she is no great shakes when it comes to acting in Arab movies. This became evident approximately half way through "Bagdad, in which Miss O'Hara is cast as a Bedouin of some means who migrates from England in order to live with her father. When she is informed that Pa has been bumped off by a local band of rowdies known as the Black Robes, nothing will do but she must get an eye-for-an-eye and all that by eliminating the ringleader of the boys...
...plot is reasonably easy to follow if you bring along a bloodhound and a pocket dictionary of Arab names, which rend the desert air and are damn hard to keep track...
...marriage of Porter and Katherine Moresby was obviously a flop and their North African jaunt was bringing out the worst in it. In the little Arab town of Bou Noura, they lay on a hotel bed fully clothed, getting drunk on a bottle of Scotch. A mosquito netting kept off the vicious flies, and as they talked, the star-studded African twilight fell and native drums kept up an insistent rhythm. Being wealthy and intense young New York intellectuals, Kit and Port Moresby glibly fell into lingo so appropriate that Noel Coward might have written...
...Bowles scores cleanly with his minor characters: Arab pimps and prostitutes, French officers in garrison towns, a stupidly tiresome pair of tourists-mother & son. Above all, The Sheltering Sky is drenched with a fine sense of place, and it sketches Arab towns and the Sahara itself with sharp sureness. Bowles may have missed the center of the target with his central characters, but he has given them a supporting cast and an exciting setting that a good many more practiced novelists can honestly envy...