Best bet for best picture lures tourists to Egypt

CAIRO -- If the 12 nominations for The English Patient aren't enough to ensure its status as front-runner for the best picture Oscar, the film is also fulfilling another tradition of past best picture winners: It has inspired a boom of tourism for its romantic setting.

Ever since the 1935 winner, Mutiny on the Bounty, turned Tahiti into a major tourist destination in the `30s, best-picture winners -- which tend to be big historical epics set in exotic places -- have had a remarkable way of sending legions of movie-influenced travelers on pilgrimages.

The 1958 winner, Bridge on the River Kwai, for instance, overnight turned the River Kwai-Kanchanaburi prison camp site into Thailand's third largest tourist draw, and 40 years later it still is, with a sound and light show simulating the film's effects for visitors. Similarly, the 1962 winner, Lawrence of Arabia, is credited with single-handedly creating Jordan's tourist industry. More recently, the 1981 winner, Gandhi, did wonders for India's tourism; the 1985 winner, Out of Africa, transformed Isak Dinesen's former estate into Nairobi's single most popular attraction; and the 1993 winner, Schindler's List, has drawn hundreds of thousands to Poland's former concentration camps. (The Polish government even sponsors a "Schindler's Poland" tour.) The English Patient is doing the same for Egypt, even though the film's lush, sensuous scenes of the Egyptian desert were not filmed in Egypt at all, but in Tunisia. (Historically, this incongruity doesn't seem to have much effect on the phenomenon: Kwai was filmed in Ceylon, Bounty off Catalina Island.) But what makes this case even more unusual is that the movie is creating tourist interest not so much in Egypt's famous archeological attractions (even though the film's hero is an archeologist), as in that specific period of history that has been so long downplayed by the country's tourist authority: the 70 or so years before 1952 that Egypt spent as part of the British Empire. As one Egyptian government tour guide told me, "It's really quite amazing. Since the movie came out, I've had a hundred foreign tourists ask me to show them Shepheard's Hotel or the old British section of Cairo or the location of the Cave of Swimmers. I don't even know where those places are. We're totally unprepared for this." If this sudden interest in the once forbidden subject of British Egypt is making the government of Hosni Mubarak vaguely uncomfortable, no one in it is complaining. Since Islamic fundamentalists declared war on foreign tourists in 1992, Egypt's most vital industry (and greatest source of foreign exchange) had been on life support. But the tourist industry made a spectacular comeback in 1996, with a record 3.8 million visitors, even though the tourist body count continues to rise. The office of Tourism Minister Mamduh Beltagui concedes The English Patient has "probably played a part" in this success. Meanwhile, the Cairo government is having to deal with its own domestic equivalent of The English Patient phenomenon: A wave of fascination for the British Era has swept over the country in recent years -- especially since the 1994 assassination attempt on Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz. In her definitive book on the rise of militant Islam, God Has 99 Names, former New York Times Middle East chief Judith Miller claims the reign of terror waged against Egypt's secularists has created "a palpable nostalgia" for "the British-backed monarchy that... ruled between 1922 and the 1952 coup -- a period that only in retrospect became known as Egypt's `enlightenment.'" But what is left of that once-scorned colonial world for the traveler to experience? Certainly not Shepheard's Hotel, the legendary hostelry that was the social center of British Egypt from the day Samuel Shepheard founded it in 1841. When I found my way to Cairo's teeming Midan Opera, where the hotel reigned for a century, it was long gone -- destroyed in an anti-British riot in 1952. What stands for Shepheard's in Cairo today is an gigantic, glass- and-steel, five-star hotel with the same name built in 1957 a few miles west on the east bank of the Nile. What stood for the hotel in the movie was partly Venice's Hotel des Bains, and mostly a large set at the Cinecitta Studio in Rome, designed from pictures of the old Shepheard's and interiors inspired by another famous Cairo hotel, the Windsor. The Windsor Hotel was also badly damaged in the riots of 1952, but it survives reasonably intact two blocks from the original site of Shepheard's. Before it was a hotel, it served as the British Officer's Club, and thus was the real-life setting for one of the most famous scenes in moviedom -- T.E. Lawrence's triumphant return to Cairo after taking of Aqaba in Lawrence of Arabia. Today, the Windsor is run-down and caters mostly to backpackers, but it's loaded with seedy Victorian atmosphere. Michael Palin stayed there when filming the Egypt episode of his Around the World in 80 Days series, and numerous framed stills in the lobby attest to the many times the place has been used as a movie location. The desk clerk assured me English Patient author Michael Ondaatje stayed there when researching his novel. The British period also survives in the thousands of art-deco apartment buildings sprinkled throughout the city; in the stately old Mena House Hotel just a stone's throw from the Giza Pyramids; in the former British military headquarters at the tip of Gezira Island (off-limits to tourists but visible from the Gezira Sheraton Hotel); and in the splendidly gothic (circa 1900) Egyptian Museum, where the high ceilings, gloomy hallways and Victorian display cases look like a set from The Mummy. Farther down the Nile, at Luxor, British Egypt has a more luxurious legacy in the stately Winter Palace Hotel, which sits on the Nile Corniche between the temples of Karnac and Luxor. Built to attract the aristocracy of Europe, it's been called the most perfect survivor of a Victorian British hotel in the former colonies, with cavernous rooms, geometrically designed gardens, a lobby the size of most Holiday Inns, exposed beams in gentlemen's bars that evoke Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham (both of whom stayed there). And even farther down the Nile, in the town of Aswan, the spirit of British Egypt is even stronger. This exquisitely lovely setting, where feluccas sail amid the rocky outcroppings of the first cataract of the Nile, was the favorite British resort in Africa. Here, Lord Horatio Kitchener, then consul-general of Egypt and commander of its armies, converted one of the nearby islands into what is perhaps England's happiest legacy in Egypt: a showplace botanical garden stocked with plants from all over the empire. When the British built the first Aswan dam in 1902, they also built the Cataract Hotel, which still regularly makes the lists of the world's great hotels. Situated on a rise overlooking the cataract, everything about the place evokes turn-of-the-century elegance, from its beveled glass elevator and high-ceiling fans to its lush Oriental carpets and formal gardens. It was on the hotel's veranda that Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile, and the 1978 movie version filmed several scenes at the Cataract. For the true movie-buff traveler, however, the real romance of British Egypt -- the true piece de resistance of the trip -- is back in Cairo, where one block west of the Windsor Hotel lies what may be the best-preserved `30s-era theater district in the world. One can walk for miles, passing one once-luxurious movie palace after another, all still functioning as single-screens (video and multiplexing have made little headway here), with movie-romantic names like the Strand, the Miami, the Radio, the Rivoli, the Pigalle and the Diana. On the Shari' Tal'at Harb, right across from a McDonald's, I stumbled upon my favorite: the Metro, an art-deco masterpiece that, in British days, was the Middle Eastern showcase for MGM films. Its single feature (Fled) was being advertised by a dozen color lobby cards and the kind of oversized posters that have been extinct in America since the `50s. A uniformed usher used a flashlight to show me to a seat in an auditorium as vast and ornate as a cathedral. Before the film, they showed -- so help me! -- a newsreel. Without trying to be, this magnificent place is an uncanny museum of the moviegoing experience -- and reason enough to justify a movie fan's pilgrimage to the lost Egypt of The English Patient.

Copyright 1997
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