User Reviews

The Kalem Company, in an editorial foreword to this picture, announces that it is to be the first of a series and that the whole series aims to give truthful and instructive pictures of life in Egypt and the East. This exciting and well-written picture, under the cloak of a love story, in which a Sheik of the Desert and the daughter of a Coptic priest (Christian) figures gives us a very welcome glimpse of life at the edge of the desert. The Copts figured largely in the first three centuries of the Christian Era. They are a distinct people and furnished many martyrs and leaders to the early Church and are still Christian in spite of Islam. The Dervishes hate them accordingly. The Dervish hero of this picture (played by Jack Clark) falls in love with the Coptic maid (played by Gene Gauntier) as she comes to the well with its camel-driven wheel to lift up the water. It is a typical Egyptian scene. The courtship of the Sheik and the refusal by the girl's father, because the man is not a Christian, occupy the next few scenes. Some of these scenes were photographed in the desert and picture real Arabs and their roving life; some were photographed in a Coptic village. The next scenes show the raid on the village by the fanatic tribesmen and the repentance of the Sheik and his rescue of the girl. The final scenes show him taking the Christian oath in the old ruin at Luxor and the departure with the girl toward a happier land, French Algeria perhaps. The more a spectator knows the more he will get out of such a picture as this; but it is no "high-brow" production. The gallery also will like it. It is very well photographed. It is a picture for people who want substantial pictures. - The Moving Picture World, June 8, 1912