Film review - Rock the Casbah
If you are a child of the 80s you will recognize Rock the Casbah as a popular song by the English punk rock band, The Clash. And that’s where the similarity ends... or so it seems. The song, Rock the Casbah , gives an account of a ban on rock music, by a king who is being defied by his kingdom’s population. The king orders jet fighters to bomb anyone who violates the ban, but the pilots ignore the orders. The Clash based their 1982 top 40 songs on the ban of Western music in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The film Rock the Casbah is not about Iran, nor is it about its Islamic Revolution, but it does have a so-to-speak king, and his “population” does indeed revolt against his rules. In this case, the “king,” Moulay Hassan ( Omar Sharif ) is a respected entrepreneur and the patriarch of an affluent Moroccan family. Hassan unexpectedly suffers a cardiac arrest and dies, leaving behind his grieving wife Aicha ( Hiam Abbass ), three daughters and a brother to tend to h...