MovieChat Forums > The Jewel of the Nile (1985) Discussion > wow, NONE of the tribesmen actors were o...

wow, NONE of the tribesmen actors were of arabic descent

posted 10 years ago by frantz_sl
1 reply | jump to latest

this is always disheartening to me in movies :(
they were all white guys putting on middle eastern accents, including Avner Eisenberg as Al-Julhara! like the "Indian" guy in Short Circuit, like the "Jamaicans" in Cool Runnings...wait, i'm getting sidetracked.

point is --- the actors playing the tribesmen:
Arak (Samuel Ross Williams)
Barak (Howard Jay Patterson)
Karak (Randall Edwin Nelson)
Sarak (Timothy Daniel Furst)
and Tarak (Paul David Magid)
are apparently not in the least bit ethnically relative to their roles. maybe i'm the only person that values authenticity, or maybe fox couldn't find any moroccans that could act, but the citizens should get a look for those portrayals if you are gonna be filming on location (which is what makes 'City Of God' so genuine), but whatever, many 80's movies seemed to always glorify "American Exceptionalism" by s*hitting on/parodying the native indigenous people(s) they went to the lands of. just like how arabs would be s*hitting on the u.s. if they came here and painted their faces pale to emulate americans. it wasn't quite blackface, but it felt like a sham when i followed up on my curiosity about 'jewel'.

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don't be ridiculous, jack would never die without telling me ~ jewel of the nile

[–] Teach417 10 years ago

Actors playing characters of different ethnicity has always been a common practice in movies. Jewish actors play Italians, Italian actors play Jews, Irish actors play WASPs, WASPs play Irish, etc. British actors often play Americans. This isn't that big a deal. At least the days of white actors wearing make up to play black, Asian, and Native American characters is by and large over, although Johnny Depp did play Tonto in the latest remake of The Lone Ranger. (Yet another reason not to see it.) In this case, the characters you're discussing were played broadly for comedy, which makes the casting rather irrelevant. The real question is, did they make the parts work? For the most part, I thought they did. One more point: Arabs are actually "white," so having white actors of different ethnicities play them isn't any more of a stretch than the examples I provided above.

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