“Al-Ousfour is a sophisticated, complex, allusive film, set in 1967 during the Six-Day War, completed in 1973, but held up for over a year through official disapproval. The film castigates official corruption and lethargy by paralleling the search for a bandit in upper Egypt (who has been stealing machinery from a new factory and selling it in Cairo, with the connivance of high officials) with Egypt's military defeat. The film moves at bewildering speed, introducing a crusading journalist, a Sheikh bent on revenge, a small boy who is determined to make a pilgrimage to El Hossein mosque in Cairo, a young policeman, his mother who is a popular singer, and a score of minor chracters, almost simultaneously, making this film a kind of Egyptian Nashville - a mosaic portrait of tradition and progress, idealism and corruption in conflict. Particularly effective are the references to the war in letters from the front, brief flashes of newsreel, and the celebrated incident when Nasser went on television to offer his resignation and people spontaneously took to the street to persuade him to stay.”