12. American Ambassador in Technicolor and Cinemascope Hollywood
and Revolution on the Nile In May 1957 representatives of two of
the largest American multinationals in Egypt called at the U.S.
embassy. The visitors were by then a familiar sight at the tree-
lined grounds of Qasr al-Dubbara, because companies such as
Metro-Goldywn-Mayer (MGM) and Twentieth Century-Fox, among other
U.S. firms, were being saddled with new costs to doing business
in their largest Middle East market. The Egyptian economy had
been on war footing since the Israeli attack on Port Said in
November 1956. President Gamal Abdel Nasser had unleashed a
punitive wave of expropriations against the French and British
nationals who were the backbone of the foreign private sector.
Controls on foreign-exchange remittances were tighter than at
any time since World War II. Meanwhile, the populist policy
currents associated with the March 1954 crisis and the Bandung
conference in April 1955 grew stronger in the wake of the war.
In the case of motio