Tribunes

"In recent years the star, suffering from Alzheimer's, revealed he was lonely."--Sara Malm

Policy analysts should respect foreign film releases as predicates, and The Horsemen is one of those which might have served as a bolt pistol extension to the brain of the 43rd president, not that our 44th is on much more hallowed ground.

One can understand Omar's vast plateau of superstardom as not contradictory to his loneliness. Who might have ameliorated that loneliness? Would primarily Caucasian westerners have braved the latter day Nubian people in their sciatic dissipation to comfort him? One of his earlier roles, little discussed, perhaps because the film was badly made, not willing to address its own implications, was as the Spanish priest in Behold A Pale Horse, about the residue of Franco's victory. Everything is over by this time-- the time of the film-- though Vietnam was still brewing in the kettle while this black and white docu-drama was assembled, and Omar's character escapes with his life. Peck's Republican partisan doesn't kill him, and the fascist forces are reluctant to antagonize the Catholic Church, giving Sharif a certain ambidextrous fluidity.

Someone in Bush'es cabinet, and why not Dr. Rice, should have consulted a humanist after the shock of 9/11 and played The Horsemen for The Decider. The .02 percent of his literate hemisphere might have listened to Omar's role as the obstinate rider. You do not invade Afghanistan if you pay attention to the coda herein, whether Russian or American. Tight lipped. 

No obituary post the evening his death made the wire. He was already an acculturated mummy entombed, despite his last major role. Unlike Bacall, Sharif was finished as a bankable name after thrillers like Juggernaut came and went. It is the thickened beat in your arteries, the Arabic everyman who never got to be himself until he was far past the age where it might have mattered.