Cameras Have Their Place in Colorful Marrakech

If it hadn’t been for Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart, as well as Doris Day, we could have avoided that traumatic encounter with the giant cobra in Djemaa el Fna Square.

We had already told our guide, Abdul Kadar (“Just remember: Guide No. 225, Marrakech”) that we were in a hurry and wanted only to see certain shops in the labyrinthine open-air marketplace.

He scurried across the huge square ahead of us, fending off the vendors and would-be guides, when suddenly we both stopped and turned delightedly to each other.

“This is the place where the mysterious man came up to Stewart to tell him something and fell dead at his feet.”

“Murdered! Day sang, ‘Que Sera Sera.’ ”

“Not here--that was later in the picture, Hitchcock’s ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much.’ ”

“Right!”

It was while we were remembering the famous opening scene of the film that a grinning snake charmer came running toward us and began to drape an unpleasant-looking cobra around Harry’s neck.

For a moment, just like Stewart and Day and their mysterious dead man, we became a part of the famous sideshow of Djemaa el Fna.

Kadar to the Rescue

Fortunately, the faithful Kadar was back to rescue us from the snake charmer before we were both wearing boas, and we set out again among the acrobats, storytellers, orange vendors and water sellers posing for photographs in their bright red-and-green costumes.

Later in the afternoon and early evening, Kadar said, the square would have trained monkeys, fire-eaters and sword-swallowers.

We passed through an archway into a smaller square that narrowed at one end and was lined with crumbling two-story pink buildings, most of them shops with awnings where old men in tipped-up, two-wheeled carts drowsed in the heat of the day.

It all looked very familiar and unusually calm. What was missing was the havoc being racked by Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty and assorted CIA and KGB agents on a chase through the narrow lanes of the medina (native quarter) in the 1987 film, “Ishtar,” which was shot here and in the Sahara south of here.

Our progress behind the energetic Kadar was almost as frenetic as the actors’. Kadar led us into an antique jewelry shop where the clerks were lying on the floor, napping in the dark.

When Abdul switched on the lights, the shopkeeper and his clerks leaped to their feet, rubbed their eyes and started pulling rings and necklaces from everywhere.

The narrow lanes of the marketplace were lit by dazzling displays of brass and copper, while skeins of wool, dyed intense red, yellow and orange, dried on lines above the street.

In one place, men were making turned newels and spindles by hand, holding and turning the wood with their bare feet while they carved and sanded.

We pressed through a blur of Moroccan leather bags and slippers with curved or pointed toes, bright painted plates, chunky jewelry of coral and silver, spices, dates, olives, fake amber beads, caftans of cotton and richly beaded silk, as if the desert caravans had come this far from Timbuctu and stopped in the cooling shade.

The reality of the medina was infinitely brighter and more complicated than it appears in film.

Shot in Hollywood

We already knew when we planned this Morocco trip that two of the most famous pictures, “Casablanca” and “Road to Morocco,” had been shot in Hollywood, not North Africa.

And certainly there was nothing in the modern city of Casablanca that looked familiar except for some black-and-white blown-up stills from the film posted in the Hyatt Regency bar.

According to Richard Alleman’s “The Movie Lover’s Guide to Hollywood,” all of “Casablanca,” even the legendary foggy airport scene at the end, was filmed at a Warner Brothers sound stage in Burbank, except for a long shot (no one can agree for certain) of the plane taking off from Burbank Airport.

The Moroccan National Tourist Office lists American films made there since 1981--”Spies Like Us,” “Jewel of the Nile,” “The Return of the Black Stallion,” Alan Pakula’s “All Over,” John and Bo Derek’s “Bolero” and “an untitled comedy” from Columbia, presumably “Ishtar.”

John Huston and company (Sean Connery, Christopher Plummer and Michael Caine) set up residence in the luxurious Hotel La Mamounia for months during the filming of “The Man Who Would Be King,” while the nearby Atlas Mountains stood in for the Hindu Kush (with snowy help from the Grande Montee at Chamonix).

In “Jewel of the Nile” versatile Morocco was turned into Egypt, and in a Chevy Chase comedy called “Spies Like Us” it doubled as Pakistan.

The draw here for film people, of course, is the photogenic city of Marrakech, with its rosy ochre walls, silvery-gray olive groves, tumbles of fluorescent magenta bougainvillea and feathery purple plumes of jacaranda, plus a clear dazzling light that seems to have been designed expressly for color film and an exotic cast of unself-conscious (and inexpensive) extras.

Hollywood people on location appreciate their comforts, especially in a setting like that at the Mamounia. It’s hardly surprising that Hoffman and Beatty checked in from the Sahara dunes for periodic holidays from the lengthy shoot for “Ishtar.”

We hope they dined in the hotel’s exotic Moroccan restaurant at one of those low tables heaped with cushions, where a silver pitcher of rose water is poured over your hands before you dig into platters heaped with couscous, tajin and b’stilla.

Of course everyone who was anyone, from Sir Winston Churchill to former President Dwight Eisenhower to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has stayed in this rose-colored palace surrounded by what were once a sultan’s gardens.

The Mamounia opened as a hotel in 1923 and was extensively (and expensively) refurbished in 1986 in Arabian Nights Art Deco style. It has intricate handmade tiles, acres of marble and handwoven carpets, splashing fountains, tiled patios only slightly smaller than the mosque at Cordoba, lavish suites swagged in peaches-and-cream Fortuny-pleated silk, Jacuzzi and sprays of silver apple blossoms.

By the pool the glamorous topless sunbathers, most of them French, are discreetly screened from day visitors by a tumult of snapdragons, roses and zinnias.

Churchill, who stayed at the Mamounia often, loved to paint in its gardens; his suite, complete with a regal bed and life-size porcelain bulldog, can be booked for around $1,000 U.S. a night.

Across from the Mamounia looms the magnificent minaret of the 12th-Century Koutoubia Mosque. A white flag flutters from the top when it is time for prayers so that people far in the fields can see it. On the highway, cars pull over and occupants get out, unfold their rugs and pray toward Mecca.

One day we stopped in the town of Ben Guerir, between Casablanca and Marrakech, to visit a marketplace similar to the camel square where Beatty bought his blind camel in “Ishtar.”

It was crowded, dusty, full of veiled women and men in coarse brown-hooded djellabas, some eyeing us curiously, others ignoring us completely.

One man sat in the shade of a tent selling ropes of dates, another held up fragrant bunches of fresh mint for tea. Huge portable radios, a rainbow of plastic shoes, spare parts for vehicles, live rabbits and chickens, goats and sheep and even camels added to the barrage of colors and smells.

A few hours later we passed back by the site, but the tents and hawkers of the bustling country bazaar had disappeared into the dust like a “Road to Morocco” mirage.

There was nothing left but a bare field with a couple of scruffy looking camels tethered to a post, probably waiting for the next film crew to come along.

-- -- --

Hotel La Mamounia, Avenue Bab Djedid, is a member of Leading Hotels of the World. Prices for its 179 rooms and 49 suites start at around $215 U.S. double. For more information, call toll-free (800) 223-6800.

The Moroccan National Tourist Office, 421 N. Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills 90210, (213) 271-8939, can provide maps and brochures for the Marrakech area.

The average guide fee for half a day is 50 dirhams (under $10 U.S.). While you may dress as you wish on hotel grounds, when walking around town men and women should cover their legs and upper arms.

French is the most commonly spoken language after Arabic; English is spoken at hotels and by guides.