Just as they are about to get married, with the bride already dressed, there is a knock at the door and it is the police. They have come for Hamouda Abdel, the hero of this film, who has been slandered in order to ruin his life, not because he is marrying Nousa, but because he is planning to set up a union to defend himself and his fellow dockworkers at the port. He has to respond to the summons, and the naive good-natured man tells Sheikh Saadoun (one of the guests), ‘Don’t move from where you are, I’ll be right back, it won’t take long.’ Oh Hamouda, it is you who will not be able to move from the perverse side where justice will place you in a corridor a couple of metres wide.

The interrogation is a charade—first Jafar Husein, the mechanic and union leader imposed by Master Abbas, swearing that Hamouda brought him the Rolexes to try to sell them to him, then Zainhum Muhhamad, including Haji, the dancer who accused him of harassing her and giving her a hard time, Aziz Abu Warda and Abu Saud, the big man from Raglinda, and finally.

Three years for the innocent man, even though he was defended by Khalil Ali bin Butah. The plot is painful but predictable according to the moral values of that era, when someone as esteemed by many workers as Hamouid could not be violent or take revenge, and the character has an artificial Christian personality of turning the other cheek to his enemies’ mistreatment.

That is why, when he is released, they harass him again with humiliations at the port and elsewhere. Khalil asks him to be patient, and Hamouda replies, ‘If you had slept on the ground in the cold winter, if I had been killed like a criminal when I was innocent…’ Indeed, there is another brawl in the bar where the mendacious Haji dances, and Hamouda defends himself by dodging two men who wanted to stab him, both of whom end up killing each other. And once again, a sham court is held in the bar itself, without the presence of union leader Jafar.

Hamouda is released and the master Abba and his lackey begin to reproach each other: there is no other option but to eliminate him and let the sea take him away, says Abbas, and don’t forget who made you the union leader, he warns Jafar. In any case, the hero will become flesh and blood from the middle of the film onwards.

We see Hamouda standing up among his comrades and haranguing them to fight for their rights. He even has time to corner Jaafar in the cafeteria ‘to show who the real thief is’ and add why Ali Tooth and Spear should fear going to prison if they give the cynical president or union leader bribed by Abbas his just deserts.

But the touch that makes this perfectly acted melodrama worthwhile is precisely the opposite of what I said a moment ago: that the ending is not predictable in the sense that the villain is indeed indeed is Master Abbas, but the perpetrator of the incidents was someone apparently so loving and close that few would have imagined that Khalil was so envious of Hamouda, not only because he was in love with the same woman, Nousa, but also ‘because he was always second,’ he said, and never the soul of everyone like Hamouda, as he jealously admitted at the end, after being unmasked by the child who witnessed the moment when he stabbed Abbas because the teacher demanded that he return the money stolen from the safe.