This essay is an attempt to read popular melodrama as a reflection of changing societal appreciations of sentimentality, romance, family relations, and, ultimately, political power during the second decade of Nasserist rule in Egypt. The essay focuses on two film classics that bookend the 1960s—“family melodramas” starring singer ءAbd al-Halim Hafiz, the pop icon intimately associated with the Nasserist project. Each film turns upon a single dramatic act of parental discipline, a slap delivered by an outraged father across the cheek of a rebellious son. Released in 1962, still a time of heady optimism, al-Khataya raises troubling questions about paternity and social status yet resolves them in classic genre style. Abi fawq al-shagara, released in 1969, in the aftermath of the June 1967 “naksa” (setback), reflects a growing generation gap and suggests—if it does not quite deliver—a countercultural reading of patriarchal authority, as well as sexual and political liberation.