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DVD Khartoum
Set in the expanse of the Sudan desert in the midst of holy war, Khartoum (1966) plays like an attempt to work the Lawrence of Arabia magic on the (mostly) true story of eccentric British general Charles "Chinese" Gordon in 1884 North Africa. The magnificent opening desert battle suggests David Lean's epic sweep, at least until the film settles into a more modest story of political games, military standoffs, and a battle of wits and wiles between two fierce leaders. Charlton Heston plays the wily Christian soldier as cocky, unconventional maverick, and Laurence Olivier (behind heavy make-up and a thick black beard) is almost as good as his cagey nemesis the Mahdi, the Islamic holy warrior on a mission of annihilation. More talk than spectacle, the film falls short of Lawrence but is nonetheless a compelling story of colonial politics, cynical maneuvering, and the unconventional heroics of another colorful British maverick abroad. --Sean Axmaker
The movie was suggested by Lytton Strachey's fine essay on Gordon that appeared in his classic EMINENT VICTORIANS, and indeed the story was brewing for a long time before a combination of international interests unleashed KHARTOUM in the English speaking world.
It was a time when Olivier, newly remarried and the surprised father of a young family, was desperate for money and wouild snatch up any job, so the film world was brightened, if that's the word, by Olivier appearing in any old movie if they gave him enough lucre. It's as if he was saying, I did the repertory thing for thirty years, it's time for a payoff. Thus we got extra helpings of ham in BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING, THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN, THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN, really any old blockbuster. It was a rare 60s movie that didn't have room for Olivier in it. He was never good in any of them, but in KHARTOUM his performance as the Mahdi causes enough offense nearly to justify, years later, the recent subway bombings in London. With russet makeup smeared over his face (slightly different shade than the blackface he used in OTHELLO), Olivier bites every piece of scenery known to man, playing rhe Mahdi as a mad tyrannical prophet of Islam, like a Westerners fantasy of Al Qaeda, hollering for white men's blood and letting his strange fantasies about Allah cloud his limited intellect.
Next to him, Gordon (Charlton Heston) almost looks like a sane man.
Maybe the filmmakers were making some sort of antiwar statement. At this distance it's hard to say. What we see is pretty frightening, for there's over the top and then there's OVER THE TOP AS THE MAHDI.
Classic inspirational story, classic film, but do read the history too
This is a wonderful story and a riveting film, as the other reviewers have noted. This DVD version is crisp and clear, well done. The final narrator comment is on the mark -- A world in which there is no room for Gordons is doomed to turn to sand.
If you would like to learn in exquisite detail what the Mahdi was truly like, his background, the games he played interposing himself between God and man, his private vices versus public face of holiness, the extent of his crimes against duped humanity, how he died [the narrator fo the film says we will never know, but Rudolph Slatin reported the cause of death more than 100 years ago], then by all means read "Fire and Sword in the Sudan," written by Colonel Sir Rudolph Slatin Pasha, an Austrian officer held captive inside the inner circles of both the Mahdi and his successor the Khalifa Abdullahi for twelve agonizing years. General Gordon's severed head was brought to Slatin in prison before it was taken as prize to the Mahdi. Slatin, an expert linguist and accomplished field commander, was appointed by Gordon as governor of Darfur and led troops in the field against rebels for one year after being cut off from all contact with his government. He played convert to Islam as a strategy to inspire his troops and to stay alive as a personal slave to the Mahdi and the Khalifa, biding his time until he could make good his escape. Slatin's story is at least as inspiring as the life of the legendary General Gordon. Several anecdotes Slatin reveals about Gordon give a special insight into the kind nature of the great but human general.
My only complaint about "Khartoum" -- The movie was grossly slanderous toward General Hicks, who commanded the troops massacred in the opening scene. Rediculed in the movie as a "fool," the facts show him a great hero. When questioned by one of his friends before the fatal expedition in which Hicks died and his 10,000 troops were wiped out, Hicks said, "I am as Jesus Christ in the midst of the Jews." He knew he was about to become a martyr. He and his handfull of officers all agreed their chances were bleak. Still he marched off, thinking his honor might be impugned if he refused to advance. When the Mahdi made Hicks an offer to accept his surrender with terms and passed out hundreds of handbills along the route of march documenting that offer, Hicks refused. He died to protect his honor just as Gordon later died. An officer sent to his death for nothing by ignorant politicians. Sound familiar?
Sir Winston Churchill's book "The River War" is a brilliantly told first-hand account of the retaking of the Sudan. Churchill's written description of the charge of the 21st Lancers is as vivid as any war scene ever filmed.
General Gordon's Khartoum Journals are also available in several different printings.
"Khartoum" will open an entirely new world to those interested enough to study the history. Those were days when 3,000 men could be killed in one twenty minute clash by spear and sword, rifle and pistol. The scenes of bravery on a large scale are like nothing we could imagine today. Many of us tend to panic at the scale of human life taken in today's war on terror. We forget the huge scale of the battles our ancestors fought before the dawn of the age of modern weaponry and terrorist attacks. We underestimate the ability of a strong society to absorb incredible blows in battle, and risk joining the ranks of the terrorized and self-defeated. Abraham Lincoln once wrote that if this great nation is to ever die, it will be by suicide, not at the hands of foreign armies incapable of stealing a single drink from the Ohio river.
This movie is D.U.L.L, dull......
I love Charleton Heston but this movie just crawls with very little action or interest. I found myself nodding off to sleep several times. Charleton also goes in and out of his English accent constantly, but he still does a good job with the part. The movie is so boring though I have to wonder why it was ever made in the first place.
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The up-and-down career of director John Milius had no finer moment than The Wind and the Lion, a dandy adventure tale. It's based on fact: An American (played by Candice Bergen) and her two children were kidnapped in 1904 Morocco by a Berber tribe, an international incident settled by President Theodore Roosevelt's "big stick" military muscle. The film's sweep and swagger are unabashedly old-fashioned, even as Milius occasionally pokes fun at the grand characters. Some of the peripheral material is sloppy, but as long as Milius keeps his sights locked on the two powerful protagonists, he's dead-on: Brian Keith makes a gutsy Roosevelt, and Sean Connery is in splendid form (with Scots accent in place--got a problem with that?) as the dashing Berber chieftain. Perhaps overshadowed... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Sean Connery - Candice Bergen Director(s): John Milius DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Tony Richardson's film about the colossal Crimean War blunder combines his sociopolitical anger with the splendors of a David Lean epic for a fascinating artifact of that boiling-point protest year, 1968. Like America's contemporaneous Vietnam War, Britain's mid-19th-century conflict with Russia in defense of Turkey made less sense the deeper they sank into it; John Gielgud's Lord Raglan keeps referring absentmindedly to the enemy as "the French"! Aside from a peripheral romantic triangle involving apparently the single sane officer in Her Majesty's army (David Hemmings), his friend (Mark Burns), and the friend's wife (Vanessa Redgrave--Mrs. Richardson), the film is really about the profoundly jingoistic Victorian imagination; transitional animation sequences by Richard Williams seem to... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Tony Richardson DVD Release Date: Released the 07 May 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A grandly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure based on the Rudyard Kipling short story, The Man Who Would Be King is the kind of rousing epic about which people said, even in 1975, "Wow! They don't make 'em like that anymore!" When director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen) first started trying to make the film, with Gable and Bogart, the project was derailed by the latter's death. It was a few decades before Huston was able to finally realize his dream movie--and with an unimprovable cast. Sean Connery and Michael Caine are, respectively, Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan, a pair of lovably roguish British soldiers who set out to make their fortunes by conning the priests of remote Kafiristan into making... More Info about this DVD Director(s): John Huston DVD Release Date: Released the 19 November 1997 Usually ships in 24 hours
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