setsuled

In a world of perpetual violence and upheaval extraordinary people aren't often heroes. 1968's Dark of the Sun exhibits a kind of exhilarating awareness of this. It's fascinatingly coupled with an Errol Flynn-ish adventurousness but set in a fictionalised version of real 1960s conflict in the Congo. Directed by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff the film has some distractingly dated attitudes about portraying race but at the same time there is some genuinely thoughtful dialogue. Mostly I loved it, though, because it felt like artists just trying to tell a great story without restraint.



The movie also has a Nazi with a chainsaw. That should tell you a lot right there. The film's central protagonist, an American mercenary named Curry (Rod Taylor with Australian accent frequently coming through) actually hires this Nazi, whose name is Henlein (Peter Carsten) because he needs his military expertise. That's how cutthroat our "hero" is--even after he sees the guy slaughter children.



Which is not to say they get along. The chainsaw fight ends with Curry holding Henlein's head under the train and he tells the train conductor to move it forward a bit because, he says--this is my favourite line--"I gotta fix something."



Curry makes it clear he's in it because he was promised diamonds, not for anyone's political or ideological cause. Usually when you get a guy saying something like that in a movie it ends up being a kind of pose. But in this movie, because Curry delays things to ensure he receives the diamonds, a whole train car of civilians end up getting tortured and killed. Among them is Andre Morell, quickly giving a devastating performance as his character is forced to make a terrible decision.



The diamonds are part of Curry's payment but one could argue he's also doing it because the Congolese president, who hired him, needs the diamonds. Curry's best friend and second in command, Ruffo (Jim Brown), is motivated by patriotism. A former guerilla fighter, he's fighting, and trying to secure the diamonds, because he longs for a day when his country will be independent.



Left wing common wisdom in the west from 1970 to 2010 or so would say that Ruffo is a racial stereotype, the ubiquitous "magic Negro" of socially conscious 1960s films. But as token, morally pure minority characters are becoming increasingly in vogue with the modern left, Ruffo now might be downright politically correct. There is one interesting dialogue scene, though, where Ruffo's character introduces a more thought-provoking commentary.



After witnessing the Nazi murder children, Curry asks Ruffo why he doesn't hate white people. Ruffo's reply is a story about growing up and knowing people whose violent behaviour is an expression of personalities shaped by systemic abuse, so he feels he actually understands the Nazi's brutality, as much as he is opposed to it. It's kind of an eloquent way for Ruffo to say that he doesn't hate white people because he's not a racist.



In light of the film's surprising level of violence and willingness to show good people getting slaughtered and abused the camaraderie between the men is sweet--even when it's mostly in the form of ball-breaking. Also, and this may be an artefact of the period in which the film was made, Curry and Ruffo seem to like being physically close to each other--they're almost cuddly.



Later in the film, the female lead, Claire (Yvette Mimieux), and Ruffo commiserate over how difficult it is to be around the often insensitive Curry. Ruffo explains how Curry is one of those people who won't share a part of himself with you and that this can hurt. It almost sounds like both Ruffo and Claire are in love with him. All this affection for the white man, whose personality certainly doesn't make him seem like he'd be that obviously loveable, kind of puts the movie in the "white saviour" category of story, though maybe not since Curry's success rate at saving people suffers from his marked lack of conscious motivation. Yet I found myself liking him right along with Ruffo and Claire. Maybe it's the fact that, however horrific things get, and however superficially cynical he might be, there's an irrepressible lust for life, affability, and basic good nature about Curry, largely conveyed by Taylor's performance.



His self-interested motives are offset but the loyalty he reluctantly can't help exhibiting for his friends and the disgust he exhibits at the exploitative colonial forces. It's as though he acts out of self-interest as though he thinks it's the only thing he can trust. It adds up to a surprisingly fascinating character in this rough and tumble film.

A small group of soldiers from different nations and cultures work together to survive against Nazis in 1943's Sahara. Some of the soldiers have family or lovers back home but they're led by Humphrey Bogart who says only about himself that he has no-one back home and he's therefore less important. Of course that makes him a symbol of the whole team in this wonderful action adventure war film.



An American tank lost in the desert comes upon a small group of British troops as well as a French corporal (Louis Mercier) and takes them aboard. Since it's an American tank, the ranking British officer, Captain Halliday (Richard Nugent), cedes authority to Bogart's character, Master Sergeant Joe Gunn. The Frenchman agrees to come along because, he says to Joe, "I like your cigarettes."



In addition to Bogart, the film also has noir great Dan Duryea as the tank's operator who in this film presents the casual, down to earth guy from Brooklyn as a counterpoint to the scale of the war and the situation. The tank crew is also eventually joined by a Sudanese officer, Sergeant Major Tambul (Rex Ingram) and his Italian prisoner, Giuseppe (J. Carrol Naish).



The film was directed by the Hungarian born Zoltan Korda who, like his brother Alexander Korda, had a career in England until the second World War compelled them to relocate to Hollywood. Zoltan had an executive producer credit on his brother's great 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad. Also in common with The Thief of Bagdad, Sahara has a score by Miklos Rozsa and features Rex Ingram, who played the genie in the fantasy film.



The American actor is never convincingly Sudanese but he gives just as assured a performance as he does in Thief of Bagdad but with the casual air of a human soldier rather than a mischievous godlike being. In a nice scene with one of the American soldiers, Waco (Bruce Bennett), the two express appreciation at the opportunity to learn more about the world in finding each other far more recognisably human than their seemingly disparate cultures might have led them to suppose. This is presented in opposition to the perspective of a Nazi pilot captured after an effective action scene where his plane crashes after strafing the tank.



He, of course, is disgusted by being in proximity to a black man, something Joe mocks him for. Yet Joe's capacity for empathy extends even to the captives as the Italian soldier, despite being concerned for his wife and child back home, finds his sympathies going decidedly over to the Allied side due to the treatment he receives from Joe.



The film's climax pulls no punches, being effectively directed action and stirring storytelling, helped immensely by the lack of sound stages. Shot entirely in California's Imperial County, the heat of the desert is constantly in evidence from the beams of light on sweat and threadbare uniforms in Rudolph Mate's beautiful cinematography.

Coming to the end of the semester, I find myself indulging in reading more things that haven't been assigned for a class lately. I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring again, getting quickly and very happily drawn in. I've probably watched the Peter Jackson movies about twenty times since the last time I read the books but I'm surprised to find I generally don't picture the characters as the actors who played them in the movies. It's not to say I don't like Elijah Wood or Sean Astin, but Frodo and Sam are so different in the book. Frodo's older, of course, and he comes off that way in the way he deals with people. The man I picture is something like Ray Milland. I understand the reasons for the changes Jackson made to pick up the story's pace and give an audience hungrier for young faces someone to be attracted to. But the feeling of a man with years of life experience having contemplative, intellectual conversations with Gandalf by the fire is a nice vibe. I suppose I could say I wish the movie were more like that, but then I do have the book, after all.

The Hobbits as a people are a bit more three dimensional in the book, too. I was surprised by this level of contempt Frodo expresses for his people:

"I should like to save the Shire if I could--though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them."

Earlier, Tolkien mentions how the Hobbits have grown complacent due to the Shire's isolation from war. Like so many things these days, I look at this through the prism of Trump. Here's the virtue of Tolkien's dislike for allegory--one can see how Tolkien was likely inspired by the state of England before World War I, but because he doesn't explicitly tie it to that, it invites the reader to look for commonalities in human nature to-day or in any other time. If I think of the people who didn't vote in the last election or were mentally complacent enough to think they could vote for Trump in the name of trolling reality, I can apply Frodo's frustration, which leads me to attempt finding also his love for his people. That's a lot harder.

Considering what happens with "The Scouring of the Shire" in the end, and, from what I remember, the Hobbits' complicity in that, it works as an inversion of the connexion dependence on assembly line, steel working, and coal mining blue collar industry Trump's campaign hearkened back to, and which also seemed to have been a big motivating factor for Brexit. Tolkien was writing about the waste and ugliness of it at the beginning, and here that ugly thing exerts its influence even as it grows undeniably obsolete.

I've always liked how the journey in The Lord of the Rings seems to be from a sort of Victorian world in the Shire into a more mediaeval world to the east. If one does apply Tolkien's experience in World War I, it's an interesting contrast to the progression of poetry from idealised odes to valour in war by Alfred Lord Tennyson to the grim reality of the trenches composed by Wilfred Owen. Tolkien seems to stand in direct opposition to that trend. It's oddly heartening that he could see the incredible horrors of the World War I battlefield and somehow digest it and produce years later a work about beauty and magic.