|
Between "diplomatic graces" and "aggressive complications" lies the British Empire according to Hollywood, where Tennyson is just another name for Kipling. The Lancer Captain (Errol Flynn) earns the gratitude of the Middle Eastern Emir (C. Henry Gordon) but can't secure the love of his bride (Olivia de Havilland), who prefers his brother (Patrick Knowles). Shadows of shimmying odalisques in the palace become waltzing couples at the Governor's ball, where the warlord's metaphor of a resistant nation as a fickle lady finds no favor with the General (Henry Stephenson). "The only great government I'm acquainted with is singularly masculine." (Spring Byington's prattling high-society gossip supplies the tale's solitary other feminine presence.) Orders to maintain peace are "pretty difficult to follow when they're firing on us," from a garrison in Raj India to "the Valley of Death" in Balaklava is a vengeful straight line on the 1850s colonial map. Ford's Fort Apache minus Ford's ambivalence, that's Michael Curtiz's Victorian swashbuckler. (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and The Four Feathers are contemporaries, The Alamo the main descendant.) Marching figures in blanched planes suggest a prototype of Jancsó's militaristic geometry, David Niven's doomed crawl in and out of wavering moonlight allows for subtle shifts in lighting. Otherwise, most of the attention is lavished on the massacre (the panning view of corpses in the aftermath comes to rest on Donald Crisp's lifeless hand still clutching a Bible) and on the titular raid, a bravura set-piece in which Max Steiner's bombast is timed to the ejaculatory cannons and thundering hooves. "A magnificent blunder" is the official story, and we shall see what Richardson's version makes of it three decades later. With Nigel Bruce, Robert Barrat, G.P. Huntley Jr., E.E. Clive, and J. Carrol Naish. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |