The Boy Kumasenu

1952, Gold Coast, directed by Sean Graham

The Boy Kumasenu was the first feature-length project produced by the Gold Coast Film Unit, led by Sean Graham. In comparison with other colonial film units -- the Bantu Educational Kinematograph Experiment (BEKE) or the Central African Film Unit (CAFU), for instance -- Graham's outfit was pretty broad-minded, rejecting the idea that Africans needed a special film language, that is, a film language that the colonial masters thought would be simple enough for "primitive Africans" to understand. Where other film units, over time, adopted an extremely static, slow style, Graham's film is full of traveling shots, quick cuts, atmospheric night-time scenes, and the occasional interesting angle; it's much more technically sophisticated and, by the standards of these things, entertaining than other colonial films. There's also a clever finale shot with two kinds of boats used to make a metaphorical point about change.

All that said, Graham's liberalism -- he strongly advocated locally interesting stories and local involvement in front of and behind the camera, complaining about the contributions of visitors like Montgomery Tully and Louis MacNeice -- had its limits: while there is synchronized sound in much of the film, the overriding voice is that of the British narrator (Russell Napier, though the actor was Australian-born). The narrator not only speaks about the African characters we see but in several scenes he actually speaks for them, as though he's saying their lines.

Note: This is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. The Boy Kumasenu was released in the Gold Coast in July 1952 and there was considerable interest in the film, at least in the local press, which highlighted numerous screenings and printed several reaction pieces. The film is available online at Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire; that site is an extremely valuable source for films about the Empire.

Something of Value

US, 1957, directed by Richard Brooks

There are numerous similarities between Something of Value and Simba, with both films delving into black-white relations in Kenya during the Mau Mau period. Unlike Dirk Bogarde in the earlier film, Rock Hudson did actually spend some time in Kenya so the film has a greater sense of authenticity in many of the outdoor scenes, and doesn't have to make quite the same use of back projection and long-shot trickery.

Although the tone is still very paternalistic, with the white characters attempting to "solve" the problems of Africa -- many of which they created -- the film also has a touch more subtlety in its exploration of race relations even if the conclusion is remarkably similar, down to the suggestion that only future generations will be able to live peacefully. The American film is certainly much blunter on the fact that Mau Mau was much more likely to result in Kikuyu deaths than European deaths, though, even if those European deaths get far more screen time; one sequence is especially terrifying as a bloodthirsty mob methodically destroys everything in a settler farmhouse, closing in gradually on their human prey.

Brooks's film reminded me at times of Ken Loach's films Land and Freedom and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, using devices such as a settler meeting to outline many of the issues for the audience's benefit, with the poles of opinion clearly demarcated. Loach used a courtroom to similar effect in the latter film, and indeed the device of two brothers on separate sides of an issue re-appears in the Loach film, too (near-brothers in the case of Hudson and Sidney Poitier; the two men grew up together).

Note: This is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project, although like Simba this film was banned by the Kenyan censorship board even though large portions of the film were shot in Kenya, including scenes of actual Kikuyu internment camps. Records in the national archives in Ghana suggest that the film was initially passed for release in that country, but that it was subsequently withdrawn and examined a second time, in the middle of 1960, resulting in a ban -- and a hefty loss for the company that had imported the film, since they couldn't get a refund on a film they had been able to screen at least once.

Simba

1955, UK, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst

Amazingly, the British administration in Kenya seemed to be quite happy to allow overseas film crews to traipse through the colony throughout the 1950s "Emergency", so-named after the imposition of a state of emergency in 1952 in response to the Mau Mau insurgency. Stranger still, officials in Nairobi granted filming permits to three films which had Mau Mau, and race relations more generally, as their primary subject matter, only to turn around and ban the films when they were then submitted for censorship in Kenya a couple of years later. Indeed, they ended up banning most films shot on Kenyan soil during the decade, whether or not the subject matter had anything to do with Mau Mau -- and banned dozens of other American, British and Indian films to boot.

Fake Donald Sinden, Dirk Bogarde, Orlando Martins in real Kenya

Dirk Bogarde plays a young colonial who inherits a Kenyan farm after his elder brother is brutally slaughtered by Mau Mau. Unexpectedly thrust into the role of white farmer, Bogarde's character wavers between a distaste for Africans, some of whom killed his brother, and the liberal white condescension of his inamorata, Virginia McKenna. Of course, Rank wasn't about to let its hottest property jet off to Kenya in the middle of a violent insurgency -- leaving aside the safety concerns, they had to keep him hard at work churning out several films a year at Pinewood. Instead, director Brian Desmond Hurst took a small crew to Kenya in early 1954 to shoot location footage, employing an ersatz Bogarde in long shot and then making heavy use of back projection to create the illusion that the star was sweating under the hot sun rather than the studio lights. I'm not sure what the audience made of this in 1955 -- when they showed up at all, since the film wasn't a big hit -- but it looks awfully unconvincing today, especially given that the stand-ins are clearly different heights than the original articles.

The real Sinden/Bogarde/Martins, with back-projection Kenya

Although it tries for a more liberal slant on matters colonial, the film's account of the origins and functioning of Mau Mau is typical imperial propaganda: atavistic tribalism, with little or no acknowledgement of the impact of a huge wave of postwar white settlement and expansion on the Kikuyu in particular. Indeed, for many Kikuyu, Mau Mau had more of the characteristics of a civil conflict than an imperial revolt, with land resources a major bone of contention. In other respects, though, the film is entirely accurate: the Kenyan administration assigned an officer to work with Hurst and his crew and they seem to have had access to all kinds of prison camps and military posts so the film provides a compelling glimpse into the actual logistics of late imperial control in Kenya. Indeed, Hurst and crew may have taken the quest for authenticity rather too far. They got in some major hot water when they returned from their Kenyan jaunt after newspaper reports revealed that several of the Africans featured in a Mau Mau initiation scene were prisoners at the time, and three of the men had apparently been hanged days after their scenes were filmed.

The film has a similar sacrificial attitude to its major African characters -- when not actively malevolent, they remain in the service of white interests, sacrificing themselves for the good of their white masters. Even the film's most complex and sympathetic African character draws the short straw, although in its own way this outcome underlines the fact that the Mau Mau conflict was far more likely to result in African rather than European deaths; 32 settlers died, sometimes in terrible circumstances, but that figure is dwarfed by the thousands of African deaths. Nonetheless, the film dramatizes half a dozen European deaths, tipping the scales very much in favour of interest in the settler population.

Note: This is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project, although in this specific case it should probably be re-titled "Not Watching Movies in Africa" given that Simba was banned by the Kenyan censorship board in 1955. I haven't been able to find any evidence that it played elsewhere in Africa, although given the presence of Nigeria's Orlando Martins in a small role, I wouldn't be surprised if it was released there. Numerous films banned in Kenya were released in Nigeria, and other West African locations, without apparent incident.

Sanders of the River

1935, UK, directed by Zoltan Korda

Of limited cinematic value -- even in the 1930s at least some reviewers noted the problems of marrying studio-set plot material with "authentic" background footage shot on location -- Sanders of the River holds considerable historical/anthropological value, both for the record of certain aspects of African life provided by those location sequences and for the insights into the British colonial (and domestic) mind.

Viewed through a modern lens, it's a terrifically problematic film, with Paul Robeson's Bosambo character an excruciating, obsequious "native" stereotype who breaks into song from time to time. Although it sounds as though Robeson -- who disowned his participation in the film -- was gulled somewhat by the production team, it doesn't help that he's not the subtlest of actors, at least on this occasion. He's more a presence, and sometimes an impressive one, than an actor, and at times you get the sense that he's following Zoltan Korda's direction rather too literally rather than attempting to inhabit a character.

As in his other colonial films, Korda has little interest in giving us actual insight into the territories that came under British rule: the location footage is a mishmash from across the continent, blended together as a composite, undifferentiated "Africa," and the studio actors playing the major African roles are almost invariably non-African. Nonetheless, and presumably inadvertently, Korda gives us a fine insight into the realities of Britain's much-vaunted "indirect rule" system, where the only indirect aspect was the fact that the will of the local colonial officer was on occasion nominally transmitted through indigenous ruling structures. The film also provides a pretty good illustration of how the colonial administration shed all pretence of indirect rule and inserted itself directly in local affairs as soon as things got tough - a theme explored in Moses Ochonu's book Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression, particularly relevant here given the time period.

Note: This is part of my Watching Movies in Africa project. The film was shown in post-independence Ghana in 1956 and 1957 by the government-controlled West African Pictures chain. It had been imported, and presumably screened, earlier in the 1950s, too. While I wonder what exactly audiences of the time made of the film, it was apparently box office gold: the Accra screenings in September 1956 broke local records, raking in G£464 in two nights, a huge sum by local standards when a single cinema might only earn £1,000 in a month.

The image above is from the DVD Beaver review of the Criterion Collection Paul Robeson - Portraits of the Artist. The film is also available to view online at the Internet Archive, although the quality isn't great.

Breaker Morant

1980, Australia, directed by Bruce Beresford

A fascinating, morally complex film, Breaker Morant affords an illuminating glimpse into some of the confusions and contradictions of Empire, centered on a trio of Australian soldiers (one English-born) tried under British military law for their part in events that occurred during the Boer War in South Africa.

In so far as the historical record can be trusted, the provides a fairly accurate account of the actual events that led to the trial, and while the overall tone suggests at least agreement with the notion that Breaker and his colleagues were folk heroes of a kind, their violent actions aren't soft-pedalled. Beresford is more interested, instead, in examining the demands placed on men at war, and the standards of behaviour that they are supposed to uphold.

Unlike Kubrick's Paths of Glory, the men at the centre of Breaker Morant are accused not of cowardice but what might be termed excess of zeal; what unites the films is the way in which military administrations use disciplinary procedures against their own men. There's also, in Breaker particularly, an important class element, with the British hierarchy both profiting from and condemning the more free-wheeling Australian attitude to soldiery (the film takes place against the backdrop of the federation of Australia, although it plays with the timeline somewhat to cast the men as political pawns in a broader game; that's hardly necessary, given that they are already pawns in the hands of the military administration).

The film is drawn from a stage play, and while Beresford "opens up" the play by roaming far from prison and courtroom to dramatise the events at the core of the trial (those scenes are beautifully shot by Donald McAlpine, using South Australia as an effective stand-in for South Africa), he also uses a variety of striking shot choices to avoid a stage-like presentation - close-ups, shots from the side, overhead angles, all of which also contribute to a sense of disorientation in the courtroom which reinforces the sense the justice and logic are being upended. Beresford is also blessed with an extremely strong cast, with two of the mainstays of Australian cinema, Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown, doing some of their best screen work here, abetted by English veteran Edward Woodward as the eponymous "Breaker".

The Charge of the Light Brigade

1936, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

Although Michael Curtiz directed so many films - over a hundred in the Hollywood portion of his career alone - that it's perhaps hard to speak of a 'typical' Curtiz picture, The Charge of the Light Brigade lacks several of the qualities that grace his stronger films, most obviously a careful sense of pace and a consistent element of visual inventiveness.

In this case, those gaps may reflect how quickly the film was rushed into production following the success of Curtiz's previous smash hit with Errol Flynn, Captain Blood: Curtiz and Flynn were back on set, on a very ambitious scale, within three months of that film's opening night. Still, given his career output Curtiz was surely no stranger to working fast, so perhaps he simply wasn't that invested in the material, or perhaps there wasn't much he could do with the rather leaden script he inherited.

There are hints, early on, of his more familiar interests, notably in a strikingly spare Indian palace, where the giant silhouettes echo those of the courtoom scenes in Captain Blood. Such flourishes aren't sustained as the film moves along, however. More problematic is the film's pacing, with the film moving fitfully along, appearing to gather steam only to crash to a halt for yet another scene that brings together Flynn's character with either his brother or his fiancée, often to no narrative purpose (even worse are the repetitive interludes involving Nigel Bruce and his shrewish wife). Everything is, of course, building to the eponymous charge - a spectacular, visceral sequence, albeit one that's uncomfortable to watch if you've even a passing interest in equine welfare - but it's quite a slog to get there.

Even by Hollywood standards, the history here is a travesty, with the charge at Balaclava re-written as both the climax to a story of brotherly rivalry and as a form of misguided vengeance for events modelled on the Indian Mutiny (never mind that the Mutiny took place three years after Balaclava). It's unclear as to why the writers couldn't have concocted a romantic backstory that actually related to the events of the Crimean War, although the entire film is another fine example of the way that Hollywood waved the flag of British Empire throughout the 1930s; with such stalwart support in Los Angeles, it must have been quite the shock when Washington proved much less supportive of Britain's Empire as the Second World War drew to a close.

Despite the complete disregard for factual accuracy, the script manages to capture some echoes of the actual empire, particularly the imperial idea that certain Indian groups - most notably the Bengals - were dissolute and feminine, as opposed to the vigorous, manly British (the British applied similar logic in dealing with indigenous groups from Africa to New Zealand). Even more inadvertently, no doubt, several of the character actors' accents give a sense of the way in which the officer corps offered opportunities to those from the fringes of the home islands, with Irish and Scottish officers particularly prominent on the ground.

Zulu

1964, UK, directed by Cy Endfield

Although it's tempting to lump Zulu together with other epics of the empire in its various guises - most obviously David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia - Cy Endfield's film attempts something both more limited, an account of a single military action, and perhaps trickier, that is, presenting that action in a manner that avoids caricature of either side. Of course, the British viewpoint is privileged throughout since the camera, for the most part, remains within the British army post at Rorke's Drift, but the film is a rare account that emphasizes not African savagery or naïveté but rather the tactical and strategic intelligence of the Zulus, who implement a coherent battlefield plan - sketched out for us by an Afrikaner - and who then make a rational calculation about the virtues of continued engagement. The film does, nonetheless, play loose with certain aspects of the historical records, inserting several sequences - most notably a singing "battle" - for dramatic purposes and underplaying some particularly brutal British acts, such as the killing of wounded Zulu.

Endfield provides us with virtually no context for Rorke's Drift beyond an indication that it is a continuation of a battle fought earlier in the day at Isandlwana - a decision which robs the film of any sense of the African motivation for the battle - and focuses immediately on the reactive efforts of the small British garrison to improvise a defense. Endfield shot parts of the film on location, and the outdoor sequences are terrifically impressive, with the tiny outpost dwarfed by the Drakensberg mountains, made more ominous still by the presence of Zulu fighters appearing from on high in several shots. There is, though, an occasional sense of disconnect from the interior sequences, many of which were shot back in England, and which sometimes have a more jocular tone that feels remote from the fighting outside (those inside the buildings, either prisoners or invalids, don't take up weapons until quite late in the film, which seems extraordinary given the numerical disparity between the Zulu regiments and British defenders).

Although Rorke's Drift is remembered as one of the great imperial rearguard actions, a disaster in the making that turned into an improbable victory - the more notable, in both military and propaganda terms, for coming immediately after the comprehensive defeat at Isandlwana - Endfield's presentation, even while enumerating the honors won in the course of the fighting, implies that there's little heroic about any such battle. The camera pans away from the guns and bayonets on the stockade to a carpet of Zulu bodies that must surely have recalled, for anyone watching in 1964, the horrific images of body upon body that emerged when the concentration camps were liberated (the sequence in Zulu is almost in black and white, unlike the vivid colours elsewhere in the film, making the analogy even clearer). It's a fascinating reappraisal of the realities of imperial conquest, a film that undermines conventional propaganda even as it reinforces the standing of Rorke's Drift in British historical memory.

Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake

1942, US, directed by John Cromwell


A very brisk adventure in the ripping yarns mode, Son of Fury packs an extraordinary amount into its 98 minutes, during which the eponymous Benjamin Blake (Tyrone Power) becomes a bonded servant, deals with tangled parenthood and inheritance issues, goes into exile, frolics on a tropical island, and goes on trial to clear his name. There's plenty of vigorous action, too, with several exciting fist-fights marred only by the very obvious use of stunt doubles in ill-fitting wigs.

The film has a sterling cast to spin the tale: Power is more than capable of holding the attention whilst he's on screen, and gets formidable support from George Sanders (the consummate villain, who utters every line with wonderfully ripe disdain), Gene Tierney as an island beauty, and Frances Farmer - and on to the likes of John Carradine, Elsa Lanchester, Dudley Digges, and Halliwell Hobbes in supporting roles. Lanchester's brief scenes, as a Bristol prostitute, are especially memorable.

While the sequences in England that bookend the film are generally very successful, with the aristocracy coming in for their usual pasting, the island segment is less memorable in large measure because it's so rushed: no sooner has Blake arrived on the island than the needs of the plot have him looking to leave again, even though the film does attempt to account for the passage of several seasons. Director John Cromwell also seems more at home in the atmospherically-shot nooks and crannies of (studio) Bristol streets and country houses than in the sunny climes of the South Pacific.

Note: This film is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. Son of Fury was exhibited in Kisumu, a city in western Kenya, in 1944.

The film attracted the particular ire of the District Commissioner (DC), the local British colonial representative. In a letter to the Chairman of the Board of Censors, who was gathering opinions regarding the possible liberalization of Kenya Colony's film censorship regime, the DC wrote: 'I am personally of the opinion that the vast majority of films have nothing but a harmful effect and I addressed the Municipal Board on the subject of scenes depicting depravity, brutality and violence in "Son of Fury"' (November 8, 1945). This appears to be a reference in particular to a sequence of whipping. The Chairman of the Board of Censors responded rather tartly, noting was the film was passed and exhibited widely throughout the United States and United Kingdom.

At the time, censorship in Kenya included a racial element: films could be placed off-limits to black African audiences, although in practice this appears to have been a rare occurrence. However, as soldiers returned from wartime postings where they could watch whatever films they liked, the administration was concerned that racially-based censorship could be inflammatory, and sought opinions, mostly from white Kenyans, before proceeding to a revision of the rules. By 1947, race-based censorship had been abandoned, but the censor more frequently banned films outright, for audiences of all races -- particularly after the beginning of the Mau Mau insurgency in 1952.

Captain Blood

1935, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

You get the sense that Errol Flynn knew exactly what kind of opportunity had landed in his lap when he was cast as Captain Blood: he blazes across the screen, investing every line with a kind of larrikin enthusiasm, moving from high drama to comedy to swordplay with consummate ease, a gleam in his eye in almost every shot. The only downside is that the film flags somewhat when he's not onscreen, despite gripping battle sequences and a rollicking, partially fact-based plot.

Michael Curtiz shows his stripes in the early going, in the carefully-staged court sequences - great shadows loom over the spare set as the accused sweat in the makeshift dock - and on board the ship that takes Flynn and his fellow convicts to the Caribbean, the light from the water outside dappling Flynn's face. However, the grim tone of the first twenty minutes or so fades pretty quickly against the boisterous action, and even unpleasant events - such as Blood's all-too-abbreviated encounter with the dastardly Levasseur, played by the Basil Rathbone in love-to-hate-him mode - are quickly put aside by the demands of the plot.

This film is part of my Watching Movies in Africa project and I couldn't help wondering how African audiences must have reacted to the film's depiction of slavery. While the precipitating events at the beginning of the film are accurate enough, and resulted in the transportation of hundreds of white Englishmen to the West Indies, the film almost never shows any black slaves although they would have been in the overwhelmingly majority on the plantations; indeed, the black extras mostly serve as domestic servants rather than as field-slaves, although they are never individualized in the film. Captain Blood played at the Picturedrome theatre in Kumasi (Ghana) in January 1951, advertised with the slogan "Robin Hood in Captain Blood".

King Solomon's Mines

1950, US, directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton

King Solomon's Mines is one of those films that's very difficult to watch without being permanently distracted by the fact that the film belongs to another world. Or rather two other worlds, the late Victorian period when H. Rider Haggard wrote the original book and the period just before African independence when the film was made.

The trailer is itself worthy of note. It's a tremendously lurid bit of work, with a voiceover that demands to be heard to be believed: "Into the strange and wild interior of darkest Africa, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sent a motion picture company on safari. Here in its original setting, where no white woman had ever been before, was filmed the story of primitive savagery, of incredible danger." The white woman in question is Deborah Kerr, although there are probably a few long-dead missionary women, and many a colonial official's wife, who would contest her claim to have been the first white woman into the Congo.

The film itself is, inevitably, far less outlandish than its trailer. By the standards of the genre, Stewart Granger's Allan Quatermain is a pretty understanding great-white-hunter type. He's able to communicate effectively with his staff in their own language, although the film overstates the prevalence of Swahili across eastern and southern Africa. Quatermain is genuinely upset when an assistant is killed early in the film, and he has a well-developed sense of propriety in his dealings with various African tribes. Indeed, in the end, it's hard to decide whether the film is actually more patronising toward the African characters, whose customs are represented with at least some gestures towards anthropological accuracy, or towards Deborah Kerr's Elizabeth Curtis, whose primary mistake is to have been born a woman.

Leaving such weightier concerns aside, the film is an effective if lightweight safari adventure, with some striking scenery and animal footage. Structurally, though, it's rather weak: the middle section is an over-extended series of geographical or cultural challenges, and the film comes to an abrupt end almost without warning, as if the filmmakers realized they'd run out of time and had to scramble to tie up at least some of their loose ends.

(Part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. This film was widely shown in Zambia and Zimbabwe from the 1950s onwards, and younger audiences remain familiar with it. One of the more unusual aspects of the film from the perspective of my project is the fact that it was actually filmed in Africa, in what are now Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the 1950s, it was a rarity for Africans to be able to see themselves onscreen in any context, and it's likely that audiences valued the film on that basis even if the images of Africa were imperfect, at least viewed from the vantage point of the West in 2009.)

The Last of the Mohicans

1992, US, directed by Michael Mann

Like so many of Michael Mann's films, The Last of the Mohicans depicts men at work, here engaged in the messy business of the the defence of their homes, as well as resistance to outside military rule. Although the film abandons the often claustrophobic confines of Thief and Manhunter for the forests of America in pre-revolutionary times, the locales are similarly fraught with danger; the woods are depicted as a place of sudden and even savage violence that can erupt at any moment to engulf the unwary.

From the opening scenes, it is clear that action as much as words will define this story: the film begins with a tremendous race through the forest, as viscerally exciting as any car pursuit, accompanied, as so often in Mann's films, by an intense and memorable score. That sequence and a bloody encounter which follows shortly thereafter deftly sketch in the three primary male characters (played by Daniel Day-Lewis, Russell Means and Eric Schweig). As if to underline the ways in which these men define their skills, one of the trio has an almost wordless part, while all three prefer to remain silent unless there's something of importance to share.

It's hard to avoid the thought that there's a occasionally a certain amount of romanticization at work here, with the depiction of a prelapsarian idyll into which outside forces intrude. However, as the film progresses Mann's depiction becomes more sophisticated, with the Native Americans far from monolithic, and capable, where it suits them, of forming political alliances to play the French and British off each other for their own ends. The film also depicts their exceptional tactical intelligence, in ways which frequently surprise the colonising forces, and strip bare the latter's tactics.
As elsewhere in Mann's work, the film turns most of all on different notions of honour, which overlap and sometimes conflict with one another. The main narrative thread is motivated by one kind of basic honorable action, that of protecting the apparently weak - not to mention extending essential notions of hospitality to strangers - and that simple action draws the central trio into a much more complex web of interlocking loyalties and betrayals, through which they are constantly called on to define their own essential values.