Love Brewed in the African Pot

1980, Ghana, directed by Kwaw Ansah

Kwaw Ansah was the victim of some awful timing, starting his cinema career just as Ghana's cinemas went into terminal decline in the early 1980s: the arrival of the VCR combined with an extended curfew to close many of the venues that were already struggling after a decade of economic upheaval. There is almost no hint of that offscreen turmoil, though: the film is set at a vaguely-defined point shortly after independence and focuses on the confrontation of tradition and modernity (intermingled with issues of social class). Like Sembène, Ansah is blunt about the ways in which many leading figures in post-independence Africa echoed their colonial predecessors, even striving to emulate them (thus the tragi-comic figure of the father with his pith helmet and his insistence on certain forms of dress and address). For the most part, Ansah displays a fine observational eye for the tensions between different views of the world, zeroing in on the distaste of the educated elite for traditional observances (a theme that was common in Ghanaian newspapers of the 1950s), though the film shifts gears quite radically in the final twenty minutes, and the move to a more consciously Shakespearean/metaphorical register is jarring.

The Glass Key

1942, US, directed by Stuart Heisler

A convoluted noir that frequently gets bogged down by excessive talkiness -- the rhythm is off, with neither the zip of the gangster movies of the 1930s nor the zing of the best noir dialogue (a zip that could often prompt the viewer to overlook the plot holes). One extended sequence, in which Alan Ladd tries to manipulate a thug played by William Bendix, is symptomatic: aside from the set-up being frankly incredible, there's no good reason for the scene to unspool at such length, and neither Ladd or Bendix does much of interest with their lines. Admittedly, Ladd isn't really my cup of tea to start with; his boss, played by Brian Donlevy, is much more fun to watch.

The Glass Key was another of the films banned by the Gold Coast censor in 1947, this time primarily because of the possible implication that "crime on a large scale pays handsomely and is in itself to be admired." There's certainly an element of truth to that, even if the film takes care to ensure that those responsible for the worst onscreen crimes are indeed brought to book; the attempts to ally political and backstreet muscle do escape prosecution, though since there was no democratic process in Gold Coast at the time, it's not clear whether this would have been a major source of concern for the censors. The sultry presence of Veronica Lake may have worried them rather more.

Pillow of Death

1945, US, directed by Wallace Fox

The final in a series of low-budget chillers, this isn't a bad illustration of what you could do when you had even the limited resources of a big studio behind you. Despite the film's B status, it has some excellent old dark house sets, and a few lovely mobile shots, particularly using the crane, which makes an appearance in just the second shot. A couple of shots later, there's a nice composition from below, immediately casting suspicion on one character -- the kind of atmosphere that the film milks quite capably for an hour before revealing its shock, though I couldn't help but think that the film gave its creepiest character a free pass.

Another of the films banned by the Gold Coast censor in 1946, Pillow of Death was condemned on the basis that "During the first five minutes of this film no less than six murders are committed. Elsewhere the film contains numerous scenes of horror and violence and also a good deal of matter very unsuitable for illiterate audiences." The description of the opening minutes is wholly inaccurate, since the entire film doesn't have six murders, and they are generally shown quite discreetly. It is possible that the censor was describing another film -- the censorship board commonly reviewed several films in a single evening, usually by watching only selected reels from each picture -- but also possible that the writer mis-remembered the film or chose to exaggerate the violence in the early going. The film contains scenes of spirit communication and the moving of a body, the kind of fare that the censor often assumed would be problematic for African audiences, and that may have counted more against the film than the body count.

Dark Waters

1944, US, directed by André de Toth

A Southern Gothic that's a good deal stronger on atmosphere than it is on plotting, with a Gaslight-esque storyline that is abandoned for a climax that is both compelling and somehow more conventional than the psychological confusion that has preceded it. de Toth extracts considerable spooky value from the shadows and heat of the bayou, as did Robert Siodmak the previous year in Son of Dracula, but Merle Oberon is a touch too helpless for my taste, while Franchot Tone's role is too blandly one-sided; much better is Thomas Mitchell, cast somewhat against type in a role that Sydney Greenstreet might also have enjoyed, while Elisha Cook Jr provides reliable nastiness entirely in keeping with his standard onscreen persona.

I'm including this in my Watching Movies in Africa project but it's yet another cheat -- like both And Then There Were None and Son of Dracula, the film was banned by the Gold Coast Board of Control in 1946 during a period when the censor was especially strict. It was condemned on the grounds that it was a horror film, though despite some superficial similarities of setting with Son of Dracula the description is inaccurate. The censor also took exception to "a series of close-ups showing the agonies of persons trapped in quicksands" (sic); accurate enough, though also a series of shots that could quite easily have been excised without the need to condemn the film as a whole.

Please Murder Me

1956, US, directed by Peter Godfrey

A rather nice meeting for two actors probably best remembered these days for small-screen roles -- a hulking Raymond Burr in his pre-Perry Mason days, and Angela Lansbury straying very far indeed from Jessica Fletcher territory, as the fatalest of femmes. On this occasion, at least, Lansbury's not entirely convincing in the role -- as depicted onscreen, she seems far too passive to really make us believe in her character's cynicism, with the spotlight remaining more firmly on Burr (as the shot above might suggest). The set-up is rather a stretch, albeit very much in the noir mould, with Burr narrating events that lead him to make a plea something along the lines of the give-it-all-away title, but the night-time atmospherics and unusual casting make the twists well worth persisting with.

This is an entry in my Watching Movies in Africa project: the film was screened in the late 1950s in Ghana, though I have not been able to gather whether it was a popular offering. I would suspect that the relative lack of action and the sustained dialogue scenes meant it was only screened a handful of times, though as an independent American production it probably didn't cost much to rent.

Son of Dracula

1943, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

As in Siodmak's later Cobra Woman, the absurdity of the script and much of the dialogue is at times quite successfully counterbalanced by the atmospheric staging: whatever the flaws in the raw material, you can't fault the director for a lack of commitment to the end product, probably why something like Cobra Woman ends up as such an intense fever dream despite its patent silliness. Here, there's no Technicolor craziness, but scenes in a prison, where a man seems to be talking to himself, or in the cabin of a gypsy woman on a Southern plantation (there's a mashup for the ages) are wonderfully creepy, deploying shadows and set design to great effect. The count himself is far less interesting, and indeed until the latter stages Lon Chaney Jr has very little screen time -- though his various entrances and exits are cleverly handled with some fine effects work. By contrast, flying bat technology had not appreciably improved since 1931. Among the supporting players, J. Edward Bromberg is most entertaining as Professor Lazlo, a vampire authority conveniently based in nearby Memphis; Bromberg was a future blacklistee, and an authentic Transylvanian, born in Timisoara.

I'm including this in my Watching Movies in Africa project but it's another cheat -- like And Then There Were None before it, Son of Dracula was banned by the Gold Coast Board of Control in 1946, part of a broader discomfort with horror films. Indeed, the censor was so reluctant to pass anything that had received the British "H"certificate in the 1930s and 1940s that exhibitors rarely imported such fare, and when they did, as in this case, a ban usually resulted. It's not clear whether local audiences were all that interested in horror films, since they had so few opportunities to see them, though later audiences loved films like The Exorcist, one of the first films to have an extended run in a single theatre in what was, by then, Ghana. That was not the local exhibition norm, with nightly changes of programme more common. The censors that banned Son of Dracula did not go into much detail about their rationale, observing simply that it was "A 'horror' film to which the Board took strong objection."

And Then There Were None

1945, US, directed by René Clair

Audiences at the tail-end of the war certainly seem to have had a taste for the blacker shadings in life, whether the overall tone was comic or tragic -- the tongue is firmly in cheek here, as English conventions are gleefully skewered by colonials, expatriates and Johnny Foreigner alike. Though I've not read Agatha Christie's original novel for years, nor seen her stage derivation, the almost frantic efforts to maintain the behavioural norms of the British class system surely was influenced by the disintegrating world that formed the real-life backdrop to the fictional material.

Clair keeps the tone bone-dry as the upper-class characters are forced to deal with an island without servants, among other inconveniences (you know, the occasional murder, and so forth), while also creating several finely atmospheric sequences, especially the early scene during which the characters find out just why their odd group has been brought together. It's hard to avoid thinking of Hitchcock throughout the film -- the opening sequence on a boat surely references the master's work in the previous year's Lifeboat, but Hitch may have returned the favour some years later, with Dial M for Murder, which makes the same precise use of set geography such that the storm-tossed house here, and the London apartment there, become characters in their own right.

While I've added this to my Watching Movies in Africa project, it's a bit of a cheat. The film is here on the basis that I know it was banned in what was then the Gold Coast in 1946, and I haven't yet found evidence that it was shown elsewhere. Film censorship on the Gold Coast was fairly relaxed for the most part, at least until the late 1950s: films were already certified in the UK, where censorship was fairly strict at the time, and very few films seem to have been subsequently banned in the Gold Coast. Based on the evidence to date, even fewer were snipped by the local censor. Still, in 1946 there was a rash of outright prohibitions, and the main film distributor at the time, West African Pictures Co., a Lebanese-run company which eventually ended up in state hands in 1956, complained loudly about the sudden strictness. The censor gave written reasons for the various bans, with And Then There Were None prohibited on the basis that it "showed a series of carefully planned murders," earning it unanimous rejection. One wonders whether the board also objected, if in unspoken ways, to the manner in which the film depicts British society -- colonial censorship boards, even when they included local representatives, tended not to like films that took the mother country down a peg or two.

Taken 2

2012, France, directed by Olivier Megaton

I haven't see the first of these films, so I can't judge it on continuity grounds, but Liam Neeson is surely the Carlton Palmer of action heroes -- two gangly men who look like extremely unlikely candidates for their assigned professions. Indeed, Neeson is so tall compared to most of his assailants that the fights look completely ridiculous whenever they're in long shot; Megaton's main solution to this problem is to render the combat sequences so completely incoherent that it no longer really matters. I like Neeson in many of his other roles, but what he needs here is the absolute seriousness of a Bruce Willis, capable of selling you something patently ridiculous by the sheer force of his commitment to the lines, however absurd. Even so, the whole enterprise is so perfectly machine-tooled that it's lacking almost completely in tension, with the outcome so obviously  fore-ordained; I'm not sure any actor can do a whole lot about that.

On the basis that I watched it at a cinema in Accra, I'll count as an entry in my Watching Movies in Africa project. I ended up seeing this particular film because I waited to see which of the late-afternoon screenings at the 5-screen Silverbird theatre at Accra Mall was most popular before plunking down my 16 cedis (US$8). The price alone, never mind the location of the Mall, well outside the centre of the city, makes this the kind of place that's off-limits for most residents of Accra. All of the films on offer had been playing for weeks -- there hadn't been a new film for nearly a month -- and so there were few people around that Sunday. The very small audience at Taken 2 was mostly made up of the (surprisingly attentive) teenage children of well-off Accra families; in the end, it felt like there wasn't anything much different about seeing this in Accra as opposed to Akron.

Where No Vultures Fly

1951, UK, directed by Harry Watt

Damn you, British audiences of 1951 and 1952 for plunking down your coppers to see this film! It's your fault that the world was given West of Zanzibar a few years later! Admittedly, those audiences showed at least some discrimination: this first Ealing-in-Africa foray is considerably better than the sequel, which was virtually ignored at the box office (other people showed good sense, too: Dinah Sheridan didn't show up for the sequel, necessitating the casting of Sheila Sim in the same role). Where No Vultures Fly was shot was almost exclusively filmed in East Africa, so there's none of the absurd stitching together of location and studio footage that's so distracting in the sequel, though on occasion the obvious realism of, say, Anthony Steel clambering up a dead elephant is rather discomfiting in comparison to the fakery of the studio hippo of West of Zanzibar.

Of course, better filmmaking doesn't mean more enlightened views on the colonies, with the white man very firmly in charge despite his propensity for continually getting himself in trouble. Indeed, the entire film is structured as a series of problems and solutions rather than as a conventional story arc. Each new challenge--poachers, leopards, snakes, marital strife, labour unrest-- comes hard on the heels of the last, and the characters mull over each situation before, inevitably, someone (white) exclaims, "I've got it!" The world of the film is comically small at times, too, perhaps in the spirit of a studio that made Passport to Pimlico : while we're constantly told that Anthony Steel is overseeing 1,000 square miles, people keep showing up on his doorstep as though they've wandered down the street for a chat and a cup of tea, while the transportation challenges of rural Africa are invoked exclusively when the plot requires an unanticipated delay.

This film is part of my Watching Movies in Africa project. While archival evidence suggests the film was screened in East Africa, I've yet to find newspaper or other information with actual screening dates.

Cobra Woman

1944, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

Wow. Where to begin. I'd previously only known Robert Siodmak as a director of noirish material so this lurid Technicolor frenzy came as something of a surprise. Even with Hollywood's loose approach to historical and geographical accuracy, this is fevered stuff, set on a series of isolated islands that feature both snake charmers and chimpanzees, not to mention both young Sabu, forced to utter his lines in a rather hideous pidgin ("I are..." etc.), among the "natives."

The film was one of a series featuring Maria Montez and Jon Hall (and Sabu in some installments), and the emphasis is on lavish escapism. Where others were already delving deeply into noir territory in 1944, including Fritz Lang in The Woman in the Window, this is pure distraction, completely goofy and unsurprisingly now treasured as a camp classic. The eye-opening cobra dance, performed not once but twice by the estimable Ms. Montez, is worthy of the price of admission by itself; Siodmak must have experienced severe whiplash shuttling between such material and the same year's psychologically acute Phantom Lady.

Note: This is part of my Watching Movies in Africa project. Cobra Woman was screened numerous times at Kumasi's Rex cinema in January 1951. The Ashanti Pioneer of January 18, 1951 includes a brief piece credited "By Our Film Critic," though the terminology employed owes more to the vocabulary of advertising than that of journalism: “Do you like the beautiful, are you fascinated by the mysterious, do you take to the colourful? If so, you cannot spend a more entertaining time than by being at the Rex Cinema to-night.” A number of Ghanaian newspapers were owned by entrepreneurs who also had interests in the cinema business; the same may well have been the case here though I've not yet tracked down direct evidence of the link. Update: I've since found evidence that the film was showing in Accra's Rex theatre as early as June 1946. That venue was owned by the same company that later screened the film in Kumasi, and by all accounts the contemporary rental system used in Ghana allowed exhibitors to keep films for up to five years.

The image above is taken from FilmFanatic.org.

West of Zanzibar

1954, UK, directed by Harry Watt

Ealing Studios made a series of pictures filmed in Australia and the African colonies in the 1950s, and for the most part Harry Watt was the go-to director for these overseas jaunts; The Overlanders, with Chips Rafferty, was a pretty enjoyable Aussie cattle drive affair, but this film is rather less successful, at least in dramatic terms. The script is pretty awful -- the actors sound pained at times, delivering the most obvious of lines, and there's not much they can do with the gaping plot holes either -- while the seams in the mixture of location footage and studio material are painfully obvious.

Watt's background was in documentaries, one of the many filmmakers trained with John Grierson, and the location footage is often rather good: the wildlife sequences are arresting, never more so than in the footage of a crocodile trying to munch on some daredevil storks. Unfortunately, the human drama is much more problematic, and often blatantly idiotic. As with all colonial adventures, the white man has to be seen to be in charge, leading to such absurdities as Anthony Steel pointing to a hippo and helpfully observing to his African companion that they need to be alert to danger; said hippo is so ridiculously fake that it makes Bruce the shark, from Jaws, look a model of special effects genius. It's not clear whether the film has any self-awareness of these absurdities; at another moment Steel insists, despite arguments from African sailors, on leading a boat across a reef. Disaster inevitably ensues but no one observes anything along the lines of "I told you so," however justified such a sentiment might be, nor does the fiasco appear to shake Steel's very English confidence for a moment. It's not all bad, of course: Edric Connor gives a very dignified performance as Ushingo, the chief of an African tribe under threat, while there's so much unsubtitled Swahili that the film could well be used with some success in a language class, as long as you knew the Swahili word for "patronising as all hell" for the subsequent discussion. And, I suspect entirely inadvertently, the film provides a rather excoriating view of the contempt in which whites held most of their colonial subjects in a scene with an untrustworthy lawyer, an unpleasant but incisive man.

Note: This is another entry in the Watching Movies In Africa project. Despite its limited intrinsic interest, West of Zanzibar managed to cause quite a stir in several colonial locations, including Kenya, where Harry Watt did much of the location shooting. Watt filmed parts of his earlier adventure Where No Vultures Fly in Kenya, apparently without incident. For the sequel, the Kenyan administration debated for some time whether or not to grant him a filming permit, eventually giving Watt permission to tour the territory in 1952 with his crew. When the film was scheduled for release two years later there was chaos, however. The Governor was to attend a gala premiere of the film in Nairobi but the censors were dealing with objections from the country's Arab community. In the end the premiere was cancelled and the film banned, although it was eventually shown -- after more debate -- on Zanzibar. While the film was banned in at least some other "settler colonies," like Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), it was shown with some fanfare in Nigeria because of the presence of the Nigerian-born actor Orlando Martins in one of the major African roles.

Many thanks to DC for tracking down and passing along a copy of the film.

West of Zanzibar

1928, US, directed by Tod Browning

Remade a few years later, with sound, as Kongo, it's hard not to draw comparisons between Tod Browning's version and the later film, so closely do they hew to the same template. There are a few substantial differences -- the remake cuts out the extended stage-magic prologue that no doubt fascinated Browning, always a fan of unusual theatre folk, and also adds in a significant character -- but for the most part the narrative is almost jarringly similar, entire scenes playing out with near-identical results. The sound version is, if anything, rather more thoroughgoing in its seediness, layering further outrages on the manifold moral excesses already onscreen in 1928.

Ultimately, though, the films come down to something of a comparison between the differing acting styles of Lon Chaney, in one of his final screen appearances, and Walter Huston. There's no doubting the physical commitment of either actor, although Chaney is particularly arresting as he drops, animal-like, down the rope that leads to his sleeping area. He allows his withered legs to drop before him, before slinging the useless limbs one by one into a wheelchair: it's a fascinating bit of physical acting, which Browning repeats a number of times with variations. Chaney achieves an entirely different, subtler effect in the key scene where he realizes just how mis-guided his vengeance has been; the transition on his face from feral outrage to heartbroken sorrow is extraordinarily multi-layered, and no speeches from Huston in the later version can hold a candle to the intensity of the moment.

Note: This is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. The film was shown in some locations in East Africa in the late 1920s/early 1930s, although white audiences objected to the film on the grounds that it suggested that whites were less than moral paragons, and also implied that white civilized values could not overcome African superstitions.

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.

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.

War Arrow

1953, US, directed by George Sherman

A routine 1950s Western, War Arrow is more interesting for what it reveals about the Hollywood system - and its attitudes to race - than for its thin intrinsic merits. Although the film was marketed as a Western, it could just as easily have been sold as a melodrama of frontier life, with scenes of high romantic drama, broken marriages, disloyal husbands, pretty "natives", handsome officers, and men doing what's right. As a consequence, it's never clear that director George Sherman has a solid handle on the material, and his filmmaking skills - with odd cut-off shots and clumsy edits - are roughly on a par with his narrative strengths.

For the modern viewer, the film's casual racism, seen in the ridiculous speech patterns assigned to the Indian characters - though the script is so poor than even this is pretty inconsistent - and the "redface" acting is highly problematic. Henry Brandon and Dennis Weaver have particularly egregious roles as a chief and a young brave; the production team seems to have decided that a bit of brown paint and a bad wig is all that's needed to transform the actors. They play opposite Jeff Chandler, who played Indian - and various other "native" - characters in a number of films, but who's the great white hope here. Early on, Chandler's character seems as though he might actually be capable of seeing the Indians as peers, presenting a pretty accurate account of the historical treatment of the Seminole tribe, and enlisting the Seminoles as allies, but as the film advances it reveals its hand, and there's not much pretty about it.

Note: This film is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. War Arrow played at the Corona, Royal and Regal theatres in Lagos in September 1956 (Lagos had roughly a dozen theatres at the time). I haven't been able to trace whether War Arrow was released in East or Southern Africa, but numerous films featuring similar themes - white/"native" warfare, "native" insubordination, guerrilla-style attacks, scenes placing white characters in peril - were banned in settler colonies such as Kenya, particularly at the height of the Mau Mau insurgency in the mid-1950s. Among the many titles banned in Kenya around that time was Budd Boetticher's Seminole, which would have recounted some of the same historical issues. Such films were generally passed without incident in West African countries, which had much smaller colonial populations: in the same month that War Arrow played in Lagos, four movies that had been banned in Kenya appeared on the Nigerian city's screens.

There's an excellent account of the film, with much of the Hollywood context, on the French website Dvdclassik.com.

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".

Whispering Smith

1948, US, directed by Leslie Fenton

There's nothing all that surprising in Leslie Fenton's Whispering Smith, but it's a well-made entertainment, the kind of effective, carefully made B-plus film that has essentially disappeared from movie screens (popping up, if anywhere, in the guise of episodic television). As far as the plotting goes, it's straight from Hollywood's old standby pile, but the film has a very decent budget that allows for some beautiful opening scenery and a number of well-staged train wrecks.

Alan Ladd is solid, if unspectacular, as the eponymous Smith, a railroad detective who has to deal with shenanigans that swirl around old pal Murray Sinclair (Robert Preston). Preston manages to upstage the ostensible leading man on several occasions, particularly in his early scenes with Ladd, who is recovering from an injury; there's an affection between the characters that's effectively rendered by the ease with which the two performers interact.

Fenton has a bit of a directorial tic, dollying into his actors to underline a plot development in a kind of visual exclamation point, but other than that he doesn't intrude overly on the performances, perhaps unsurprisingly given he started out as actor. He extracts especially enjoyable turns from William Demarest (whose rat-tat-tat delivery nonetheless seems mildly out of place in a Western setting), Frank Faylen as a strikingly nasty sidekick, and Donald Crisp playing against his more familiar fatherly type as the chief villain of the piece.

(Part of the Watching Movies in Africa project; Whispering Smith played at the King's and Pen-Agege theatres in Lagos in September 1956).