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Politics are hooey, says John Milius, action separates leopard from fox. (Lions and grizzlies also figure, the eagle is "a dandified vulture.") Morocco in the early 1900s is a landscape in flux riddled with bits from Eastern cultures, including a private Yankee patch—Berber horsemen crash it, the patrician maiden (Candice Bergen) and her children are carried away by "the last of the Barbary pirates" (Sean Connery), it's an international matter. "A jihad to abolish this foreign pestilence" has reverberations for Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith), introduced with hand on globe before flashing a bully grin to reporters who know to print the legend. America "the blind and the reckless," sighs the President admiringly, the Raisuli is his equal in alpha virility and contradiction, a warrior who declares himself "a scholar and a leader" before adorning an oasis with severed heads. Thus the love story, long-distance and unconsummated, between a pair of yaks admiring each other's rifles and dignity in a world prone to swirling barbarism. "You ever hear of The Big Stick?" David Lean is the main tributary, John Huston is at hand as the sardonic Secretary of State, Leone's Duck, You Sucker is a model for Brecht on the epic canvas. American militarism is luxuriated in, though only after a low-angled burlesque view of Geoffrey Lewis, Steve Kanaly, and other uniform ramrods dizzy with imperialist thoughts under a Remington painting. Milius at home in the desert, exercising a most erudite Movie Brat mind: Connery barging with erect sword into Bergen's tent is out of It Happened One Night, a boy napping in a Vermeer close-up wakes up to the aching theme from The Searchers on a soldier's harmonica. "Too early in the morning for rattling sabers." Huston exits quoting Kipling, and there's The Man Who Would Be King that same year. With Vladek Sheybal, Nadim Sawalha, Roy Jenson, Simon Harrison, Marc Zuber, and Deborah Baxter.
--- Fernando F. Croce |