I think the biggest problem the review has is not so much the virtue signalling as the ignorance it shows of the morally compromised historical events the film does a pretty good job of dramatising considering the constraints of time and commercial considerations. It was one of those cases where a combination of good intentions, political expedience and flawed populists combined to create a perfect storm that backfired on everybody.
The real Charles Gordon makes T.E. Lawrence look like a perfectly well-adjusted young man. By comparison, Khartoum pulls back from some of the contradictions that make him such a fascinating and, at times, uncomfortable historical figure. 'Chinese' Gordon’s such a remarkable Victorian paradox that it would take a trilogy of films at least to do him justice, and not just because his military career was so wide reaching. A curious mixture of an almost Messianic inspired figure fired by a fiercely religious sense of purpose and a very disturbed man with a death wish that his published letters vaguely allude was due to some youthful sexual indiscretion that thoroughly revolted him but whose religious principles wouldn’t allow him to commit suicide (instead he chose to lead his men from the front while carrying only a swagger stick in the hope that someone would do the deed for him), it’s just as easy to see his decision to defend Khartoum as a disastrous – for the Sudanese – attempt to meet a noble end in a hopeless but noble cause as a genuinely heroic act of self-sacrifice intended to save lives. It’s not the only contradiction that the film, understandably for its era, is unable to confront.
Although hailed in the west for ending the slave trade in the Sudan, it was that very act and the huge damage it caused the Northern Sudanese economy that was one of the factors in the Mahdi’s rebellion gaining such popular support: the Mahdi used the misery its abolition caused as a rallying point to such a degree that Gordon was reluctantly forced to reinstate the trade to boost the economy and to gain the support of slave traders and their private armies on his return, something that proved too little too late and which the film diplomatically ignores (a film whose hero reinstates the slave trade released in the height of the era of civil rights movement would have been commercial suicide in the US).
The film was exhaustively researched (the research we actually published in a hardback book given to all the cast and crew), but the length of the film and what could be described as the political correctness of the day and the need to maintain audience sympathy forced some choices to be made for dramatic and commercial reasons. Yet Robert Ardrey’s literate Oscar-nominated screenplay is remarkably accurate in other ways despite the film’s relatively short running time for a roadshow epic. He manages to address the way Gordon confounded everyone around him - “He’s an idealist with ideals strictly his own,” a man so filled with contradictions that his life is not an open book even to him – and the way the British government mishandled the whole mess by sending the one person least likely to do what he was asked. Even his invented meeting between Gordon and the Mahdi draws on the two men’s letters where they did indeed try to convince each other of their divine sense of purpose. And it does address the fact that his legacy backfired on both him and Gladstone, who simply wanted a gesture to save his career and head off the imperialists.
As for Sir "Lawrence", well in some ways he is appalling, but not for the reasons the reviewer says. While Heston is excellent, Olivier still seems to be playing Othello, at times making you wonder if he only started the rebellion because his wife mislaid his favorite hankie. And yes, the lisp, while possibly accurate, feels like an affectation.
The success of Lawrence of Arabia was undoubtedly a factor in the film getting made, and like Lawrence in many ways it was ahead of its day in its criticism of the pitfalls of interfering in that neck of the woods, so it seems bizarre to criticise it as a celebration of racist colonial attitudes (and I love the implication that the author of The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations was a naive stick in the mud who just managed to pull off one good scene because he lucked into having two good actors rather than attracting good actors by the quality of his script). In its way, especially for its day, it's a pretty literate, intelligent anti-establishment epic about men rushing nations into disaster - all with the best intentions.
Last edited by Aclea; 12-02-2018 at 10:20 PM.
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Khartoum (1966)
Personally, I think they're fcukwits of the first magnitude that society can do without.
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