SPOILERS.
I first saw this some years ago and found it impressive but maybe I've seen Lawrence of Arabia too often in the interim. It owes a lot of Lawrence, appearing as it did four years after. As in Lawrence,a lone British officer is sent to the desert to set things straight. He's mysterious, a paradox. He rides camels and gets into battles with the enemy. He fails in his mission.
Well, Charlton Heston as "Chinese" Gordon doesn't really seem too mysterious when you come down to it, even though he himself tells us, "My life is not an open book. Not to you, not to any man. Not even to myself." Yet he's a pretty normal guy. People keep calling him "vain" behind his back but it doesn't seem like vanity to me when you're trapped behind the lines and expect the British, who sent you there in the first place, to come and get you out.
Actually Heston is pretty good. His mass is imposing. His uniforms are splendiferous. His acting doesn't shoot out the lights but he's convincing because Gordon is well within his range. Olivier, as the Mahdi, "the expected one," the kind of rabid charismatic warrior that religions seem to generate on a regular basis, gives a little better performance because, let's face it, he's a more efficient ham. You killed to prevent killing, he tells Gorden. "I kill to prevent more killing. Tell me, Gordon Pasha, where is the difference?" And he holds both his hands up and gives them a little twist, while looking slyly out of the corner of his eyes at Heston. For Heston such techniques would be infra dig. Olivier plays this in blackface, by the way. All of the Egyptians, as well as the Sudanese, are in blackface. Man, these Egyptians are dark. Not just swarthy. Not even dark like sub-Saharan Africa is dark, but a shiny bluish-black like a freshly polished boot.
It's not a bad film and it does describe Gordon and his predicament in intelligible terms. We're never at a loss for what's going on. But Lawrence of Arabia, inevitably, keeps springing to mind. And Khartoum seems plodding by comparison, especially in the direction. You may remember, to take a single example, the scene in which Lawrence and his irregulars blow up a train and then puncture the cars with machine gun bullets. Lawrence shouts for them to cease fire because the passenger cars are being turned into lacework. Nobody hears him, so he fires a flare. No one pays attention, so Lawrence must run out in front of his own guns screaming at his men to stop shooting. Finally the firing sputters raggedly to a stop.
There's nothing like that here. In this movie, Gordon generals a battle on horseback with the Madhi's supporters and everybody -- every one of the extras -- runs to his mark and does what he's supposed to. The battles are full of the same extras in long shot, slashing away at each other with scimitars or whatever they are. Nobody seems to get dirty. The dialogue is strictly functional. And one has to think of Lean's USE of the desert setting. That fulsomely ominous vermilion sun peeking up over the flat spirit level of a horizon at dawn. We have the desert here too, but it might almost have been a painted backdrop. It isn't a presence. Dearden uses a lot of swooping helicopter shots as if to say, "Wow -- what a vast emptiness." But we don't get to KNOW it. We don't get to see its rocks or its animals or is leisurely dust devils. It might as well be a studio jungle as a desert.
The score is good, though. It borrows from Eric Wolfgang Korngold but it's effective -- sweeping, majestic, and rife with breast-bursting button-popping imperial sentiment.
In the end it's a watchable epic movie. If you haven't seen Lawrence of Arabia, rent the two of them and show them in succession -- if you can stay awake that long. It's the difference between a good-enough movie and a great movie.
