Tamango

Captain Reiker (Curd Jürgens) loads a new shipment of slaves destine for Cuba. Tamango (Alex Cressan), the lion hunter, tries to lead a revolt but most slaves are only farmers. Aiché (Dorothy Dandridge) is a slave owned by the Captain. Doctor Corot (Jean Servais) is a Frenchman conflicted about slavery.

It's a black empowerment movie. There is a fascinating scene with Reiker haggling with the chief over his payment. The actors are all terrific. I do question about escaping into the cargo hold. If there are fewer escaped slaves, then a quick retreat may make more sense. While the final ending makes poetic sense, it's not the most action-filled possible. Aiché is still great and her decision is extremely powerful. The most impressive part may be when this movie was released. It's in the era of Sydney Poitier, the heroic but non-threatening black. This is different and that's great.

It's ironic to me that in the late 50s when the civil rights movement was getting into high gear it was a French film that talked about slavery. Very few films were made about the slave trade in studio era Hollywood. Offhand I can think of only two, Paramount's Souls At Sea and MGM's Stand Up And Fight.

Tamango was a French film and the title role is played by one Alex Cressan who made this and no other film. He is captured and sold to Dutch slavers and bound for Havana with others in a ship captained by Curt Jurgens.

Jurgens who does a lot of his thinking from south of the border has a bit of comfort in the bewitching Dorothy Dandridge. She's resigned herself to her life as a concubine, but has some concerns for her fellow Africans.

Herein is the problem with Tamango, A really good film about the brutality of the slave trade is spoiled by a personal story that seems almost soap operish. The cargo also carries woman slaves as well and no doubt the crew took and the captain could have availed himself there and I'm sure many did. It was the same criticism I made about All The Brothers Were Valiant where Robert Taylor has Ann Blyth aboard. You just didn't bring women on board back in those days. Too many problems with the crew's morale.

In any event the revolt of the cargo of slaves was well done and truly inspirational. Could be compared with Amistead which was about a true incident of a slave revolt.

A good film that falls just short of greatness is Tamango.

Prosper Mérimée is considered a classic French writer and this adaptation of his short story «Le Vit envié de l'esclave» (also known as «Colomba») is rightly described as a forerunner of «Roots». Alex Cressan, in the title role, is a famous French athlete and wrestler who never appeared in another film. According to critic Franço Moriac, Mr Cressan wanted his part to be so «true to life» that he insisted upon not wearing any undergarments and be just clad in a minute and very loose loincloth. This detail is apparent in his dance (voodoo?) sequence when he ends up by falling on the deck of the ship. I was too busy admiring the beauty of the late Miss Dandridge when this happened. But my wife was not...

Arguably more interesting as a social document and a step forward in mainstreams films dealing with race, than as a drama.

On a slave ship carrying Africans from their homeland to slavery in the American south, a charismatic young warrior attempts to organize a revolt. Meanwhile, Dorothy Dandridge plays captain Curt Jurgens' mistress, featuring interracial kissing and sexuality at a time very few American films would go near the subject. Add in the complexity that Dandridge's subjugated Lucy is a far more empathetic figure than any white character, and that Tamango and his fellow captives are show to be in every way – morally, strategically as well as physically better than their white captors, and you have a film that was way ahead of it's time.

That said there is odd flat quality in the drama and less than thrilling acting and film-making that keep the actual story from living up to it's potential. But it's still pretty involving, and worth seeing at least as a part of films' maturing around racial issues.

Interestingly, blacklisted director John Berry, went on to direct another racially 'ahead of it's time' film; 1974's "Claudine", one of the first mainstream American films to try and intelligently deal with the struggles of poor urban African Americans without falling into exploitation, violence or cliché.

When I was 7 years old I saw the ads of «Tamango» in the press and posters in cinemas as I passed them by, but when I was old enough to see it (it was classified "for adults only") it had vanished from sight. Now that I finally watched it, when it was finished I was in awe. What a good film! Of course it does help that the final 10 minutes are simultaneously tense and poetic leading to a highly dramatic ending. But six decades after its original release, it is still a motion picture of strong content and great visual impact (although the copy I saw is not in the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio and the colors have faded).

Released in 1958 it is an adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's 1829 homonymous novella (before he wrote his most famous «Carmen»). Significant changes were made for this screen version, but the final plot is also set in the early 19th century. In the coast of Guinea, warrior Tamango (Alex Cressan) and a sizable group of men and women have been sold to Reinker, a Dutch slave trader (Curt Jürgens) and they board the ship Esperanza that sets sails to Cuba, where they will be sold again, this time in the slave market. On route the violent conflict between the Caucasian sailors and the black slaves intensifies, the interracial sexual liaison between Reinker and a beautiful African woman named Ayché (Dorothy Dandridge) breaks, and Tamango leads a mutiny against the slavers.

In the final script that went through significant re-writing due to Dandridge's insistence (who also refused to wear costumes that were offensive to the African woman, as designed by a Parisian designer), Ayché and Tamango are no longer lovers, he does not sell her but the two are victimized, and instead of surviving in Kingston the warrior fights until the end. These script changes turn Tamango and Ayché into icons of racial struggle, while the sincere, intense passion Reinker feels for Ayché is one of the first screen recognitions of many Europeans' love or lust for Africans.

In the time it was made «Tamango» must have been some kind of a political and educational «audiovisual pamphlet», invaluable for those who were involved in the fight for the civil rights of Afro-descendants in the United States and elsewhere. No wonder it was banned in a few countries, and surely not only for the Reinker-Ayché relationship.

I first saw the English-dubbed version: it becomes a bit hard in the first scenes to accept Dandridge as an African girl, with her American accent, but one gets used to it and thankfully she only has the necessary dialogue. Cressan, a medical student from Martinique that only made this film, is a magnificent emblem of African male beauty; and Jürgens, as usual, is fine as the villain with a soft heart.

Director Berry was black-listed during the witch-hunting craze led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and, after directing the cult film «He Ran All the Way», he went to Europe as Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, Charles Chaplin, and others did. Berry also directed the romantic comedy «Claudine» about a couple of African-American workers, but he remained in France until his death.