Khartoum (1966)..........works on two levels for us......a comforting, nostalgic trip into old fashioned battle-epic filmmaking.......
........and surprisingly, a fairly prescient depiction of all our current misadventures in Middle East wars against Islamic fanatics.......
As historical films normally do, "Khartoum" freely warps the facts by staging, in 1884 Sudan, meetings between its two charismatic, clashing titans. In reality, they never met each other.....
On the Western Civilization team we have British General Charles 'Chinese' Gordon (Charlton Heston, at his jaw-clenching best).........on the scary, creepy, murderous Middle East team, we have 'The Mahdi', the 'expected one' (Sir Laurence Olivier in full blackface.......a comic book impersonation of Islamic mania.......ready to sweep across the desert and slaughter everyone...)
The script takes some pains to present these men as two sides of the same coin of religious zealotry.........'Onward Christian Soldiers' versus 'God Is Great'........
We couldn't help thinking.........take away the costumes, the pitched battles, the 'Rule Britannia' score by Frank Cordell and you might as well be watching a live CNN feed from Afghanistan..... nothing much has changed......the opponents, the mindset and the perpetual violence.
This is 1966 big budget filmmaking, however, so the politics remain good-'n-evil minimal, while what it's really about in presenting masses of extras sword-whacking each other in glorious Ultra Panavision 70.....(a cheaper, replacement process for the ungainly, impractical 3 projector Cinerama....)
Just to remind us that this bloody panorama was designed for a huge curved screen, flaming projectiles regularly come flying into the camera........(but for sheer spectacle, nothing beats the sight of Lord Olivier in full Halloween Shop Islamic Terrorist regalia......addressing his acolytes in an overripe theatrical sing-song delivery...."Oh my Beloveds.....", like outtakes from his filmed version of "Othello" also made in 1966)
Whichever way you choose to view "Khartoum" it's a fascinating chuck of time capsule cinema.......with a degree of wit and irony rarely seen in the 60's epics.......we flat out love the final penultimate moment - The Mahdi gazing in horror and revulsion at the sight of 'Chinese' Gordon's head paraded before him......
Now there's a moment no one will
ever see in today's endless Middle East conflicts....so we'll fondly remember this one with 3 stars (***)
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