'Burn! (Queimada) 1969 We used 'not quite' since everybody has mixed feelings about this film.......it's a raggedy, lumpy piece of work that every so often threatens to break into brilliance......but sinks in mass of confusion and fuzzy editorializing.......
It was director Gillo Pontecorvo's studio-backed follow-up to his thunderous, international success of 1966, 'The Battle Of Algiers'.......and just like that film, 'Burn!' was fashioned as a furious, take-no-prisoners attack on European colonialism and its brutal exploitation and subjugation of third world countries.
Unlike the true events depicted in 'Algiers', 'Burn' s purely fictitious story images a 19th century tropical island colonized and dominated by Portugal. But Portugal's iron-fisted rule is slowing the sugar trade, so Britain sends in its professional agent provocateur Sir William Walker (a blonded Marlon Brando) to stir up a revolution.
Walker (based on a real historical figure) plucks out a disaffected native Jose Dolores (non-actor Evaristo Marquez) and literally re-invents him as the island's new rebel revolutionary...........mission accomplished......
Years later, with Dolores and his rebel army still raising hell with the colonial bigwigs, Walker's once again recruited to return to the island.....(the chaos, you see, upsets that all important sugar business)......and this time, Walker must engineer his Machiavellian schemes in reverse......and bring down Dolores and restore colonial law, order and sugar exports......
You can sense Brando's efforts to find the conflicted, contradictory sides of Walker, but Pontecorvo's busy with his own angry agenda and the film wanders aimlessly back and forth between Walker's machinations and the colonial army's continuous, rampaging massacres and firing squads....all of this scored to a typically haunting, pulsating Ennio Morricone score.
The title's apt, since the film burns with righteous fury, but overall it never achieves the immediate single-minded power that so energized 'The Battle Of Algiers'.......it comes across more like an overly ambitious spaghetti western, complete with amoral hero and piles of dead bodies.
While far from the blistering drama it was clearly supposed to be, 50 years later, it's still worth another viewing. 3 stars (***)
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