Queimada

I've still got multiple Marlon Brando movies from his time as TCM's Star of the Month to get through watching before they expire from the DVR. Up next is one I hadn't heard of before seeing it show up was Burn!. Since the premise sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it.

Marlon Brando plays Sir William Walker, a British man in the 1840s who is clearly based on the American mercenary of the 19th century who fomented rebellions in Central America in order to benefit US business interests. The movie Walker is being sent to an island called Queimada, a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean Antilles that produces a goodly amount of sugar, having burned the original inhabitatns out. The British would like an interest in the sugar, and figures that the best way to do that is to get the African slaves to revolt against the Portuguese. Once the place is independent, it will willingly trade with the British instead of the Portuguese.

With that in mind, the British have sent Walker, who they think is a master manipulator. And he is that good. But he decides to manipulate multiple sides. He meets with one of the slaves, José Dolores (Evaristo Márquez, not a professional actor at the time he made the movie), and gets him to lead the revolt, in part by robbing the territory's national bank. But Walker is playing both sides of the street, as he talks to Teddy Sanchez (Italian actor Renato Salvatori), leader of an influential group of landowners. The plan is to get them to agree to revolt too, and with Sanchez having been influenced by Walker, they'll agree to let the British control the island's sugar trade.

The rebellion is more or less successful, in that Portugal gives up control of the colony. But there's the question of who should leave it. Walker puts Sanchez in control, getting Dolores to agree to this arrangement in exchange for the abolition of slavery. Walker has satisfied his British masters, so he's free to leave Queimada and foment his next rebellion.

However, he's left behind a relationship that's clearly unstable both politically and socially, and it's only going to be a matter of time before things spiral out of control. Sure enough, the former slaves, although nominally free, are no better off than the sharecroppers of the American south and, having led one rebellion, decide to rebel again. The Sanchez government is unable to put this down, and the British, wanting a stable government, call on Walker again to try to put down another rebellion. It's not going to be so easy.

Burn! was directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, who is probably most famous for The Battle of Algiers, a deeply political film about the Algerian war of independence against France. As such, it's no surprise that Pontecorvo takes the political views with which he imbued The Battle of Algiers and brings them to Burn!. However, I don't think he's quite as successful this time. That might be down to the editing; Pontecorvo's original Italian version was apparently a good 15-20 minutes longer than the English-language version that gets shown in the US. I get the feeling however, that it might be more down to the fact that Burn! is based on a completely fictional place, and portraying a time long in the past. To me, it felt like it was too easy for Pontecorvo to take the route of letting a political message overwhelm the narrative story, unlike The Battle of Algiers where the events were fresh in people's minds and the movie has more of the feel of a docudrama.

As a result, Burn! winds up being an interesting premise that doesn't rise to much more than a curiosity. To me, it's more worth watching to see why it doesn't succeed.