Hello, Sadness

One of those movies that has shown up on TCM several times in the past that I'd heard about but never got around to watching was Bonjour Tristesse, which I knew is also based on the sort of novel with a reputation. With that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM, I finally decided to record it and watch it to be able to put up a review.

The first interesting thing is that the opening credits are in color (and obviously by Saul Bass even if you didn't pay close enough attention to the credits), but the opening scene is in black and white. In Paris in the present day, Cécile (Jean Seberg) is out at some nightspot, but not necessarily happy, which is because of things that happened last summer down on the Riviera. As you can guess, we're going to get another flashback, but the flashback is in color, which is in some ways a good thing considering the natural beauty of the French Riviera.

Cécile is the daughter of Raymond (David Niven), a widowed businessman who doesn't actually seem to do much business but spends his time wooing a series of youngish women. The current romantic partner is Elsa (Mylène Demongeot), who seems to get along well with Cécile, which isn't exactly a bad thing for someone of Cécile's age. She's enjoying the summer, and when she goes down to the swimming platform at the beach, she meets Philippe (Geoffrey Horn), a law student who is good-looking enough that it's obvious Cécile is going to be romantically interested in him.

And then things change when Raymond learns that Anne (Deborah Kerr), a friend of Raymond's late wife, it looking to come down to the Riviera for the summer and is going to be spending the summer with Raymond and Cécile. Anne is a huge change of pace from Elsa, and not in a good way as far as Cécile is concerned, as Anne is the sort of woman who is a bit more concerned with actually parenting a teenaged girl like Cécile. Anne's, unsurprisingly, isn't happy with Elsa being around. Worse is that she's thoroughly disapproving of Cécile's relationship with Philippe, and that Raymond is taking Anne's side in the dispute.

Things get more complicated, and as you can guess from the opening, the way the summer ends isn't exactly happy. But I'm not going to spoil that.

Bonjour Tristesse isn't going to become one of my favorites. It's based on a French novel, and while the film itself isn't particularly pretentious in the way that foreign arthouse movies of that era would become, there's something about the movie that feels like it's got the same tedious vibe that New Wave movies would have. The acting is good, and the Riviera is lovely to look at, but there's something about the story that's aggravating to the point that I don't really care about the characters.

Vengeance Valley

I mentioned yesterday that I've got two movies on the TCM lineup for Nov. 10 that I wanted to blog about. The second of those movies is Vengeance Valley, which you can see tomorrow at 2:30 PM as part of TCM's salute to Star of the Month Burt Lancaster.

Carleton Carpenter as Hewie provides opening narration which made me think about Tribute to a Bad Man, about how memories from when one was young are disproportionately positive and how driving cattle out in the fresh air was wonderfully invigorating. He then talks about how the problems began when the Strobie brothers walked into town.... Well, technically they're not brothers. Lee Strobie (Robert Walker) is the son of rancher Arch (Ray Collins), while Owen (Burt Lancaster) is Arch's foster son, taken on to help Lee grow into a man. Owen has the responsibility necessary to be ranch foreman, while Lee seems to spend like there's no tomorrow along with being a rather invirtuous person. At the saloon in town, the doctor mentions that Lily (Sally Forrest) needed help with what is childbirth, but that the doctor wouldn't help unless he knows who the father is, which seems like a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.

So on the way back to the ranch, Owen stops off to see Lily and finds Lee's relatively new wife Jen (Joanne Dru) there. Worse is that Lily's brother Dick (Hugh O'Brian) is there. Dick is unsurprisingly worried about Lily's honor, what with this being the Old West, and besides, raising a kid alone would have been a particularly tough thing for a woman in those days. If Lily had been it widow that would have just sucked, but worse is that Lily got knocked up out of wedlock and she's not saying who the father is. But with Owen bringing money, Dick makes the logical conclusion that Owen is the father.

However, we are given more than enough hints early enough on that this may not in fact be the case. Lee has overdrawn his account at the bank by the same exact amount of money that Owen gave to Lily. Also, Lee and Jen's marriage seems to be one of convenience as she needed a man and he needed a wife. If anything, Lee would like to take the money and run, except that he doesn't have a whole lot of money yet. Dad owns the ranch outright, and despite being confined to crutches (hence needing Owen as a foster brother to problem child Lee) hasn't given up control of the ranch for what are really sensible reasons. Who wouldn't expect Lee to run the place into the ground?

The train pulls into town, and getting off the train is Hub (John Ireland), brother to Dick and Lily. Hub isn't really known to the folks in town, which would make him perfect as someone to bring in to help take down Owen for deflowering poor Lily or, if not Owen, then whoever is the actual father. The two main plot threads eventually come together for a finale along a cattle drive, satisfying at least the Production Code office.

Vengeance Valley is a well-enough made little programmer with good performances and a surprisingly grown-up plot. But it is a programmer and there's enough about it that's typical (if not formulaic because of the plot) to early 1950s westerns that I guess there's a reason it's not thought of as a great movie. There is, for example, stock footage used for the cattle drive that definitely sticks out. But the pluses definitely outweigh the minuses here, and Vengeance Valley is a pleasant enough way to spend 80-some minutes.

More World War II intrigue in the desert

I hadn't really thought about it, but the North African campaign of World War II was the setting for a whole bunch of movies, either obvious war films, or films that deal more with the political intrigue in the region against the backdrop of the war. (And then there's movies like Benghazi that deal with what the war left behind.) I would assume that part of it has to do with the sense in the US that North Africa is somehow exotic and therefore cinematically interesting. A movie in the second group that's been sitting on my DVR since 31 Days of Oscar is the 1943 version of The Desert Song. It's getting another airing on TCM Nov. 10, at 12:30 PM, but I'm putting it up two days early because I've got a post for another movie showing up on TCM later on November 10.

The action opens in the the summer of 1939, so just before World War II breaks out in Europe. The opening scenes are in Geneva, where future Allies and the future Axis powers are freely able to mingle since Switzerland remained as neutral as they could be considering that within a year they'd be completely surrounded by Axis powers. A company is trying to finance the building of a railway through the French colonies Sahara from Casablanca to Dakar, which necessitates going around what one map shows as the Río de Oro: for those who don't remember their history, that's part of what in those days was Spanish Sahara, to be annexed by independent Morocco in the 1970s although that's controversial for reasons not having anything to do with the movie. Anyhow, although the French are trying to build this railroad, foreshadowing clearly implies that the Nazis are really trying to get control of it.

Meanwhile, construction of the railroad is slow because of constant interference from an ethnic group called the Rifs. The Rifs are more or less being impressed into service and don't like that, hence the guerrilla attacks. The Rifs are led by a mysterious man named El Khobar; the French under military commander Col. Fontaine (Bruce Cabot) would really like to know who he is.

In town, there's also American journalist Johnny Walsh (Lynne Overman), who tries to get interesting stories from the region out to the world, although it's difficult considering the censorship from the colonial authorities. Johnny has a friend in adventurer Paul Hudson (Dennis Morgan), who fought presumably on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War and is in Morocco as a nightclub singer and pianist. Also doing the nightclub thing is Margot Bendits (Irene Manning), who sees the poor Rifs about to be hauled off and shows some sympathy for them by offering them her glass of water.

El Khobar goes to meet the leaders of the various Rif tribes out in the desert, and even though he's wearing a cloth to cover most of his face it's oh-so obvious that El Khobar is in fact Paul Hudson. The brings up an interesting dilemma. El Khobar seems to be a bit of a criminal at the very least, but since he's the lead and this is a light drama musical it doesn't seem as though there could be any way for the male lead to meet a bad end in the last reel. So how are things going to be resolved? Also, there's the question of how Paul gets all the time to be in so many different places, although that's something that's never really explained in movies like this.

Along the way, Paul and Margot become romantically involved, while Col. Fontaine also has a yen for Margot. He's nominally the antagonist for much of the movie, at least until he learns that he's been played the fool by Nazis. As best as I can tell, the movie ends sometime before the Nazis invaded France and, as you might guess, the good guys defeat the bad guys and the right people get the chance to live happily ever after, or at least as happy as could be with a war on. There's also the chance for Morgan and Irene Manning to perform several nightclub-style musical numbers.

The Desert Song is based on an operetta by Sigmund Romberg that had already been turned into a film once before at the dawn of the sound era. Obviously, since this version is from 1943 and deals explicity with the war, there's a lot that's been updated. It's not a bad movie, although it's decidedly Hollywood. Part of the fun for me was seeing all of the California locations doubling for the Moroccan Sahara. I could swear I've seen some of those rock formations in other movies. Morgan is pleasant enough, a capable if unspectacular actor. The Technicolor is very nice in this print.

Ultimately, this version of The Desert Song is entertaining enough although also not anything that's going to be thought of as an all-time great movie. It's definitely worth a watch, even if it's not the sort of thing you're going to thing of coming back to watch again and again.

La planète sauvage

My DVR can list programs in chronological order of when they were added to the DVR, although it's not always accurate especially when there's more than one airing of a program. In any case, it had a pair of animated films together and I wouldn't be surprised if TCM ran them together because there are some thematic similarities beyond the films both being animated. I already did a post on Watership Down for a subsequent airing; the other movie was Fantastic Planet. (For some reason, the English title is Fantastic Planet even though the original title in both French and Czech, the film being an international co-production, translates to Savage Planet or Wild Planet.

The movie opens with a woman running along a desolate and dangerous landscape with her baby in her arms, as though she's trying to get away from something. She tries running up a hill, only to be stopped by a much larger, blue, God-like hand that flicks her down the hill multiple times until the last time it picks the woman up and drops her from too high a height, killing her and leaving the baby alive. The blue hand is actually the hand of a Draag, a race of advanced humanoids on a planet called Ygam, while the woman and baby are Oms (it's not explicity stated that they're human, but Om is clearly a play on words from the French homme meaning "human"). There are actually several juvenile Draags playing with the Om, and one of them, a girl named Tiwa, has pity and decides to keep the baby Om as a pet.

Tiwa is the daughter of Master Sinh, who has a fairly high position in Draag politics. There has been quite a bit of discussion about the Oms. The Draags consider them Oms a clearly inferior species, although there's also a raging debate on how much intelligence the Oms have. A relatively small number of Oms are kept as pets, but out in the forests and other areas not inhabited by the Draags there are "wild" Oms living and these are seen as pests by the Draags. There are pest-control campaigns carried out, but the Oms reproduce so quickly that the Draags can't keep up.

Then again, the Draags also seem to spend most of their time meditating, for reasons that will be made clear near the end of the movie. How they actually make all the things necessary to keep their civilization going is of course not mentioned. Tiwa, the girl Draag who took an Om as a pet, calls her Om "Terr". She dotes on Terr for a good while, including letting Terr in on her lessons which are carred out through some sort of telepathic necklace. Somehow, this one has a fault that allows Terr to learn the Draag knowledge. So eventually, when Tiwa begins to grow up, she starts tiring of Terr, and Terr runs away to join a tribe of wild Oms.

Not that the Oms are united, as there are various tribes who go after one another. But they're more likely to come together when Terr reads some of the writing on the wall outside the abandoned Draag park where the Oms live and realizes that the Draags are about to carry out another of their eradication campaigns against the Oms. They do kill a fair number of Oms but many survive and one group even kills a Draag. That's a big problem as it's going to make the Draags even angrier and more vicious.

The Oms escape to an area where the Draags used to work with rockets, although they don't need the rockets anymore thanks to their meditation which allows them to travel. The Draags learn where the Oms have gone to, and send another eradication campaign after them. The Oms, for their part, go to the titular wild planet which is a moon of Ymag that the Draags consider uninhabitable. Except that it actually serves a purpose for the Draags....

Fantastic Planet is a movie that got a lot of acclaim when it was first released. On the other hand, the reviews on IMDb are rather more divided. I think that's because Fantastic Planet is a rather surreal movie that in many ways is more about the visuals than the plot. The movie is also quite clearly an allegory, although exactly what it's an allegory for is something that could have multiple interpretations. I found Fantastic Planet mostly interesting, especially in the visuals presenting the dangers that the Oms faced.

If you're willing to try something different and a bit challenging, Fantastic Planet certainly fits that bill and is more than worth watching.

Driving Miss Daisy

Another of those movies that for some reason I'd never gotten around to seeing was Oscar's Best Picture for 1989, Driving Miss Daisy. So when TCM ran it during the 2026 edition of 31 Days of Oscar, I finally recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

Driving Miss Daisy is one of those movies that doesn't need all that much of a synopsis, in part because it's one of those little movies where there's not a whole lot going on, and in part because having won the Best Picture Oscar people tend to know what it's about already. Jessica Tandy stars as Daisy, a Jewish widow living alone in Atlanta in the late 1940s, with just a black housekeeper Idella (Esther Rolle). Daisy has a businessman son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) who is married to Florine (Patti LuPone), a woman who has become assimilated to the point of celbrating Christmas, something that horrifies Daisy. Daisy is also fiercely independent despite getting on in years.

One day, she puts the car in the wrong gear and crashes into the neighbor's yard. Booley knows this means that the insurance company won't want to insure her any longer, but that Daisy won't want to give up driving. Boolie hits upon the idea of hiring someone who can really use a job to be Daisy's chauffeur; and, since Boolie is doing the hiring, Daisy can't fire him. That man is Hoke (Morgan Freeman), who isn't exactly a spring chicken himself.

Now, given the fact that Daisy is independent, and the racial difference, you can be certain that things aren't going to go swimmingly at first. Daisy has attitudes typical for the late 1940s South, but not nearly as bad as a lot of whites would have had in part because she's a minority herself as a Jew (something that comes into much sharper focus when the synagogue gets bombed) and because Atlanta in that era was, from what I've read, less bad than the rest of the South. Daisy learns to trust Hoke, and in turn, Hoke is able to learn from Daisy since, for one example, Daisy was a teacher and Hoke is illiterate.

The two spend 20-plus years in their professional relationship, going through the same sort of pastiche of background historical changes that a lot of movies looking at that era through a longer lens did, until by the early 1970s Daisy is too old to live by herself and is beginning to suffer dementia. Hoke is old too and definitely at the age where he should probably be retiring.

Having watched Driving Miss Daisy, it's easy to see why so many people think it's the fashionable thing to bash it. Ooh, it delivers its race-relations parable in a soft form that's easy for a certain sort of white to enjoy and feel smugly morally superior! Or, it doesn't actually have much of a plot, and besides, it only won because everything else that year was weak. I'm not certain whether it was the best movie of 1989, but at the same time I don't think it deserves the vitriol it gets. At its heart, Driving Miss Daisy is more of a character study, driven by two leads who both give excellent performances and got Oscar nominations. Tandy won, although Freeman lost to Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot; if you've seen the latter, you can say that Day-Lewis probably did deserve the win. But Dan Aykroyd, generally thought of as a comic actor, was also nominated, and deservedly so.

Still, when it comes to the South of that era, I think the period piece I'd recommend first and that I thought of as I was watching Driving Miss Daisy would be The Trip to Bountiful.

Edison, the Man

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR that was getting close to expiring was Edison, the Man. Once again, having seen it, now you get the blog post on it.

I did a post on Young Tom Edison at the end of 2024. At the end of that movie, MGM announced that there would soon be another movie telling the second chapter of Tom Edison's life, which is of course Edison, the Man. This second chapter opens in 1929, on the golden jubilee of light to commemorate 50 years of Edison having come up with incandescent lighting. As you might guess, this is where we're going to get Yet Another Flashback, going all the way back to the early 1870s, before the invention of the light bulb.

Edison has been working as a telegraph operator, but he's an inventor at heart, so he makes his way to New York where he's got a friend, Bunt Cavatt (Lynne Overman), who suggested he come because perhaps he can set Edison up with some research space. That space is in the basement of the business owned by Taggart (Gene Lockhart with a ridiculous beard), who runs a business showing gold prices.

Edison had already invented a stock ticker by this point, but the invention was a failure. In any case, it had given him some experience with electricity which was a new thing at that time. So when Taggart's ticker fails, Edison is able to fix it, getting him an in to Western Union and its research division, run by General Powell (Charles Coburn). Working in the same building is young Mary Stillwell (Rita Johnson). As you might guess, the two fall in love and get married. (In real life, Edison was married twice; Mary was Edison's first wife who died in the mid-1880s after the action of this movie ends.)

Edison comes up with another invention that he's able to sell to Powell and Taggart for a substantial sum, which enables him to build his own laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ and bring over many of the people he had worked with at Western Union. Edison's dream is to come up with an incandescent light to replace gas lighting, although it's an intractable problem. He comes up with some inventions, but eventually he gets to the point where he's heavily in debt and he might even lose the laboratory if he can't come up with another invention to pay off that debt.

That invention isn't the electric light yet; first is the recording of sound on the forerunner of the grammophone. But he's still working on electric lighting, and Bunt is stupid enough to tell reporters that Edison has more or less solved the problem of incandescent light. So we get a sequence in which Edison and his men go through a lot of unsuccessful tries before he finally comes up with a filament that allows for a workable light bulb. But then there's the problem of the creation of the large amounts of electricity necessary to run the bulbs that would light up a whole city. Taggart is still there to oppose Edison....

Edison, the Man is a dramatically interesting movie, although by all accounts it's more or less only tangentially related to the real Thomas Edison. Sure, Edison invented a sound recorder and an incandescent light bulb, but some of the other aspects of his life, such as his being fairly vicious in enforcing his patents, is completely overlooked. Spencer Tracy unsuprisingly does a good job with his role, as do the supporting characters, although the Bunt Cavatt character is a bit obnoxious and unlikable. Edison, the Man is very much a good example of the Hollywood biopic from the era before World War II. Despite its hagiolatrous inaccuracties, it's definitely worth a watch.

Vice Squad

Another Noir Alley entry that was sitting on my DVR about to expire was another one I hadn't heard of, largely because Eddie Muller has been picking a lot of B movies adjacent to noir having already presented the well-known ones from the major studios. This time, the movie in question was Vice Squad.

Jack Hartrampf (Porter Hall) is leaving the apartment of a young woman named Vickie. In the used car lot across the courtyard, a couple of criminals Pete (Lee Van Cleef) and Al (Edward Binns) are trying to steal a car, only to get caught in flagrante delicto by a cop. However, one of the car thieves shoots the patrolman, with Jack running over after the crooks flee, trying to help. The cop who arrives brings Jack down to the station in the hopes that he can give some information.

Meanwile, at the station, Capt. Barnaby (Edward G. Robinson) arrives for another day on the job. He's got a lot on his plate, and having to deal with the shooting of one of the cops serving under him only adds to his problems. And he's going to get another problem. Career criminal Frankie (Jay Adler), trying to get a charge thrown out, decides that he's going to do it by turning state's evidence. He's heard of a plot to rob a bank in the area. He fingers Al, although of course Barnaby doesn't know that Al was involved in the shooting of the patrolman.

Barnaby wants Jack to identify possible shooters in a line-up, but Jack has his own reasons for not wanting to do so, and claiming that it was too dark and his memory isn't so good and all that. The real reason is that Jack has a wife. He runs a mortuary, and claims that he has to go out of town overnights to pick up dead bodies for the funerals. If he cooperates with the police, then word will get out that he was really seeing another woman instead of going away on business.

Also getting involved in the intertwined plot is Mona Ross (Paulette Goddard). She run an "escort" service that provides the sort of women that people like Jack see. What none of them know is that one of the young women who works for her happens to be seeing one of the people who is involved in the bank robbery plot. Mona is also a useful source of information, which might be why Barnaby never really wants to arrest her and shut the whole operation down despite its skirting the edge of legality.

All of the sub-plots wind their way towards coming together, although because of the Production Code, you know that everything is going to be resolved with the bad guys getting what's coming to them. Crime, as they say, does not pay.

Vice Squad was made at a low point in Edward G. Robinson's career, but he still puts in a professional performance. Despite the B budget, the rest of the cast and the story are more than serviceable. The B status and not having been made at a major studio, I suppose it's not surprising that Vice Squad isn't so well known. It's the sort of movie that probably ought to be on some box set, certainly worth a watch if not anything spectacular.

Teddy the Rough Rider

Title card from Teddy the Rough Rider

Quite a few years back, I made mention of actor Sidney Blackmer playing US President Theodore Roosevelt on multiple occasions. One of these is in the Oscar-winning short Teddy the Rough Rider. This was part of a series of two-reelers that Warner Bros. made in Technicolor in the late 1930s and early 1940s about American history.

As the short opens, it's 1895, and Theodore Roosevelt has just been named police commissioner for New York City. There, he roots out corruption with his usual bluster, and starts setting his sight higher. He talks about the need for a strong national defense, which ultimately leads to his leading the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War of 1898. This makes him such a hero that he's catapulted into a run for Governor of New York state, which he wins.

But his aggressive policymaking doesn't exactly please the national Republican party. They respond by getting the incumbent president, William McKinley, to nominate Roosevelt for the vice-presidency in the presidential election of 1900. (McKinley's first vice-president had died in office and since this was before the 25th Amendment the office was vacant, necessitating the nomination of someone new anyway.) The plan is that the vice-presidency is the graveyard of politicians, while Roosevelt won't be able to refuse because of the clamor from America as a whole. Of course, McKinley is assassinated in office. Roosevelt then proceeds to act in ways that would theoretically make the "No Kings" people blanch in horror. Except that as we all know they want their own guy to be king and use the power of the presidency to punish the people they oppose politically. In any case, Roosevelt's actions are portrayed here as an unalloyed good.

Finally, Roosevelt leaves office. A few years later comes the Great War, and all of Roosevelt's sons go off to fight, with one losing his life in the war, something that according to the short was a mortal blow to Theodore Roosevelt too. All of this is compressed into the running-time of a two-reel short.

Teddy the Rough Rider is a hagiography that I suppose could serve as a jumping-off point for a deeper look into the life of Theodore Roosevelt, although the mythology around him and the praise for his imperial presidence means even the deeper looks would be superficial. Blackmer does well with the material he has.

One interesting thing is that although the short was released in 1940 and won the Academy Award for two-reel shorts that year, the print TCM ran was a re-release print as there's a clear copyright date of 1947 on it.

TCM Star of the Month November 2026: Burt Lancaster

Burt Lancaster and Shirley Jones in their Oscar-winning performances in Elmer Gantry (Nov. 17, 10:45 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, and that means that once again it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time, that star is Burt Lancaster, since his birthday is in November; indeed, he was already Star of the Month back in November 2013 for his centenary. Lancaster's movies will be on TCM every Tuesday in November, starting in the afternoons and continuing through the prime time lineup. One good thing about this is that it gives me the chance to take a couple of the photos that I had posted back in the days when I was using Photobucket to host my pictures, and re-upload them to Blogger. Not that I care about Google having my classic Hollywood publicity stills and movie photos, since they're not really mine to begin with.

Burt Lancaster in The Killers (Nov. 3, 8:00 PM)

As far as I can tell, the tribute is roughly chronological, in the sense that the movies aren't strictly in chronological order, but each week is a later period in Lancaster's career than the preceding week. So today's first day is the 1940s and some 1950s; Nov. 10 is mostly 1950s; the 17th focuses on the 1960s; and the last week is the 1970s and the couple of 1980s films Lancaster made at the end of his career. This, as opposed to some tributes that group movies together by genre.

Burt Lancaster romping on the beach with Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (Nov. 10, 8:00 PM)

As an example, From Here to Eternity of course won Oscar's Best Picture for 1953, and it kicks off the prime time portion of the lineup at 8:00 PM on November 10. Immediately preceding that is Sweet Smell of Success, at 6:00 PM, although that movie was released a couple of years later.

Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success (Nov. 10, 6:00 PM)

Finally, I'd like to mention that I'm always thrilled to see another showing of Seven Days in May (Nov. 17, 2:00 PM), since the idea of the permanent bureaucracy and politicized officer corps of the military trying to do an end-around against a democractically elected president is something that's still relevant today.

Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in Seven Days in May (Nov. 17, 2:00 PM)

Not a cartoon

Back in August, I did a post on the Charlton Heston movie 55 Days at Peking, I think for Ava Gardner's day in Summer Under the Stars. It's a movie that I couldn't help but think of as I was watching another Heston film, Khartoum.

Khartoum is the capital of modern-day Sudan, but a bit of a history lesson is in order. Back in the 1880s much of what is now Sudan was a sort of protectorate under Egypt since the two countries were both Muslim, although of different ethnicities, causing no end of friction. Meanwhile, Egypt wasn't particularly strong itself, being more or less a vassal to the Ottoman Empire. Egypt, however, was home to the Suez Canal, completed about a dozen years earlier and a vital transport link. So the British had troops stationed in Egypt to keep the Suez Canal open and the Egyptian government stable.

Further south in what is now Sudan, a man named Muhammed Ahmed (played in the movie by Laurence Olivier) claimed that he had been called upon by the original Muhammed to be the Mahdi (this is how I'll refer to the character for the rest of the post since that's also how he's referred to in the movie), which is a sort of Islamic version of the Messiah that to Christians is supposed to come in the end times. Further complicating matters is that other branches of Islam certainly weren't about to believe that this upstart from backwater Sudan was a Mahdi. So the Mahdi needed to assert absolute political power able to drive out the Egyptians to get the other Muslims to notice. As the movie opens, a former English soldier leads an Egyptian army south, only to get ambushed by the Mahdi's men.

This is a problem for the government of the day back in London, led by William Gladstone (Ralph Richardson). They can't really let the Mahdi overrun Sudan, or even worse get farther north. But there are a whole bunch of Egyptians stuck in Khartoum, and the British can't really let them get stranded to their fate. The fact that the ambushed Egyptians were led by a Briton makes action more necessary, at least for domestic political purposes. An envoy returned from Sudan, Col. Stewart (Richard Johnson), comes up with an idea which is to send Major-General Charles Gordon (Charlton Heston) back to Sudan. Gordon is known among the Sudanese people, and has a good reputation there as a more honest broker who helped destroy the slave trade. Perhaps Gen. Gordon can get the Egyptians out of Khartoum. If not, the British can wash their hands of the whole thing because Gordon's reputation means there's not a need to send the British army yet, which would provide its own set of political difficulties for the Gladstone government.

Gordon decides to accept the mission, but Gladstone, not trusting him, requires that Col. Stewart go along as an attaché. When the two finally get to Sudan, they realize that the Mahdist army has advanced farther north along the Nile than anybody knew, and that they threaten to surround Khartoum and besiege it. Gordon, with his reputation, is able to go to the Mahdi alone and unarmed, which creates a degree of trust between Gordon and the Mahdi to the point that the Mahdi reveals his true intentions.

So a war of waiting ensues, as the Mahdi waits for the right conditions to begin the final assault on Khartoum with Gordon figuring out a way to defend the city long enough for another way to get the Egyptians out besides sending them straight down the Nile which isn't an option. Political pressure mounts on Gladstone back in London, and he finally relents and allows the creation of a relief force under Maj. Kitchener, although he doesn't imbue the force with any urgency. Since all of this is based on real events, you can look up the history yourself to find out how it ended if you want to know going into the movie.

Khartoum is the sort of movie that I don't think could really be made today, at least certainly not in the form that it was made back in the mid-1960s. Modern sensibilities in the filmmaking community would probably insist on the portrayal of the British as unambiguously villanous. As for the film that we have, it's certainly competently made, and well acted, but the screenplay is the weak point here. It's slow, with a story that's more character driven than plot driven, and runs too long at over two hours (the exact running time will depend on whether the print includes the overture and exit music).