Angie Sinned

Today's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Woody Strode, a supporting actor in a bunch of interesting movies in the late 1950s and 1960s. I had one of those roles on my DVR, so when I saw that it would show up in Summer Under the Stars, I decided I'd watch it so I could do a post on it today. That movie is The Sins of Rachel Cade, which concludes Strode's day at 3:30 AM (so, the early hours of August 30).

Once again, Strode is not the star, and he's certainly not playing the role of Rachel Cade. That honor goes to Angie Dickinson. As the movie opens, Rachel is on a train in the Belgian Congo in 1939. Now, if you remember your history, you'll recall two things. One is that up in Europe, the Nazis are about to invade Poland, kicking off the European theater of World War II, with the conquest of Belgium not far behind. The other is that Belgium had a reputation for being even worse to the locals than other colonial powers were in Africa, but surprisingly that bit is almost entirely overlooked.

Rachel gets off in the backwater town of Dibale. She's a missionary nurse, and a Protestant American one at that, which is equally surprising since Belgium was a largely Catholic country and I've have thought the Belgians would only allow Catholic missionaries. Running the local district, or at least the town, is Col. Derode (Peter Finch), who isn't very religious and certainly doesn't think having a woman at the mission is a good idea. He knows what the locals think of the missionaries.

Rachel is about to find that out as she makes her way to the mission to meet her nominal boss, Dr. Bikel (Douglas Spencer). Bikel desperately wants the supply of drugs that was sent along with her, in part because it includes his heart medicine. But that's not going to be necessary much longer, since Dr. Bikel drops dead mere moments after he first meets Rachel. I guess Angie Dickinson's beauty was too much for the old man's heart to take. Rachel and any westerner understands that Bikel died of a heart attack.

The locals, however, would beg to differ. The locals in this part of the interior believe in a religion that has a god up at the top of a sacred mountain which Dr. Bikel tried to climb, a big no-no. As such, the local chieftain, Kalanumu (Juano Hernandez), put a curse on Bikel that seems to have come true with his death. Rachel, meanwhile, tries to go on practicing western medicine, which brings the ire of both Kalanumu and medicine man Muwango (Woody Strode in a horrendous wig at least part of the time).

What Rachel really needs is another doctor to help run the mission clinic. But with a war on, fat chance of that happening. At least, not until a miracle literally falls from out of the sky. An RAF plane crashes, and on that plane was badly injured survivor Paul Wilton (Roger Moore). Paul happens to be a doctor, and, quite surprisingly, an American (pay no attention to Moore's intermittent attempts at an American accent) who's hoping to become an orthopedic surgeon in Boston after the war. He can do basic doctor stuff while he's recovering! As he recovers, he begins to recognize his biological needs, and Rachel is the only white woman around for hundreds of miles.

You can probably guess how soapy it's going to get from here. Rachel wants to stay in the Congo even though she winds up pregnant and Paul is going to be called back to fight with the RAF, or maybe the Americans if the movie ever gets to December 1941. Derode serves as a sort of intermediary, trying to solve everybody else's problems even though he's got his own problems with that Nazi threat always on the horizon.

One of the reviews I read of The Sins of Rachel Cade suggested that the main storyline could have been set pretty much anywhere, and it would be easy to see it as a sort of early precursor to the TV show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The movie is a slow, plodding mess, and one where it would also be easy to see modern-day movie historians commenting very negatively on the portrayal of Africans, who seem to fit every stereotype westerners had in those days about the continent.

It further doesn't help that Roger Moore is badly miscast here, and doesn't even show up until halfway through the movie. Dickinson and Finch do the best they can to try to save the movie, but there's not much they can do.