Directors: Basil Dearden and Eliot Elisofon
Writer: Robert Ardrey
Producer: Julian Blaustein
Studio: MGM
Major Stars: Laurence Olivier, Burt Lancaster Charlton Heston, Ralph Richardson, Richard Johnson
Note: In keeping with my policy about movies 25 years old or more, I feel no compunctions about revealing the ending of the film. With that in mind, there are SPOILERS below. If you haven’t seen the film yet, you may want to avoid this review.
Second Note: Someone very nicely pointed out that I had Burt Lancaster listed as playing Gordon when, it was in fact, Charlton Heston. Now, I know this. If you asked me right now who played Gordon, I'd say it was Heston. But somehow I wrote Lancaster and fed it through the entire review. Which is just about a million kinds of embarrassing.
So, mea culpa on the rather-large error. And thanks to the anonymous person who pointed this out and wasn't at all snarky or rude about it.
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They really made the war movie a spectacle back in the day. And Khartoum definitely is a spectacle. The dramatization/historical recounting of the British loss of the Sudan in the 1880s has a cast of thousands. Some represent the armies of the Mahdi, the Islamic mystic who claimed to be Mohammed’s voice on Earth. Others portray the soldiers of Egypt, a British satellite by this point in its history but the nominal “owners” of Sudan. And when they collide on-screen, you know there is no CGI trickery involved.
The story is an intriguing – and true – tale. Prime Minister Gladstone (Richardson) is told a British-led Egyptian army at El Obeid in Sudan has been destroyed by the armies of the Mahdi (Olivier, in blackface – more on that later). It makes the British/Egyptian presence in the major city of Khartoum shaky. Gladstone doesn’t want to commit British forces to save Khartoum and destroy the Madhi. So the British order/persuade the Egyptian ruler to evacuate Khartoum. The former Governor-General of the Sudan, General Charles “Chinese” Gordon (Lancaster Heston), is appointed to carry out the evacuation.
That alone wouldn’t make for much of a film. As it happened historically, Gordon instead reinforced Khartoum to try and force Gladstone to send a British army down the Nile from Egypt to relieve Khartoum. Gladstone eventually gave in and an army was sent, but dithered in Egypt while the army of the Mahdi surrounded Khartoum. By that time Khartoum had been under siege for almost a year and disease was laying waste to the city. The British army arrived two days after Khartoum fell to the Mahdi. His army had massacred the garrison and civilians. Gordon himself was beheaded. The British army retreated back up the Nile and the Mahdi armies controlled much of Sudan for the next decade or so, before a new Anglo-Egyptian army under Kitchener re-conquered the Sudan for the British Empire.
The film follows the history pretty well. It invents a couple of fictitious meetings between Gordon and the Mahdi, where each implores the other to quit the battle. But those meetings do well to show that the Mahdi and Gordon were two sides of the same coin; both felt compelled by their God to be in the Sudan. And since meetings between the leaders of opposing forces was not unheard of in that time, it a forgivable conceit on the part of the film.
Lancaster Heston does a good job as Chinese Gordon. He portrays the general as a man who loves the Sudan and cannot bear to abandon it to the Mahdi. He’s a hard man but one who gives his all for these people. The film doesn’t allow Lancaster to fully portray the full complexity of the man. But that would take a separate film in and of itself; Chinese Gordon was an interesting and complex man.
