An army of religious zealots on the march, led by a charismatic would-be holy warrior convinced he’s the right hand of an angry God. An unstable state beset by schisms in ethnicity and worldview, struggling to resist the onslaught of such a force. A liberal western government, unwilling to be drawn into another costly and bloody regional conflict but unable to ignore the dangerous ramifications of spreading extremism. Sound familiar? Nearly alone amongst epic films of its time, Khartoum feels bizarrely immediate in its political relevance, although it was made nearly fifty years ago and depicts events from the 1880s. Director Basil Dearden’s film recounts events leading up to the capture of the capital of Sudan and the killing of General Charles George ‘Chinese’ Gordon (Charlton Heston) by the forces of Muhammad Ahmad (Laurence Olivier), the self-proclaimed Mahdi who sparked a long war in north-eastern Africa in the last quarter of the Nineteenth century, uniting Sudanese tribes with a programme of insurrectionist holy war aimed not at colonial powers but at rival local powers like Egypt, which still dominated Sudanese affairs, with Britain draw into the conflict because of its alliances. Dearden had been one of the most consistently interesting and substantial British directors of the 1950s and early ‘60s, tackling many different sorts of movie but revealing his most immediate interests in films tackling topical social issues, a dedication to of-the-moment concerns that partly obscured a deeper interest in intersecting tensions between characters, the forces that create the heat in such issues.
Khartoum saw Dearden taking a tilt at a David Lean-style epic, chosen as director after several other high-profile filmmakers turned the project down, and Dearden struggles to maintain contact with his consistent interest in clashing personal and social perspectives. Dearden opens with the Mahdist forces wiping out an Egyptian army led by blundering English hireling Hicks (Edward Underdown), careening columns of mounted warriors from the edge of worlds falling upon a hapless and bedraggled force of smartly uniformed but entirely outwitted modern soldiers. Richard Johnson is Col. John Stewart, a solid and intelligent soldier who delivers a report on the political situation in the Sudan for Prime Minister William Gladstone (Ralph Richardson) and his advisors, including Lord Granville (Michael Hordern) and Gen. Wolseley (Nigel Green). Gladstone is determined not to let the Mahdist uprising become a pretext for more imperial adventuring or protracted warfare, and ponders how to deal with the immediate problem of withdrawing from the region without official intervention. Granville hits on the perfect candidate: Gordon, who as governor of the Sudan a decade earlier helped end slave trading in the region and has since burnished a legendary reputation leading the armies of the Chinese emperor. Stewart declares that if Gordon takes on such a thorny assignment he’d have to be the vainest man alive, but Gladstone makes a personal appeal to Gordon, who accepts.
At first the hard-headed Stewart circles Gordon with his outsized gestures and messianic tendencies with scepticism, and the two men clash on the journey to Khartoum. Gordon finds his righteous actions in the region have earned him a twin-edged reputation, and lead him into a zone of deadly political realities. The Sudanese greet him as a hero, but the man whose help he actually needs to possibly lend a political counterweight to the Mahdi, Zobeir Pasha (Zia Mohyeddin), one of the slaving powers he displaced, refuses to help and curses Gordon for executing his son during the previous conflict. Gordon, an ardent Christian as well as a fighter, soon realises the depth of the danger the Mahdi represents as this more than equal, opposing brand of religious warrior declares his intentions to invade Khartoum and massacre its Egyptian population as precursor to marching on to Cairo and Constantinople.
Heston had been starring in what seemed an unending string of historical epics and spectacle films at the time, usually playing titanic figures beset by the crunching gears of shifting epochs – El Cid, Michelangelo, Amos Dundee, George Taylor. Khartoum has immediate thematic ties with 55 Days in Peking (1963), except that where Heston there played an ordinary man called on to perform great deeds in the midst of siege and clashing civilisations, Gordon is a figure of grandiose associations and vivid contradictions – a pithy cavalier and a man of faith, an intellectual and straightforward man of action, an anachronistic warrior-poet who lends romantic hues to the hard and often ugly business of international politics and soldiering. Khartoum was certainly produced on a big scale, and yet there’s something rather half-hearted about its exploitation of that scale. The Mahdist War had provided the backdrop for that most essential of heroic Imperial-era tales, The Four Feathers (Richardson had starred in Zoltan Korda’s great 1939 film of that), but Khartoum, although nominally exalting in similar spectacles of widescreen vistas of soldiers on camels under the billowing Union Jack and aerial shots of boats travelling on the Nile, lacks the panoramic poeticism of obvious model Lawrence of Arabia (1962), or the sunstroke ferocity Sam Peckinpah brought to Heston’s previous exploration of the messianic leader figure, Major Dundee (1965). The action scenes scattered through the film were surely impressive enough on a giant screen in 70 mm, but they are generally pretty prosaic in shooting and staging.
Dearden is far more interested in the verbal batteries of high-powered men representing schismatic modes of understanding and method, and he sure has a dramatic landscape filled with them: Gladstone, Stewart, Gordon, the Mahdi, Zobeir, wary Khartoum elder Sheikh Osman (Marne Maitland) and even Gordon’s aide Khaleel (Johnny Sekka), whose sense of the here and now is readily foiled by his own diverging trains of mental contemplation. The sallies and lunges of verbal warfare explore this moment from height of the imperial era with echoes of the post-imperial cynicism Dearden deployed in The League of Gentlemen (1960), whilst also situating Khartoum as an interesting by-product and median mark for shifting points of interest in popular culture. It belongs to a phase of epic films about faltering champions like Lawrence and Thomas More whilst looking forward to the more actively scabrous and revisionist modes that would inflect historical filmmaking in the later 1960s and ‘70s. Dearden and screenwriter Robert Ardrey do an excellent job of capturing the mirroring qualities of the wayward English potentate and his African opposite, the lethally shrewd, coolly driven Mahdi: the two men interact like vulcanised rubber, each stirred, fascinated, and frightened by the other’s blend of pragmatic intelligence and genuine conviction that their actions can stir greater forces and exemplify polarised creeds.
Dearden’s interest in debate as its own form of action between figures with violently divergent worldviews and conjoining desires, displayed in works like The Gentle Gunman (1952), Sapphire (1959), Victim, All Night Long (both 1961), and Life for Ruth (1962) here is transferred onto a larger sphere. Characteristically, then, Gordon and the Mahdi essentially write each-other’s fates in a long final confrontation via speech, rendering the actual violent action that consumes a city a mere playing-out of the inevitable. The setting is far from the post-war London Dearden portrayed so well with its blend of homey charm and grimy veracity, though, and the action too expansive for his eye: although he’d been directing films since the early 1940s, this was Dearden’s first epic. Some beautifully framed shots and occasional flickers of thumping cinema do come – exploding grenades thrown right at the camera, a mounted cavalry charge filmed from horseback as a lunging forward rush. But the very large and expensive production plays often like an inflated TV play, and Ardrey’s script, whilst lucid and smart, is too talky. Olivier’s thick blackface makeup and accent was the sort of thing still hailed as great thespian work at the time and which if proffered today would spark a firestorm of Twitter protest. Olivier was rarely less than a compelling presence and he does layer his characterisation, capturing both the political skill and testing, sinuous genius of a leader whose very real sense of divine mission doesn’t blind him to the problems he faces and the danger of a man like Gordon. But it’s not a performance that’s aged well, feeling anachronistic in its plumminess even for 1966.
Heston emerges best here with one of his finest, flintiest performances, inflecting his familiar voice with an English whistle and deftly handling heavyweight acting opponents. When he picks up a young girl and parades through the city to the cheers of the Khartoum citizenry, there’s a sense of showmanship lurking under the bombast that is both amusing and troubling, and a real thoughtfulness that belies the image of strident assurance. Khartoum defines the tension between Gordon’s sense of his own special power and his gradual learning of a new feeling – fear – and the mental and spiritual process he must pass through in order to meet death with a sense of purpose. This aspect lifts Khartoum well above the baseline bombast of many historical action films. Johnson, who never realised his potential as a movie star, is also very good as the no-nonsense Stewart, a character as solidly of the Earth as Gordon and the Mahdi are lofty. The climactic siege and invasion of the city is again merely a competent bit of staged mass slaughter that doesn’t hold a candle for vividness to The Alamo (1960) or 55 Days in Peking. But when the moment comes for Gordon to take his last bow, Dearden deftly recreates the imagery of high Victorian propaganda whilst recontextualising it as the mere act of a defeated chess player toppling his own king. The gesture both mocks and fulfils the urge of the hero towards martyred glory, and galls his opponent with the truth that sometimes your enemy’s head on a pike, far from being the end of your troubles, can be as good as a curse.
