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August 7, 2008

Exclusive: Two Cheers for British Colonialism: The Film Four Feathers Reviewed

Dr. Yale Kramer

The recent version of the film Four Feathers, expensively packaged and executed with a cast of wooden, juvenile actors, stirred memories of my boyhood. It made me long to see again what I remembered in 1939 as a grand old spectacular adventure. At that time I didn't care who produced or directed it, or who wrote it, or whether it was based on a novel or not. Nor was I, in all probability, even aware of the subtler aspects of characters' motivation or plot development. To me at that time it was a rousing story in which the handsome good guys won and the cruel bad guys, in their funny hats and dresses, lost. The fact that the hero, Harry Fevesham, won the beautiful girl with a chaste kiss at the end was more or less irrelevant to me, some silly ritual that I had learned to accept as part of the price you had to pay, in addition to the 10 cent admission price, for an exciting Saturday afternoon adventure film.

The current version - without a single English man or woman playing a major role - I found, had been transformed into a confused hodge-podge of anti-British, anti-colonial moralizing; a sermon in multicultural clichés. More important, it bears little or no relation to either the spirit or point of the novel on which it purports to be based. And what is worse is that the anti-Western propaganda is, like all propaganda, based on lies and distortions. There are many literary and historical vehicles that are available for film adaptation that might allow for a depiction of the complex truths about British colonialism - but Four Feathers is not one of them. Surely the producers, director, and writers wanted it both ways - to get their political rocks off and at the same time have a big slice of the pie by trying to sell the movie as a rousing adventure-romance like the 1939 version.

The current version of Four Feathers is actually its seventh incarnation. The first in 1915 and the second in 1921 were, of course, silent. The third, in 1929, had sound effects and music, but no spoken dialogue. None of these were more than primitive versions of the story and are antiques, unavailable for current viewing. The 1939 version was next and still remains the best. Not a great film, but a grand one. (This was followed, in 1955, by a degraded version of the last one with the same script but a different cast and title - Storm over the Nile - and produced to exploit the then new "wide-screen" format. Then, in 1977, still further down on the food chain, came a "made for TV" version.)

Although much simplified and condensed, the 1939 version, produced by that great Hungarian monger of British myth, Alexander Korda, was close in spirit to the original novel. It tells the story of Harry Fevesham, his close friend and fellow officer in the British army, Jack Durrance, and the beautiful young woman they both love, Ethne Willoughby. She, tender hearted and caring, but faithful to the values of her father, a retired general in the army, holds Durrance in high regard as a friend, but has given her heart to Fevesham.

Harry is a complicated young man. While his brother officers enjoy drinking and the rough and tumble of sports and army life, Harry enjoys poetry and music - definitely a bit of a softy underneath that handsome Lieutenant's uniform. He is product of both his parents: on the one side he is the heir of a long tradition of military heroes and the only son of a courageous but overbearing father who expects him to carry on the tradition; his mother, wholly different from his father, "remarkable for the refinement of her intellect as for the beauty of her person." Harry is closer to his mother, perhaps too close. She dies during his childhood, all through which he has been haunted by fears of battle and his own cowardice. All of this is only hinted at in the Korda movie, but it gives a clue to his actions after he becomes engaged to Ethne. Soon after this announcement and right after he hears that his regiment is off to the wars in Sudan to rescue General Gordon in Khartoum he has a crisis of courage and in an act he comes to regret, resigns his commission and leaves the army. When his brother officers hear this, three of them send him a white feather - an accusation of cowardice - and when Ethne hears of this she is astonished and humiliated and adds a fourth feather.

Harry becomes a social pariah and spends the rest of the movie trying to redeem himself by going to the Sudan and proving his own courage by rescuing Durrance and the other two officers who had sent him the white feathers. Through much guile and suffering he manages to do this but, alas, he appears to have lost his chances with Ethne. Durrance has returned to England blind and Ethne feels out of a sense of duty that she must marry him. But when Harry returns and redeems himself in Ethne's eyes Durrance sacrifices his love of Ethne and bows out of the picture. A sad but happy ending.

The novel on which these seven films were based was written in 1902 by A.E.W. Mason and has, since then, never been out of print. Mason was born in London in 1865 and raised in a middle-class family. His father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker. He graduated from Oxford in 1888 and became an actor. While in the theatre he began to write plays and eventually turned to writing fiction. He became a gifted writer of adventure and detective novels. His most famous novel and the one that has stood the test of time is Four Feathers. Having achieved fame and fortune by the time he was 38, he did not stop there. A tremendously energetic man, he was a sportsman, loved mountain climbing, hunting, and riding. An entertaining social companion and a great raconteur, he was socially in demand wherever he was known. He had a successful career in politics as a Member of Parliament, and during World War I served as an infantry officer until he became a spy for the newly established Secret Service. In 1937 he was offered a knighthood but, perhaps characteristically, turned it down. He died in 1948 after living to see Four Feathers filmed four times.

The questions remain: Why has this novel prevailed for over a hundred years despite the fact that it is not a very distinguished literary work? What is there about it that continues to capture the popular imagination? Is there any truth value at all in the current movie version?

Although much of the novel Four Feathers is set in Sudan during a period of Britain's military involvement there, it is not a "war novel." There are no battle scenes, no shots are fired in anger, in fact no fighting of any kind takes place. It is essentially a psychological novel with a touch of romance and a dollop of adventure in an exotic military setting. When I say "psychological" I don't mean Dostoyevski or Proust. Alfred Edward Woodley Mason was a Victorian Englishman. And there is just so much psychology to be found in a Victorian Englishman. But Mason did have a fascination with the dynamics of fear, cowardice, and guilt, and the human complexities they engender. And that is what Four Feathers is about.

In the current version of Four Feathers there is a written explanation of the meaning of the symbol of the white feather even before the story begins. The explanation is repeated during an early scene in which Harry Fevesham receives the feathers from his brother officers. These explanations are obviously for the sake of an audience that is unfamiliar with the icons and rituals of honor and dishonor. In the original - the novel - there is no explanation; the gesture is understood by characters and readers alike. This is true as well for the Korda film version. Even as late as 1939 audiences understood that a white feather meant that you were a coward. What has happened in the intervening 60 years to make cowardice, dishonor, and manliness such alien ideas?

The novel suggests that Harry Fevesham has been powerfully influenced by his sensitive mother and that this influence has tended to undermine an appreciation for the sterner values of his father. Thus his manhood ideology has been compromised. If his father had not been a courageous military officer and a strong influence in the family Harry would have not had a problem, he'd have become a poet or philosopher. But as things develop in the novel part of him wants to be like his beloved mother and part like his admired and feared father. The novel turns out to be a "becoming a man" novel, and the rest of the story is devoted to this passage - his transformation.

The newest movie utterly fails in understanding Harry or any aspect of this universal problem, which is perhaps why it has failed so badly with critics and audiences. In the film it is impossible to understand Harry's motivation in resigning his commission and turning tail. The first few scenes show Harry as a handsome muscular hunk of a guy playing a really rough game of rugby, thwacking guys and being thwacked left and right. No sign of any flinching - he obviously enjoys a good fight. Instead of rendering him as a slender poetic type, quiet and thoughtful, as the book depicts him, the movie shows him as utterly, unconflictedly masculine. He carouses with his mates, he wenches with his girlfriend - in short he has already achieved "real manhood" at the beginning of the movie so his cowardice is baffling and unbelievable.

The second important failure in the movie is that Harry never does what he is supposed to do in order to become transformed from coward to hero. In the book he faces various tests and challenges and surmounts them on his own (with a bit of help from his sidekick, a faithful Arab named Abou Fatma). In the movie it is Abou Fatma who becomes the real and only hero of the movie because he is the one who, through his guile, nobility, and courage, rescues Harry and his brother officer. In the movie, Harry seems to have no resources at all and thus does not deserve either our admiration or the girl at the end. The transformation has gone on in reverse. Instead of going from coward to "real man" he has gone from "real man" to inept wuss. The final shot in the film shows Abou Fatma, the noble savage and knight-like hero (who has been changed from an Arab in the book to a black slave in the film) walking in a stately manner into the desert sunset with his camel, ready to perform more heroic deeds.

Clearly, the makers of the movie were not able to withstand the powerful pull toward androgyny that our modern culture casts over its men.

"Movies are for entertainment; if you want to send a message, go to Western Union." This was the famous advice given by Samuel Goldwyn, when he had read the script of an ardent young writer who wanted to express his views about serious social issues in his screenplay.

Shekhar Kapur, the Indian filmmaker who directed Four Feathers, must have been too young and far away to have heard Goldwyn's advice, because his new movie has more messages than Hotmail. Unfortunately the messages are neither new nor true. He and his writers, Hossein Amini and Michael Schiffer, are anti-colonial, anti-authority, anti-British and multicultural - exactly the kind of clichéd thinking you would expect from contemporary filmmakers (as distinct from old fashioned movie makers) who fancy themselves social critics. The trouble is that they are compelled to sacrifice not only artistic meaning, but what is worse, almost all aspects of historical truth. There is hardly a scene in this epic that is not a distortion of history.

Kapur has tried to shift the focus of the book - which is almost completely devoid of political values - from a story about individuals to a tract against British manners, morals, and politics. Incoherent about what it wants to be, it is neither artfully critical of British attitudes as was "Oh, What a Lovely War," nor is it a grand adventure tale about a flawed hero.

There is only one major character in the film who is worthy of our admiration, interest and respect: Abou Fatma, the black slave. All of the other male characters are white, British, and despicable. The young officers are callow, cruel, feckless, and stupid, except for Fevesham himself, who once he gets to the Sudan becomes more or less of a basket case and pitiable. The older British characters are pompous, supercilious fools or treacherous hypocrites. There isn't one redeeming quality to be found among the white characters.

The movie suggests over and over that the war that is being pursued by the British is an immoral colonial struggle - that the Brits are trying to defeat an uprising of oppressed, exploited natives in order to maintain Britain's Empire. This is so far from the truth that some clarification is in order.

The movie takes place around the time of the fall of Khartoum in 1885. At that time all of Sudan was threatened by a warlike charismatic Muslim leader - a religious fanatic who declared himself the messiah (The Mahdi). The Mahdi's aim was to lead his army of followers on a Jihad to rid the Sudan of all unbelievers and foreigners who did not believe that he was the messiah.

Contrary to the distortions of the movie, the Sudan was not part of the British Empire. It was, in fact, governed fecklessly by the Egyptians. Gladstone, the British Prime Minister at the time, wanted nothing at all to do with the Sudan and sent General Charles Gordon to Khartoum for one purpose and one purpose only, and that was to organize a rescue of British, European, and Egyptian nationals who were still left in Khartoum. He was sent without an army and his mission was to lead them north back to Cairo. This he was unable to do because by the time he arrived in Khartoum the forces of the Mahdi had cut off all escape routes.

More than anything, Gladstone and his government wanted to extricate themselves from the Sudan without sending forces to rescue Khartoum. The problem was that English public opinion was strongly opposed to letting Khartoum fall to the Mahdi with the possible loss of thousands of lives.

Contrary to the distortions of the movie, British intentions were not to exploit and oppress the natives of the Sudan but to rescue those threatened by them. Gladstone temporized for months but was finally forced to send a rescue expedition which, when it eventually arrived, was about a week too late. There was no one left to rescue and the head of General Gordon had already been separated from his body and brought to the Mahdi. Having no further mission in the Sudan, the rescue forces removed to Cairo in the north.

Contrary to the distortions of the movie there was no British Army that was defeated in any battle in the Sudan - ever. The rescue forces encountered the Mahdi's army on one or two occasions on their way to Khartoum and sustained about 100 casualties, but there was never even a remote possibility of serious British loss. The movie, however, depicts with relish the near total destruction of the vaunted British tactical Square. Kapur lovingly shows the English redcoats falling apart and panicking before the power of the Mahdi's army.

Six months after the fall of Khartoum and the death of Gordon, the Mahdi himself died of typhus. But before he died he hand picked his successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi. For 10 years, the people he ruled over in Sudan found little else but war and famine in their lives. Relations with neighboring cultures remained tense throughout the Khalifa's rule, largely because of his commitment to using the Jihad to extend the Mahdi's version of Islam throughout the world. He believed, naively, that he could spread his dogma throughout Egypt, Turkey and Europe. He sent letters to Queen Victoria in 1887 and again in 1889. One of them reads in part:

If you will believe and testify that there is no god but Allah, and that Mohammed is the apostle of Allah... and become subject to my rule, I will receive you and give you tidings of prosperity and safety from the torments of the fire. You will be secure and content. What is for me will be for you; what is against me will be against you. A love in Allah will arise between us, and He will pardon you all the sins you have committed in the time of your unbelief. . . . But if you refuse ... then know that you are in great error...For the men of the Mahdi are men of iron. Allah gave them a nature to love death. He made it sweeter for them than cool water to the thirsty. Hence are they terrible to the unbelievers...They care not for the life of this world, the transient...but they look instead for eternal bliss and dainty living to be allotted to them in the world to come....

One would give much to see the expression on the Queen's face when she read these words.

In 1889 the Khalifa ordered an invasion of Egypt that ended in the defeat of one of his armies and signalled a wake-up call to the Egyptians and their protectors, the British. In 1896 the British government authorized Horatio Herbert Kitchener to launch a campaign to re-conquer Sudan for the Egyptians. It took almost two years to train and transport a large army 1600 miles south to Omdurman, where the Khalifa had decided to make his stand.

On September 2, 1898, the Khalifa committed his 52,000-man army to a frontal assault against the Anglo-Egyptian force, consisting of 8,000 British troops and 17,000 well-trained Egyptians who were massed on the plain outside Omdurman. The outcome was never in doubt, largely because of superior British firepower. During the five-hour battle, about 11,000 Mahdists died. Anglo-Egyptian losses amounted to 48 dead and fewer than 400 wounded.

Many in Sudan welcomed the downfall of the regime. For 20 years it had been a fragmented theocratic kleptocracy whose main industries were religious conversion, plunder, and slave trading. Sudan's economy had been all but destroyed during this time and the population had declined by approximately one-half because of famine, disease, persecution, and warfare. Moreover, none of the country's traditional institutions remained intact. Tribes had been divided in their attitudes toward Mahdism, religious brotherhoods had been weakened, and religious leaders had vanished.

In January 1899, an Anglo-Egyptian agreement restored Egyptian rule in Sudan as part of a joint authority, and Britain assumed responsibility for governing the territory on behalf of the khedive.

After restoring order and the government's authority, the British dedicated themselves to creating a modern government. Five thousand men were set to work rebuilding Khartoum, new streets were laid out, 7,000 trees were planted and government buildings were built. More than £100,000 was subscribed by the British public to build what is now the University of Khartoum. Among other important changes jurists adopted penal and criminal procedural codes similar to those in force in British India, commissions established land tenure rules, and the rate of taxation was fixed for the first time in Sudan's history.

Early attempts at eliminating slavery and slave trading were baffled because these practices were so widely accepted and were the basis of so much of the economy; eventually it was decided that abolition was best accomplished gradually, and it was not until 1940 that slaving was eliminated under the British.

During the first two decades of British rule, economic development occurred only in the Nile Valley's settled areas. The British extended telegraph and rail lines to link key points in northern Sudan but services did not reach more remote areas. An irrigation dam near Sannar, completed in 1925, brought a much larger area in Al Jazirah under cultivation. Planters were able to send cotton by rail from Sannar to Port Sudan for shipment abroad. This eventually made cotton the mainstay of the country's economy and turned the region into Sudan's most densely populated area.

Perhaps Britain's most important legacy was the development of a sound government administration. At first all the senior officials were British and the minor officials were Sudanese, but gradually the Sudanese Civil Service developed a cadre of honest, hardworking young men who came to be Sudan's governmental elite in the late 1920s and 1930s.

The mainstream of political development occurred among this educated class, those who had careers in the central administration and envisioned an eventual transfer of power from British colonial authorities to their class. And as Kipling had predicted, "In due time the demand will go up 'the Sudan for the Sudanese.'" This happened soon after the end of World War II, and on January 1, 1956 Sudan became completely independent. Fifty years is perhaps too soon after independence for the Sudanese to acknowledge their debt to British paternalism.

The British, in 1899 - seeing that Sudan was weakened, a threat to Egypt no longer, and seeing that it was economically worthless, the hell-hole of the universe, made up of little more than swamps in the south and deserts in the north - could have, should have gone home and had a cup of tea. In 1899 Sudan was a starving, primitive, fragmented country, presenting nothing but insurmountable problems. Or they could have plundered it or found some ingenious way of exploiting its hapless natives. But the British didn't do either of those things. Some crazy British sense of rightness and responsibility kicked in. Perhaps Churchill said it best in his history of the Sudan War, The River War: "What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations? To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off of the slave, to draw richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain--what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort? The act is virtuous, the exercise invigorating, and the result often extremely profitable."

In the period from 1899 through 1955, the Brits abolished slavery - a practice that had gone on for hundreds of profitable years - rebuilt Khartoum, established an educational system, built railroads, a telegraph, roads, an airport, an irrigation system that reclaimed millions of acres, established a solvent economy, provided a peaceful and stable existence, established an educated class of governors, eliminated famine, and increased the population.

Now, let's see what happened after the Sudanese rid themselves of their colonial oppressors.

Two years after the Sudanese achieved independence as a parliamentary republic, General Ibrahim Abboud led a military coup that ended the parliamentary system. In the meantime the black south, mostly Christian and/or traditional in religious belief, revolted against the Muslim northern government. Unable to improve the weak economy or end the southern revolt, Abboud agreed to re-establish a civilian government in 1964. This was followed by another military coup in 1969. This time a Leftist government was established which banned all political parties and nationalized industries and banks. In 1973 a "people’s congress" was elected to draw up a new constitution. This done, more groups and sub groups were formed, some military, some religious, a veritable alphabet soup of revolutionary political parties. This round of fighting for power continued for another 10 years until 1983, when open war between the north and the south - between the Muslims and the blacks - broke out in an uncontainable way. Since then - for the past 19 years - the longest war in modern African history has been going on.

Since the beginning of independence more than 5,000,000 people have died in various wars and revolutions. At this time there is no economy to speak of because there is no stability. The blacks can choose between living in their own habitat which is bombed and sown with land mines constantly by the Sudanese government dominated by Muslim Arabs, or flee to the area around Khartoum as refugees subject to violence, rape, abduction, looting, and exploitative labor situations which are not much different than they were in the 19th century when slavery was dominant.

So much for independence from colonial oppressors.

The fact is that there are some forms of empire and colonialism that are good and some that are bad and some in between. It is also true that there are times when colonies are ripe for independence and times when independence is premature and it is sometimes hard to tell when the time is ripe.

Roman Imperialism was a good thing; it brought us Western civilization. British colonialism brought the world the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Trinidad, Mauritius - not a bad heritage to pass on to a world that values freedom and democracy.

Had the makers of Four Feathers spent less time in film school and more time studying history they might have made a better film.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Yale Kramer, a former faculty member and graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, psychoanalyst and former Clinical Professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is the author of Talking Back to Liberal Power. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, American Spectator and The Public Interest.

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