THE WILD GEESE (1978)

In The Dogs of War "everybody comes home" is the motto of Christopher Walken's mercenary hero, and he abides by that to the point of seating corpses on planes. In Andrew V. McLaglen's Wild Geese, the film that started a mercenary subgenre and arguably made Dogs of War possible, Richard Burton's mercenary hero orders the corpse of one of his men dumped from a plane to lighten its load and save fuel. That's probably the only instance in which Geese is more realistic than Dogs. In general thematic terms the pictures are similar: mostly white mercenaries get to run amok in an African dictatorship, paid by shady British business interests. In Geese retired General Allen Faulkner (Burton) is hired by a powerful businessman (Stewart Granger) to break a deposed president out of his prison. This businessman is powerful enough to persuade the British mafia to give up a vendetta against mercenary Shaun Fynn (Roger Moore), who has whacked a gangster for tricking him into becoming a drug mule. Faulkner wants Fynn on his team, along with logistics expert Rafer Janders (Richard Harris) and some other dependable colleagues. Despite repeated compressions of their schedule, the operation to free President Limbani (Winston Ntshona) goes off smoothly until the plane sent to pick up the team takes off again without them. Granger has cut a deal with the current regime and has no more use for Limbani or the mercenaries, who seem doomed to destruction by the ruler's crack Simba troops. Their only way out may be to start the civil war that Granger had apparently intended to incite....

 

Note: the liquor bottle above is for acting purposes only -- Drink Responsibly.

Below: Roger Moore can't stand the criminal environment he finds himself stuck in.

While the synopsis sounds grim and cynical the actual movie is less grim in tone than Dogs of War. There's a "Boy's Own Adventure" air to the project that may be inescapable given the fantastical images of Burton et al waging war in Africa. It's hard to imagine them as mercenaries because it's hard to imagine them as anyone but the stars they are. Their characters are one-dimensional. Janders pines for his son off at boarding school; Fynn is arrogant; Faulkner is practically a cipher. The most character development he gets is an art-imitates-life indication that the Burton character does nothing but fight or drink. But we're meant to believe that they're all inspired by the nobility of the suffering Limbani. In fact, none is more impressed than the Afrikaaner mercenary Pieter Coetzee (Hardy Kruger), who despises "kaffirs" but spends much of the picture symbolically carrying Limbani on his back. Screenwriter Reginald (Ten Angry Men) Rose aspires to political relevance in the dialogue scenes between Kruger and Ntshona, which amount to a plea for peace and reconciliation in the South Africa where the picture was shot. McGlaglen can only manage to make the scenes feel heavyhanded and superfluous. The film's pretensions of relevance also show glaringly in Maurice Binder's title sequence, scored by Joan Armatrading's ponderous theme song. Binder is the man who did the title bits in the old James Bond films, and while no naked women cavort across the map of Africa here, there's something about his style and the reminders of Bond in the song-and-symbols combination that gives a bad taste to this opening earnestness. In any event, you'll probably have forgotten about suffering Africa after the second act's tedious service-comedy training sequences. Also part of this alleged comedy are the mincing mannerisms of a homosexual medic (Kenneth Griffith), but to be fair this character gets a heroic death scene later and his fitness for duty under fire is never questioned.

 

 

 

McLaglen didn't have Jack Cardiff shooting his film, so Wild Geese lacks the dark grandeur of Dogs of War's night assault scenes. Once the film becomes a pursuit of the mercs by the Simbas it develops some momentum, but McGlaglen too self-consciously inserts bits of still-modest gore (a slit throat, characters spitting up blood) to make the action seem more "adult." He only makes those bits look like exploitation in the worst sense of the word. Neither he nor Rose really do much to make the most of the master thespians in their employ. When Burton and Harris (both cold sober, reportedly) yell at one another, it only makes their characters look less professional. It makes you more appreciative of the casting of an aloof Christopher Walken in Dogs of War; his emotional self-limitation makes him more convincing as an all-business merc. The films end similarly, however, with the protagonists committing bridge-burning acts of violence, as if cinema couldn't yet accept mercenaries in their true businesslike amorality. Wild Geese may not exactly be a moral picture, but it upholds an old ideal of heroism invoked in the poster's description of the mercenaries as "Modern Musketeers." While it started something somewhat new in cinema, it's really part of an older tradition of exotic adventure movies. If it wasn't instantly dated by its attitude or its aging stars, it would soon look very dated alongside the films it inspired. But if you like the stars and, as many must have, you like the idea of people like Burton, Harris and Moore kicking ass and mowing down multitudes, Wild Geese can still be an enjoyable if also slightly campy experience.

MAN IN THE WILDERNESS (1971) and LAST CANNIBAL WORLD (1976)

At first I was just going to review Ruggero Deodato's first essay into cannibal cinema, which I saw for the first time earlier this month under its exploitative nom de video Jungle Holocaust. I had a backlog of other films to write up, however, and in the meantime I read venom5's survey of Italian cannibal and related horrors at his Cool Ass Cinema blog. In it, he noted that the pioneer film of the cannibal genre, Umberto Lenzi's Man From Deep River (as yet unseen by me) was a retelling of A Man Called Horse, the movie that made Richard Harris an unlikely Western star. That point provoked me to ponder the differences between the American wilderness genre and its Italian counterpart -- counterpoint may be the better word. It occurred to me while thinking about it that Indians never factored much in spaghetti westerns. I've never seen one in which they play the noble-savage role (with increasing emphasis on noble) that became common in American films. You see Mexicans more than Indians in Italian westerns, at least in my experience. The absence of Indians is understandable, I suppose, since American moviemakers are playing out issues from their nation's recent past that have no parallel that I can think of for the Italian moviegoer. Yet Italians seemed to have a distinct idea about aboriginal cultures, or at least their exploitation producers did, and it's profoundly different from the prevailing American idealization of Natives. Arguably it extends to profoundly different ideas of nature itself and the possibility of achieving harmony with it.

So I decided on a comparative approach, matching the Deodato with an American counterpart. I happened to have one at home: Richard C. Sarafian's Man in the Wilderness, starring none other than Richard Harris. It actually isn't the ideal film for comparison, since its Indians are rather peripheral to its story, but there are a few moments with surprisingly exact counterparts in Last Cannibal World, leading me to wonder whether Deodato was commenting on or parodying Sarafian.

Man in the Wilderness is at the least a case of truth in advertising. It consists mostly of Richard Harris in the wilderness. He's Zach Bass, a member of a peculiar trapping expedition circa 1820. The trappers are hauling a big boat through our title wilderness, intending to ride it down the Mississippi. It's a powerful eerie image to open the film with, and its progress gives us a visual jolt whenever we see it, but it promises a stranger, more interesting film than Sarafian actually made.

John Huston and his ship-on-wheels often seem to be part of a different, more surreal or sinister film than Man in the Wilderness, but that's where they're stuck.

The trouble begins when Zach is mauled by a bear in a nicely staged scene with some nasty wound effects. By the time his comrades have shot the bear down, Zach is at least half dead. It tells you about the influence Italian films have had on me when I assumed, when one of the trappers says, "At least he left us some meat for the rest of the journey," that the trapper meant Zach, not the bear. I realized my error quickly. The chief of the trappers, Captain Henry (John Huston) is concerned mainly with giving Zach a Christian burial before they move on. Since Zach is still alive, he details two men to stay with him until he dies, then bury him. He gives them two days; if Zach's still alive then, they should kill him, bury him, and rejoin the main group. Harris is uncommunicative but conscious enough to hear this.

Two days later, it looks as if Zach is actually getting better thanks to the minimal patching up he received. Orders are orders, however, -- except when Indians are close. The two trappers, one unwilling to kill Zach in the first place, chicken out and skedaddle, abandoning the still gravely hurt man in the middle of nowhere. From here the film consists of Zach's slow recovery, from dragging himself to a watering hole to regaining the use of his legs, from scavenging in rivalry with wolves to trapping and hunting on his own. For variety's sake we're treated to flashbacks that reveal Zach as a sullen, undemonstrative fellow. We see him as a child getting rapped repeatedly on the knuckles for refusing to answer the question, "Who made the world?" One of this film's problems is that we can't tell from this scene whether little Zach is a precocious agnostic or clinically dense. In later life we see him about to abandon his pregnant wife, but not without telling the child in her womb that he wishes them both the best despite his belief that it's foolish to be born in such a world as ours. Later yet, we see him return to find the wife dead from childbirth and his son a toddler tended by Zach's mother-in-law. Our hero was content to leave things that way, reluctant even to greet the boy. We're rooting for a real winner here, but rooting for him to do what?

The trappers continue on their way but take a detour while the Indians dither over whether to attack them. Captain Henry grows obsessed with Zach, believing like many of his men that their colleague is still alive and most likely powerfully pissed off at all of them. Having a ship in his picture with John Huston as its captain is Sarafian's way of begging for comparisons with Moby Dick, but screenwriter Jack DeWitt gives Huston little to work with. The old man has a striking costume and a proven presence on film, but he isn't sufficiently villainous or crazy to get us anticipating a showdown between him and Harris. That's a good thing, I suppose, since that showdown is an incredible anticlimax that leaves you wondering what the point was of it all.

Sarafian's wilderness isn't a benign place. It tests people, but like many wilderness films it seems to argue that the hero's ordeal has a positive or purifying effect. The location work is the film's strongest suit apart from the imagery of the ship on land. Harris's performance is almost entirely physical. He has little more than a dozen lines of dialogue in the whole picture, it seems, but he does invest his role with nonverbal expressiveness. Apart from Huston, the trappers (including James "Scotty" Doohan) are a nondescript bunch. The Indians notice Harris's existence occasionally, but usually leave him alone because he wears some sort of Indian sign. Henry Wilcoxson is their chief, which rather limits their ability to represent natural authenticity. He has a big scene with Harris in which he talks entirely in untranslated native language. There are no initiation scenes of the kind that made Man Called Horse notorious. There is, however, a moment in which Indians teach Zach Bass about humanity, and this is where I found an evil echo in Last Cannibal World.

On his road to recovery, on the trail of the trappers, Zach comes across an Indian woman by a riverbank. She's there to give birth to a baby. Our hero watches raptly, and the sight inspires the flashback to his first and only sight of his son. His eyes appear to ache with sympathy for the mother as he suddenly and clearly misses his own child. This feeling grows stronger as he sees the father lovingly claim the new baby and take the mother home.This sets up what the writer wants to be the payoff of the final confrontation between Harris and Huston, and while you can see what his point was, it's still an anticlimax, and a fatal one for this sort of film. Still, we have to note this one moment when the taciturn, solitary white man learns the value of family from "savages."

In Last Cannibal World, Robert Harper (Massimo Foschi) is on the run from his cannibal captors somewhere in the Philippines when he pauses to espy a similar sight. While the Indian mother in Wilderness is fully clothed, the Cannibal mother is as naked as most of the rest of the cast. With louder birth pains she brings her baby into the world. Like the Wilderness mother she bites through the umbilical cord. She then throws the baby into a river, presumably to be eaten by an alligator.

Apart from scenes of violence against animals (which Deodato denies shooting in a video intro to the Shriek Show DVD), this business with the baby is the most appalling part of a pretty appalling film. Deodato's primitives have no family values that we can notice, and maybe no values whatsoever. Their collective feasts of human flesh or fresh-killed alligators are free-for-alls that see fellow tribesmen fighting each other for the best bits. They seem to be envisioned as sub-human; one civilized character claims that the tribespeople don't even have a language. This is meant to be more alarming to the audience because, while the American wilderness films are set in the past, the Italian cannibal films take place in the present.

Harper's sojourn among the cannibals is in no way purifying. Quite the opposite; he ends up raping the native woman (Me Me Ly) who helps him escape a captivity intended to fatten him up into alligator bait. When one of his civilized colleagues reunites with him, he thinks that Harper is going insane. In the thematic climax of the film, Harper faces down his last pursuers by ripping the heart from one he's just killed and tucking into it as a form of intimidation. I was reminded of this a little when in Wilderness Harris chomps on a hunk of raw meat he'd just cut from a still-quivering buffalo after beating wolves away from the body. That moment is meant to make you a little queasy, but the Deodato scene is far more horrific and powerful because Harper has turned cannibal not from necessity, but out of pure viciousness. It represents his victory over the cannibals but also his final descent into savagery, his eventual return to civilization and his reported marriage and retirement to Mexico notwithstanding.

Last Cannibal World hearkens back to Man Called Horse in its ritual humiliation of Harper, who is stripped naked, has his penis fondled by curious or contemptuous natives, and is pissed upon by children. In the wilderness films you can construe this treatment as a kind of breaking down of the defective "civilized" personality before the hero can be built up as a better, more natural man. In Deodato's film there's no room for idealistic fantasy; Harper's story is an ordeal of degradation from beginning to end, which he survives only by becoming more savage than his oppressors.

Massimo Foschi is made to fly like an eagle (or an airplane) by the literal cavemen of the Last Cannibal World. Below, an eagle resents the comparison.

Critics have been speculating for nearly forty years about the roots of the Italian fascination with cannibals. If the cannibal films are a response to the American wilderness films they can be seen to some extent as a grim satire on American noble-savagery. I don't know if the notions about noble savages popularly identified with Jean-Jacques Rousseau had much influence in Italy, but I do know that Italians were little exposed to aboriginal peoples compared to other European powers that had more extensive colonial empires. Maybe they had no colonial guilt to drive them to idealize the primitive, and maybe they had a stronger sense of original sin than other nations that immunized them against noble-savage idealism. I have to defer to the experts on this one.

I've long been a defender of Deodato's magnum opus, Cannibal Holocaust (1980), and having now seen Ultimo Mondo Cannibale I can definitely say that the later film is an advance on the earlier one. Holocaust is often taken as a satire on "Mondo" moviemakers, but in the context of Deodato's career it could also be an act of self-criticism, or willful self-parody. While holding no illusions about its cannibals, Holocaust takes their side, to an extent, against its predatory filmmakers. That's progressive compared to Last Cannibal World, but just about anything would be. More so than Holocaust, the earlier film is one whose power must be acknowledged in spite of, or perhaps because of the profound feelings of loathing it may provoke. It taps into an atavistic fear that most people had hoped to forget, or might prefer to experience in the sublimated or (strange to say) euphemistic form of the flesh-eating zombie film. Did the cannibal films fill a perceived void left by some supposed denial at the heart of the wilderness films? It depends on how you see the wilderness films, and how you see the wilderness.