The second (follwing Mohammed, Messenger of God) of producer turned director Moustapha Akkad's rather foolhardy attempts to create a popular Islamic cinema using Western cinematic and narrative forms which were 20 years (at least) out of date even in Hollywood, Lion of the Desert tells the story of the 20 year campaign of resistance against Italian imperialist occupation by the Bedouin desert armies of Omar Mukhtar. Anthony Quinn, who was also in Mohammed, play Mukhtar as someone's kindly old uncle, a wily old desert lion with one spectacled eye on the Koran and the other on the field of battle. Oliver Reed plays his nemesis, the Italian fascist General Rodolfo Graziani.
The film is a fairly simplistic affair. Mukhtar and his fellow Bedouin are the personifications of good, patiently and relentlessly opposing the mechanistic might of the Italians. It's horses and guns versus tanks and bombs for the most part, and the film makes no bones about being propaganda for Mukhtar's resistance movement - not too difficult to swallow, considering the army he was facing. Yet in creating such a black and white view of reality (reminiscent of the many popular films the allies produced during and after the 2nd World War), the film comes across as dated, unambiguous and conceptually crude. The society that Mukhtar was defending is not questioned, even though it is clearly a society which is relentlessly anti-modern and in which women have very little active role to play. There is an intriguing scene in which a grieving war widow brings her son to Mukhtar's tent, and the old lion gives the boy his father's book and instructs him to "tell your mother to keep it safe for you." The woman must be told by the man, even when the man is her tiny child...
The film is pretty successful in cramming a long historical story into two and a half hours of screen time, and the narrative is pretty clear. H.A.L Craig's screenplay makes rather too much use of repetitive motifs, which don't develop as the story goes on but simply come up again and again at intervals. The two most notable of these motifs are the constant encounters with "good" Italians who although they wear a fascist uniform shrink from the more abhorrent crimes they are asked to perform and have a scarcely hidden admiration for Mukhtar (exemplified by Raf Vallone's veteran negotiator), and Bedouin children in jeopardy but learning from the "spirit of Mukhtar" - this latter strand of motif leans towards the cloying and sentimental.
There is a lot to admire in the film as an achievement in big-scale movie-making. The camera-work is excellent throughout, the battle sequences impressive and certain set-pieces (the montage of the concentration camps the Italians put the Bedouin in; the hanging of Mukhtar) are impressive and worth watching the film for. The performances are pretty ripe, except for Quinn, who over-eggs his pudding by being too kindly, too scholastic, too intrinsically good to convince as a real human being. We expect Reed to be hammy, but he is large without being absurd, and predictably outdone by Steiger doing a shouting turn as Mussolini (a role he also played in 1974's Mussolini: Ultimo atto). Far worse is the tendency to cast veteran British Thespians as elder Arabs: Andrew Keir just about gets away with it, but John Gielgud as a wily old collaborator with the Italians is preposterous, with his rich upper class English tones and pale skin.
There's a certain pan-historical element to the story - the Bedouin stand for all colonised peoples fighting their colonisers; this is made explicit in the film by Mussolini comparing the wall Graziani builds with Hadrian's, and one gets the feeling watching the film that it could be inspirational to the oppressed people of Palestine now. Mukhtar, with his high ideals and refusal to torture or kill prisoners, is a very different Muslim fighter to the popular Western image of the suicide bomber today, which only makes director Akkad's death in 2005 in Amman, Jordan by an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber the more bitter and tragic.
The film is a fairly simplistic affair. Mukhtar and his fellow Bedouin are the personifications of good, patiently and relentlessly opposing the mechanistic might of the Italians. It's horses and guns versus tanks and bombs for the most part, and the film makes no bones about being propaganda for Mukhtar's resistance movement - not too difficult to swallow, considering the army he was facing. Yet in creating such a black and white view of reality (reminiscent of the many popular films the allies produced during and after the 2nd World War), the film comes across as dated, unambiguous and conceptually crude. The society that Mukhtar was defending is not questioned, even though it is clearly a society which is relentlessly anti-modern and in which women have very little active role to play. There is an intriguing scene in which a grieving war widow brings her son to Mukhtar's tent, and the old lion gives the boy his father's book and instructs him to "tell your mother to keep it safe for you." The woman must be told by the man, even when the man is her tiny child...
The film is pretty successful in cramming a long historical story into two and a half hours of screen time, and the narrative is pretty clear. H.A.L Craig's screenplay makes rather too much use of repetitive motifs, which don't develop as the story goes on but simply come up again and again at intervals. The two most notable of these motifs are the constant encounters with "good" Italians who although they wear a fascist uniform shrink from the more abhorrent crimes they are asked to perform and have a scarcely hidden admiration for Mukhtar (exemplified by Raf Vallone's veteran negotiator), and Bedouin children in jeopardy but learning from the "spirit of Mukhtar" - this latter strand of motif leans towards the cloying and sentimental.
There is a lot to admire in the film as an achievement in big-scale movie-making. The camera-work is excellent throughout, the battle sequences impressive and certain set-pieces (the montage of the concentration camps the Italians put the Bedouin in; the hanging of Mukhtar) are impressive and worth watching the film for. The performances are pretty ripe, except for Quinn, who over-eggs his pudding by being too kindly, too scholastic, too intrinsically good to convince as a real human being. We expect Reed to be hammy, but he is large without being absurd, and predictably outdone by Steiger doing a shouting turn as Mussolini (a role he also played in 1974's Mussolini: Ultimo atto). Far worse is the tendency to cast veteran British Thespians as elder Arabs: Andrew Keir just about gets away with it, but John Gielgud as a wily old collaborator with the Italians is preposterous, with his rich upper class English tones and pale skin.
There's a certain pan-historical element to the story - the Bedouin stand for all colonised peoples fighting their colonisers; this is made explicit in the film by Mussolini comparing the wall Graziani builds with Hadrian's, and one gets the feeling watching the film that it could be inspirational to the oppressed people of Palestine now. Mukhtar, with his high ideals and refusal to torture or kill prisoners, is a very different Muslim fighter to the popular Western image of the suicide bomber today, which only makes director Akkad's death in 2005 in Amman, Jordan by an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber the more bitter and tragic.