tieman64
The 1840s. Marlon Brando plays William Walker, a mercenary who is sent to the Spanish Caribbean on behalf of the British Empire. He touches down on Queimada, an island currently ruled by the Portugeze. Queimada, we later learn, means "burnt" in Italian. The island has been razed to the ground numerous times in the past, Empires routinely setting her ablaze in an attempt to squelch uprisings. Offshore, the bones of dead Amerindian and African slaves adorn a grotesque coral reef. An early scene, in which domesticated birds battle to the death because their "masters" set them against each another, drives home the crux of the film; the tragedy of men used as sacrificial pawns in proxy wars instigated by wealthy spectators. In this regard, it is Walker's mission to infiltrate Queimada and coax its black natives into rebelling against their Portugese colonisers. If Walker is successful, Britain will then be able to step in and gain access to the island's sugar plantations, the "white oil" of the 1800s. Brando plays Walker as an effeminate, snake-oil salesman. He's a dandy, his ridiculous gait masking his slimy, brutal nature. Walker's target? Jose Dolores, a broad-shouldered black slave to whom Walker whispers sweet words of rebellion. Jose takes the bait, begins to desire the freedom Walker sells, and so dutifully fights a little war against the Portugese. After all, it's in his best interest. Isn't it? Walker stands back and watches while the dominoes fall. Once the blacks have conquered the Portugeze, the British Empire then steps in and labels Jose's freedom fighters "terrorists" and "extremists". Jose Dolores and his rag tag rebels resist the British at first – they've tasted freedom and won't let go – but they're eventually crushed. The island is once again burnt to the ground.Walker's role changes dramatically in the second half of the film. No longer urging Jose to stand up to Empires, he switches gears and seduces Jose into stepping aside and letting a "civilized" Britain take over. "You can not learn the secrets of the white man's civilisation over night," Walker says. "Who will teach your children? Who will cure your sick? Who will transact your commerce?" Jose looks at Walker with confused eyes. He cannot read, has no understanding of a constitution, laws or rights. Cunningly, Walker steps back and lets Jose realise these things himself. Under Jose's leadership, the island degenerates into a mess. Disorder. Near anarchy. Jose's men virtually will the British Empire into returning to them.The film offers a fictional parable of the bloody transition from chattel slavery to "free" labour; from old imperial colonies to "independent" nations dominated by foreign capital. Today its imagery alludes not only to actual historical events from the past – Brazil, Vietnam, Santo Domingo, Jamaica, Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America – but current crises (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) in which Empires seduce leaders into fighting proxy wars against their enemies, before violently discarding their pawns and stepping in themselves. The film was directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, a director who routinely condenses complex history, truths and politics down to rousing epics. Think his 1965 film "The Battle of Algiers", which was so prophetic that Pentagon officials and think-tank experts screened it before the Second Gulf War. This one, "Burn!", was intended as a truncation of the Vietnam War.The youngest of three Italian-Jewish brothers, all of whom suffered under the anti-Semitic restrictions of Mussolini, Pontecorvo was a leader of the Milan Resistance during WW2. Like many in his generation he was a staunch communist. After the war he worked as a functionary in the Italian Communist Party. When the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956, Pontecorvo resigned from the party but did not abandon Marxist politics. He then brought his political commitment and his many talents — photography, journalism and music composition — to filmmaking. The Italian neo-realism of Rossellini inspired him. His goal as a director was to be three parts Rosselini and one part Eisenstein.Like most neo-realists, Pontecorvo's casting decisions were based almost entirely on actors' faces and physical presence. He selected most of the actors in "The Battle of Algiers" this way. Unsurprisingly, Brando was the only professional actor cast in "Queimada". To play Jose Dolores, Pontecorvo found Evaristo Marquez. A tall Colombian, Marquez spoke no English, had never seen a film, and could not learn cues. This didn't matter to Pontecorvo. The guy looked like a mahogany god. Pontecorvo turns him into a stoic symbol of Africa, her persecution, strength and potential.But though it possesses a number of neo-realist traits, "Queimada" pulls heavily from Italian opera. Ennio Morricone's score, which consists of an exhilarating, deranged amalgam of 1969 Euro electronic space-jazz and soaring African chants, captures the tone of the film. Drawing from exploitation cinema, this is a blood soaked epic, filled with psychedelic imagery, rousing passages and remarkable, weird energy. Using dense colour-saturated film (lush images zap our eyeballs, and the film's tropical heat is palatable), Pontecorvo treats us to the kind of spectacle typical of someone like Sergio Leone. Think the film's large processions of half-naked men, women, and children, which are later reversed with a bombastic scene in which a triumphant Jose Delores returns to his city with an army. The mahogany saint, now a general on a white horse, is an unforgettable, and comical, image of empowerment. Other sequences, in which blacks are hunted down by dogs, and villages are vapourised by artillery and flame, conjure up Vietnam's macabre image bank. And then there's Brando. Brando called this his best performance, the actor parodying genteel devils and perhaps expressing sneering disdain for both his own acting and the play-acting of history's Walkers. Though much hated, it's a fascinating performance.9/10 – Masterpiece. See uncut version only. Worth one viewing. See Alex Cox's "Walker".
fedor8
Some call this a Marxist view of colonialism and history, but I'd only partly agree. American liberals, Marxists, and Europe's Left-wingers will surely want to claim ANY revolution or revolt in history as their own, i.e. fitting in neatly with Karl Marx's deluded little theories. Same with movies: they basically watch a film and see what they want to see. However, the revolt in Queimada isn't portrayed in such simplistic, idiotic, black-and-white terms, as we find them in that pitiful Bible of the Left. Once Dolores wins his first revolt, there is the realization that he and his rebels are light-years away from being capable of maintaining a functioning economy. While Marx, in his endless arrogance and ignorance, saw the proletariat as the proper force to guide a country and even all of mankind itself, even Dolores - "formerly a nothing", as Brando called him - himself realizes that the working class/the oppressed lower class/the proletariat/the lowest cast/whatever does not have the necessary education or abilities to achieve anything beyond a successful armed resistance. It is easy to destroy; building a society is quite another matter...This brings us to the more left-wing aspect of the movie: the overly simplistic portrayal of Dolores. The fact is that nearly every black revolutionary established a dictatorship in which the people lived far worse off than under the colonial power in question. Africa is a failed continent today (the only one with minus growth!) not because of white influence but because of a lack of it. The African continent has been far too quickly abandoned in the name of "equality, justice" and other notions, leaving the as-yet-unready and too uneducated black populace to find their own path in a world which was marching off, progressing at a rapid speed. Nearly every African/black country sports a tyranny in which the elections - when there are any - are a mere joke, more like a pathetic circus set up to fool those in the West who really think that the transition from tribal life or slave to modern capitalism is achievable overnight. Hence to portray Dolores as such a self-sacrificing idealist in the William Wallace "Braveheart" vein is utterly absurd and infinitely naive. In fact, William Wallace himself was no squeaky-clean individual. There is no such thing as a "revolutionary saint", the way Marxists, aided greatly by their sympathizers in the Western media, have tried and mostly succeeded in propagandizing mass murderers like Che Guevara into. People who lead the desperate into revolt very often have their own agendas, and aren't rarely intelligent psychopaths (Castro) who see a clever opportunity to get wealthy and powerful by riding on waves of the populace's desperation and genuine idealism and hope. The Marxist notion of the "noble proletariat", who have very little education, yet march bravely and with success toward a prosperous new modern world is just as fantasy-based as the idea of someone like Jose Dolores actually existing in the past or present. Marxists are all ultra-idealists, and what else is idealism but an over-simplification of truth, and an escape into flights of fancy that are nearly always based on wishful thinking rather than a sobering nose-dive into harsh reality."Queimada" is less black-and-white than that, fortunately. It shows the cold realities of economics and human development: one race dominates another, a nation dominates another, a class dominates another class. Empirically, objectively, there is nothing evil, immoral or despicable about this - it's just the way humans are, just the way human psychology coupled with biology works. Animals kill each other in the trillions every single day: it may seem cruel and pointless to us "civilized" Westerners, but only because we have become too soft in our cozy, comparatively luxurious existence. Reality is never what idealists tell you it is - or can be. Besides, the struggle isn't merely one of black against white (now, wouldn't have Hollywood's Oscar voters just loved that...) but there are different interest groups on the island, all with their own problems and enemies.The movie is visually interesting, having that grimy late 60s/early 70s look. I was not bothered by some oddities, such as there being no scenes of the bank robbery, or scenes showing the first clash between Dolores's men and the Portuguese. Good, unusual soundtrack.
MoneyMagnet
A new generation might not know how to take this film, since the production values are sometimes threadbare and the screenplay is very straightforward, but it's still a movie worth watching if you want to understand how the New World (including America) got to where it is today. (No, it's not historically accurate since Portugal never had Caribbean colonies, but it's clear that Portugal is just a stand-in for Spain or England or any other European colonial power.) From the start it is hard not to get involved in the struggles of the Queimadan slaves (who we see powerfully both in close-up and in mass scenes), after we first see the heartbreak and indignity of a widow and her small children forced to cart the headless corpse of their husband/father across the island themselves after he is executed by the slave masters for rebellion. It is also hard not to simultaneously appreciate and loathe the slick operations of Sir William Walker, an English agent provocateur who expertly manipulates one courageous man, Jose Dolores, into fomenting an effective rebellion that is actually planned to ultimately fail ten years later. Marlon Brando gives a masterful performance as Walker. (Even if you think you don't like Brando as an actor, you may be very surprised with him here. He considered this his best screen performance and his judgment was probably correct.) The ideas laid out in "Queimada" may seem old hat to today's audiences, but are also character-driven in a way that escapes most didactic modern treatments of racist imperialism. (Translation: It's a much better movie than BLOOD DIAMOND.) The most important message still relevant for today is that what we think of "freedom" often really isn't "free,", depending on whether we take it for ourselves, or if it is given to us (and who is doing the giving). Still an important lesson for "free" peoples around the world to keep in mind.
