Review of Khartoum (1966) by David P — 01 Feb 2018

I saw Khartoum a long time ago, and on a wide screen in a cinema. Like Ben Hur, that is the only way to see it. It's an epic, and it has stuck in my memory. It is grand and epic and relatively close to the facts. I don't know how it would fare if I saw it again, given the parallels with the ISIS and the Mahdi, and given that "Lawrence of Arabia" now looks dated. Above all, LoA could not be made again, and perhaps Khartoum could not either. Blame recent politics and changing social attitudes that would compromise any attempt to remale these classics. But I felt that LoA was the more dated.

Other comparisons? I never saw the older versions of "The four feathers", I did see the recent version with the Indian director and which I rate as pure guano, and I also read the book a while ago.

It's weird to see a European in blackface playing the Mahdi, and Heston's Gordon is more heroic than the actual Gordon, who was immensely brave but immensely opinionated, and who quite frankly was just looking for a place to be martyred and the Sudan was just fine and dandy. Heston's performance is epic, as always, but he does not bring out that much of the complexity of Gordon's character, or the moral ambiguity of being essentially an expendable soldier of fortune doing the dirty work of the empire. But films that preach quickly get boring.

Apart from that, the film is a visual feast, and the battle scenes some of the best ever. It is simply an epic, a classic, and they don't make them like that any more.