Burn!

 In the late sixties, Gillo Pontecorvo was regarded as one of the world's most important filmmakers.  In 1966, his harrowing docu-drama The Battle of Algiers made  him the darling of Leftist critics.  The Battle of Algiers is an account of violence in Algeria in which French soldiers fought terrorists; the film's most famous sequence involves a bomb planted in a cinema.  Figuratively, the movie, shot on location with non-professional actors, was an explosion in a movie theater, a raw depiction of summary executions, torture, and bombings slanted in favor of the terrorist insurgency.  The movie became famous throughout the world for its urgent Marxist critique of colonialism.  In 1966, colonial powers still ruled in the Caribbean and throughout Africa and, of course, the movie's austere black-and-white account of revolutionaries and counter-insurgency forces murdering one another was considered an implicit critique of the American war against Viet Cong guerillas in southeast Asia.  Riding high on the international success of The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo was recruited by Hollywood, given a large budget, and offered an opportunity to work with Marlon Brando, then regarded as the greatest screen actor in the world.  (Brando says that he turned-down a lead part in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to appear in Pontecorvo's Burn!).  The film proved logistically difficult to shoot -- the picture was made in technicolor and, of course, working with Brando posed some problems; ultimately, United Artists who had agreed to finance the picture and distribute it internationally threatened to "pull the plug."  Brando, who regards this film as embodying his best screen performance, protested and the shoot was completed in Morocco where it production costs were lower.  Critical reactions to the picture were mixed and it was considered a disappointment.  However, when I watched the film in 2024, in the harsh light of the war between Israel and Gaza, the movie seemed startlingly relevant and uncompromising.  (As people are wont to say, this is the sort of film that couldn't be made today -- no one would agree to finance a picture overtly endorsing a sophisticated Marxist understanding of history.)  The Palestinian writer, Edward Said, declared this film, taken together with The Battle of Algiers as the most intelligent and penetrating depictions of European colonialism ever made.  The picture is brilliant and, certainly, powerful with respect to its depiction of a violent insurgency in the Caribbean -- it's set in the Lesser Antilles.  The movie combines historical references and allusions to Haiti (also relevant today), Santo Domingo, the American South, and, it seems, various African countries such as Guinea and Cape Verde (indeed, a guerilla war in Cape Verde was ongoing when the movie was made).

The film begins with Marlon Brando, playing an agent of the British navy, William Walker, arriving at a tropical island called Queimado (this means "burnt" in Portuguese).  On the ship before landing, Walker is told that the island is called "Queimado" because Portuguese had to burn its forests down to exterminate the natives living there.  With the indigenous people all massacred, Black slaves were imported to operate the sugar plantations on the island.  However, this has led to violence and a guerilla war is apparently underway when Walker comes ashore in 1844.  (It's peculiarity of world politics and movie distribution in 1966 that the European slave power controlling Queimado is Portugal.  Portugal had no colonies in the Caribbean, but that nation was cast as the villain in the movie; the reason for this sleight of hand is that Spain was a country with box-office clout while the much smaller and poorer Portugal lacked market share.  Out of fear of offending Spanish audiences, the movie imagines a fictional Portuguese regime on the island.  Commercial exigency controls everything in the movie industry even films by celebrated Italian Communist directors.)  

Initially Walker plans to join forces with a rebel leader named Santiago in order to destabilize the Portuguese colony.  (His role as agent provocateur is subsidized by British sugar interests.)  Walker arrives just in time to see Santiago garroted in a horrific scene.  The guerilla leader's corpse is beheaded so that his skull can be displayed to the slaves on the island to terrorize them.  Santiago's headless corpse is put on a wagon that is dragged over rough country roads by the guerilla's widow and her small children.  Walker follows the woman and helps her pull the beheaded cadaver on the wagon up a steep hill.  Walker now needs to develop a new insurgent leader from among the local population.  He discovers a man named Jose Dolores, also a slave, who is not as cowed and subservient as the rest of the population.  (Walker slaps the man repeatedly and demands that the slave say that his mother was a whore; Dolores reluctantly agrees to do this, but, then, tries to hack Walker to death with his machete.)  Admiring the man's spirit, Walker recruits him for a bank robbery.  The robbery of the local Bank of the Holy Spirit is successful and buckets of silver and gold doubloons are divided between Walker and Dolores who hides the loot in his remote village.  When the Portuguese troops come to punish Dolores and the people in his village, they are apparently ambushed (Pontecorvo is making a political film primarily and not an adventure movie -- he often keeps the more showy violence off-screen) and slaughtered.  (With Walker's help, Dolores has taught the villagers how to use muzzle-loading rifles.)   Dolores, now forced to fight -- this was Walker's plan all along -- leads an uprising against the slaves on the sugar cane plantations against their Portuguese masters.  In a bravura scene, hundreds of Dolores' followers wearing huge masks and dancing ecstatically swarm into the capitol for some kind of religious festival.  Walker has armed a humane, liberal White man, Teddy Sanchez, and encourages him to assassinate the Portuguese governor of the colony.  Sanchez pulls the trigger and shoots down  the corrupt governor while masked dancers whirl through the city.  Later, Dolores leads a large army of men, women, and children along the beach and, then, enters the city where Sanchez has now established his regime/.  Dolores properly takes credit for the rebellion and storms into the governor's palace sitting in the ruler's throne to the discomfiture of Sanchez who is nominally in charge of the colony.  Dolores threatens to invade the city and seize it from Sanchez forces.  (Sanchez, a good liberal, has abolished slavery.  But he recognizes that the colony can not succeed economically without selling the sugar that it produces --therefore, the Blacks are going to have to work on the plantations, although for a wages.  This sequence of events resembles the revolution in Haiti in which the slave revolt was successful but with the result that the freed slaves found themselves in economic bondage on sugar plantations now owned by Black masters.)  Walker takes a pistol and goes to Dolores' tent planning to murder him.  (He's a reluctant assassin because he has come to like Dolores, drinks with him, and admires his courage.)  Dolores admits he knows nothing about the sugar trade and stands down in favor  ofTeddy Sanchez, the White ruler of the island.  Walker departs for Indochina, no doubt planning mischief against the French colonialists in Hanoi and Saigon.  

Several years pass.  Dolores is now leading an insurgency against the government troops under the orders of Teddy Sanchez.  When the regime's soldiers lose a battle, the British send in red-coats to restore order in the country.  (Sanchez is executed as a traitor by a firing squad).  The country is now locked in a bitter Civil War with Black soldiers fighting on both sides.  Walker returns to the country and directs military operations -- that is, the counter-insurgency.  Dolores' guerillas a fighting from remote enclaves in the barren Sierra Madre -- these were formerly wooded mountains denuded by the fires used to destroy the Indian natives.  Walker ruthlessly destroys the five villages in the mountains where Dolores is hiding among the peasants.  Vast columns of refugees trek through the horrible-looking wasteland -- this part of the movie was shot in the desolate mountains of Morocco. (These images will remind viewers of scenes of shell-shocked refugees trudging through ruins in the Gaza strip on CNN.)  Walker's troops set fires and when Dolores' men flee from the burning thickets, gun them down.  Once again, the island is on fire. In the end, Dolores is captured. (He's wounded and in a spectacular scene falls about six-hundred feet, rolling down the side of  the m;ountain.) This sets up the final confrontation between the nihilistic British agent provocateur and the freedom-fighter.

The movie is brilliantly staged.  Brando is fantastically charismatic in his role as the tormented leader of the counter-insurgency forces.  Dolores' part is played by a non-professional, Evaristo Marquez, an  illiterate Columbian shepherd -- he also is remarkably charismatic as the leader of the guerillas.  (Marquez made two or three other movies, ended up unemployable in the film industry, and returned to the mountains of Columbia where he spent the rest of his life herding sheep and goats; he died in 2007.)  The movie has a startlingly beautiful score by Ennio Morricone, a simmer of percussion and woodwinds with equally percussive choral singing -- it's like Stravinsky refracted through the Mambo or other Afro-Caribbean dance music.  The sequences showing the guerilla war have a scathing immediacy -- villages are burned, civilians massacred, and the colonialist troops conduct body-counts on dead rebels against tapestries of orange fire burning in the sugar cane.  (The island's sugar industry, to cite an expression from the Vietnam war, has to be destroyed to be saved.)  The Marxist edge to the film may be disturbing to some viewers, but the evidence of oppression and violence presented in Burn! is unsparing and persuasive.  The movie is like Frantz Fanon on-screen.  You're swept up in the frenzied action and sympathize with the guerillas --  it's like the audiences watching The Battle of Algiers cheering on the terrorists plotting to blow up a movie theater just like occupied by the audience for the film's screening.  I'm not sure that the political stance espoused by Burn! is reasonable, but it certainly seems plausible while you are watching the movie.  And the harsh light of history, from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza make Burn! cast a long shadow.