On an ignored bookshelf in your grandmother's basement, you will probably find copies of Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative and Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape. The books will be dog-eared -- clearly, they have been read, not once but, probably, several times by several people. The Territorial Imperative, about the roots of human nature in African "killer apes", was published in 1966, a year after the release of Cy Endfield's The Sands of the Kalahari. Morris' book, with its self-explanatory title, The Naked Ape endorses similar explanations for human aggression -- that book was published in 1967. In the mid-sixties, the Zeitgeist, perhaps in reaction to the "Summer of Love," produced a number of books asserting that human beings were inherently violent and territorial, hairless apes engaged in predatory raiding under the leadership of dominant alpha males wielding sexual power over the females in the horde and suppressing the reproduction of less powerful male rivals. This dispiriting thesis has its pop science origins in Ardrey's earlier book African Genesis (1961) and Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression (1966). Ardrey's theories, expressed in lyrical, vehement prose (his prose style reads like Clifford Odets), were culturally controversial but indelible -- Ardrey wrote like what he was, a former MGM contract screenwriter. (Among other things, he wrote the Charleton Heston epic Khartoum). His rhetoric is a lot like a speech delivered by a movie hero on the eve of a big game or political crisis or battle. I don't know if The Sands of the Kalahari was directly influenced by the "killer ape" hypothesis promoted in African Genesis -- but there's no question that the film explores similar themes.
If you saw The Sands of the Kalahari as a child (as I did), scenes from this film will have remained with you for your whole life. The last sequence in which a brutish big game hunter, unarmed and almost naked, fights for dominance with a vicious alpha male baboon is not the sort of thing you are likely to forget. And, so, I decided I would revisit the movie, a film that I found fantastically exciting when I was about 14. Alas, fond memories from youth are often misplaced -- upon recently seeing the movie, I've been forced to conclude that it's not very good. The film, particularly with respect to gender assumptions, has not dated well -- it is casually and misogynistically sexist. Although the plot is well-paced, and fairly exciting, the movie bogs down in tedious preaching and it's pretty obviously allegorical, a form that doesn't work well in the literal-minded movies. (There's a dystopian aspect about the movie that is derived from the allegorical novel and film The Lord of the Flies -- also a famous artifact from the period: Peter Brooks' famous adaptation of William Golding's novel was made in 1963). As a chaste youth, I interpreted the movie to be about conflict between men competing for dominance. In fact, the Sands of the Kalahari is primarily about sex, generally not a good subject for presentation by he-man great White hunter types -- as witness Hemingway's embarrassing problems with romance and sex scenes in his books. The movie features the simpering Samantha York as the object of desire that inspires brutish passions in her fellow castaways -- she's not particularly appealing and the film runs true to its anthropological sources in that the characters are all louts, including the heroine. Robert Ardrey should have been coaxed out of his screenwriting retirement to draft the script -- in general, the film is poorly written.
The story in The Sands of the Kalahari is simple enough and compelling, as I have noted a "castaway" yarn. When a commercial flight to Johannesberg is diverted to Windhoek, a group of passengers charter a small prop-driven plane to complete the trip. The passengers are a motley group four men and a luscious babe -- the girl, improbably, named Grace Mountain, is dressed like Jackie Kennedy in white high heels and a little pillbox hat. The men consist of a German emigre to South Africa, an old man named Grimmelman, O'Brien (played by Stanley Baker) a dipsomaniac oil field roustabout, a social worker employed by the UN Children's Service, and, arriving late to the party on the tarmac, Bain, a big game hunter (Stewart Whitman scowling a lot like Richard Boone in Hombre). The plane runs into a monstrous flock of locusts and crashes in the middle of a vast desert covered with sand dunes. O'Brien's leg is broken and the co-pilot dies in the fiery explosion. Without water, but with a surfeit of Bain's hunting rifles, the survivors limp to a furnace-like heap of boulders and wind-abraded pinnacles and spires of grey granite. Baboons are living in that labyrinth of huge, broken stones and this means that there's water to sustain the group. Immediately, civilization breaks down. The pilot tries to rape Grace, but she fights him off and, surprisingly, he declares that he's disgusted with the comely lass (since she didn't melt in his arms during the rape as he expected). The pilot takes a couple of buckets of water and departs from the stony fortress-like rock formation; he plans to walk to the coast and get help. Recognizing the Great White Hunter is the alpha male, Grace immediately mates with him. Bain is a nasty piece of work, spending his nights massacring the baboons whom he interprets as competitors for the scarce resources in the rocky oasis. Bain thinks there too many mouths to feed among the castaways and so he takes the Social Worker out in the desert, threatens him with his rifle, and makes him march away across the dunes under the remorseless sun. He tries the same maneuver with the German -- there's a fight and he beats the old man to death. O'Brien, whose leg is now better, knows that Bain is murdering the other men. There's a brutal fight and Bain gets knocked out -- O'Brien hits him with a wrench. Bain, then, gets imprisoned in a oubliette-like cavity in the granite badlands. A monsoon arrives and in the storm Bain escapes from this pit. This action is intercut with episodes from the adventures of the pilot -- he makes it to the sea but ends up in proscribed zone owned by a diamond mining company; the diamond mining security guards beat him up. The Social Worker collapses but is rescued by some Hottentot tribesmen. A helicopter comes to rescue the castaways. O'Brien and Grace depart but Bain, who has been mounting a sort of gorilla (pun intended) campaign in the stony fastness of the little massif elects to remain in the wilderness. Perhaps, he's afraid of being charged with murder. Left to his own devices, Bain becomes a sort of Robinson Crusoe. But he can't leave the pack of baboons alone. Challenging their alpha male, a fight to the death occurs -- the movie predates CGI and the fight is shot in either extremely long shots (showing Bain wrestling with a baboon pelt) or in extreme close-ups (snarling baboon, snarling man, blood, strangulation); the battle is completely unpersuasive. Bain kills the lord baboon. A very long shot shows him as a speck in the rocky arena. The other baboons cautiously circle and, then, converge on him -- it's not clear whether he's been elected king or has become meat.
The story is pretty thrilling and the picture would work well as a silent movie. It's the talk that wrecks the show -- everyone keeps saying that there's no difference between men and baboons and that the "overpopulation" at the oasis requires Bain's murderous reduction in force and morality is, generally, eschewed as irrelevant to survival. There are extremely effective scenes -- some of the baboon massacre sequences are legitimately horrifying (similar to the slaughter of the kangaroos in Wake up in Fright) and one sequence in which the social worker, Bain, and O'Brien slaughter an kind of gazelle, an oryx it seems, with their bare hands is also savagely effective. Bain is an excellent villain although there is something decidedly gay about the way that he sashays around the oasis in very short shorts, bare-chested, with combat boots and a bandolier of ammo as a belt. Whitman throws out his brawny chest and has a very cute ass and, in fact, somewhere along the line, the director and screenwriters seem to grasp that there's something campy about the performance -- Bain is very interesting in killing but has no time for sex and his love scenes with the always aroused Grace seem perfunctory at best. And, announcing the theme of latent homosexuality, someone says that Bain is more concerned with his "rifle" than with the woman. O'Brien, played by Stanley Baker who co-produced the picture with Cy Endfield (an American on the HUAC/Hollywood blacklist), has the sort of role in which Cornel Wilde or Mel Gibson specialized -- the hero who has to suffer in every scene: his leg is broken and it pains him terribly, then, he gets savagely beaten by Bain. His leg is infected at the outset and Grace has to use her body heat to warm him with her embrace -- a scene played straight and not for titillation. The baboons are great, powerful, sleek-looking proto-humans with huge coffin-shaped muzzles full of dagger-sized canine teeth. With a lost donkey and a desert tortoise, the beasts are the best things in this movie. Endfield is an excellent director -- his films, particularly Zulu are singleminded explorations of male fantasies of combat, aggression, and sex. He amps up the volume on the soundtrack -- the locusts sound like a million chainsaws and the baboons bark and yip and grunt and squeal in loud, alarming choruses. The plane crash is staged with Theater of Cruelty sound effects, ear-splitting whines and rumbles and roars, and the score is excellent -- there's a jaunty grotesque march, a bit like Shostakovich, at the outset of the film; the tune is a nightmare version of Henry Mancini's "Baby Elephant Walk" from Hatari. But the movie is full of implausible details -- in one scene, Grace is walking about barefoot on 140 degree jagged rocks that would both fry and lacerate her feet. Whitman's brawny chest would be covered with second-degree blisters in the heat of the equatorial sun, so his campy outfit isn't merely risible but seems dangerous. O'Brien gets to stare in horror at a six-inch scorpion crawling on his arm. The first third of the movie is pretty good, but, once the allegory is defined and kicks into high gear, the film deteriorates. There's a roomy cave obviously detached from its environment and very well-lit; this is where the characters speechify. The film was shot both "on location" and at Shepperton Studios in London -- this is clearly where the nice cave, a little like a drawing room, is located.
No comments:
Post a Comment