Burn! (Queimada!)

I’ve been looking for this film for a long time, since it is Gillo Pontecorvo’s follow-up to Battle of Algiers, in my view one of the greatest films ever. Plus Brando! In a way it wasn’t a disappointment to watch, even though it was a mess, just too many elements that fail to coalesce. How long is it? What language is it? Apparently there is an 132 minute version in the “original” Italian, so Brando is dubbed. The recently-released dvd here is twenty minutes shorter, and in English, so you get Marlon’s second stab at a Fletcher Christian accent in his own voice, and everyone else is dubbed. He plays William Walker, who’s an international adventurer/fixer for the Queen’s Navy, who first comes to this Antilles island to foment revolt among the canecutters against the Portuguese, and then returns ten years later to put down revolt among the same people against the English now in control. The island of Queimada -- which literally means “burned-over” -- was initially colonized when the Portuguese burned out the natives and brought in African slaves to work the sugar plantations. Walker revisits that strategy against the slave insurgency in 1848. The contemporaneous Vietnam connections are obvious and powerful, the billows of flame recalling nothing so much as napalm, and the notion that it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. There is a lot going on here, the ambition is staggering, but Pontecorvo does not manage to hold it together, and the polyglot cast is fragmenting as well. There are sweeping scenes and set pieces, but no coherent flow. The color photography is sometimes striking, but sometimes amateurish, and the Ennio Morricone score seems slapped on from some other movie entirely. Still -- Brando was yet a mesmerizingly beautiful man at the time, and always fascinating to watch in his offbeat approach. And the film’s warnings about colonialism and imperialism are still highly relevant. (1968, dvd, n.) *6*