Zulu (1964)
One of my favorite people is The Long Winters' John Roderick. I've listened to every podcast of his that I'm aware of, or nearly so, and am endlessly impressed by how strangely similar he and I are (and how different, but that's a stream for another day).
Recently, he and two friends started a podcast called "Friendly Fire" wherein they watch and then talk about war movies. I've been watching along and listening to each enjoyable episode. That's how I came to finally watch the 1964 British masterpiece Zulu.
I've known about this movie for just about as long as I can remember knowing about movies. But I'm not sure why. I can remember my dad watching bits and pieces of it. I never saw the whole film and have no memory of him watching it titles-to-credits, tho he must have. Perhaps this is because it was often on TV early in my childhood. Or perhaps this is one of the laserdiscs my dad would rent back when I was too young to help hook up the rented player(!), but old enough to know they were awesome. Regardless, spotted among my early-childhood memories are bits of this film.
And what a film it is!
Weirdly, perhaps, it's effective not exactly in the way it was intended. We're meant to root for the British and (spoilers!) find relief at their ultimate survival. And there's definitely relief at the end. But I suspect the road I took to get there wasn't the road on the map.
I'm American and I have a natural revulsion to Empire. The British were particularly foul, absolutely everywhere. So as this movie sets up the characters - the Cassandra-like preacher succumbing to increasing hysteria, the lieutenants Chard and Bromhead (the competent and the absurd), and so on - I spent most of the time rooting (against history and filmmaking) for the Zulu warriors to drive out their invaders, protect their own land, prevail, and rewrite the textbooks we're all disappointed by.
But history is awash in malignancy.
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Because life, I didn't finish writing this earlier and most of my concrete thoughts at the time have blurred to abstractions. But I wanted to say something about how wonderful the soundtrack – apparently never released on LP/CD – is, how well the movie's suspense builds, how terrible the effects are, and the honor paid to the Zulu (even as they're made to honor jolly-old British courage). The scenes with them chanting and singing are extraordinary and affecting. Amid the awful effects and ridiculous accents is a humanity films of this type and era too rarely paid people of darker skin tones - just as in history, they're treated as tools (plot-devices, in the movies) at best, sources of terror at worst. But here a softer light shines on them - and the rareness of this increases its effect.
This movie is imperfect, but it is damned good.