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Rating: "The Wind and the Lion" from 1975 is an exotic adventure film as few remember them. So even desperate housewives (perhaps the category that made cinema thrive), upon seeing Sean Connery playing a handsome version of Sandokan and Candice Bergen resisting him under that artificially styled mushroom of blonde hair, should be shouting masterpiece. But today desperate housewives have other entertainments, and cinema no longer holds this power. The same power that caused the inflation of the name "Sabrina" following Wilder's film release or, comparatively, turned "The Battle of Algiers" into a manual of urban guerrilla warfare. Television has ruined it by trivializing and vulgarizing "images," capturing and catering to the worst tastes of the public with the motto "generalize, generalize, generalize!"
The result is that the "desire for cinema" has been reduced to just wanting to go, just not to break up pizza and beer on a Saturday night, while we are light-years away from those who went to the movies to enjoy a powerful engine of dreams and had fun with a fullness that, to be honest, we can only dream of. When cinema was a unique event, truly collective (you brought chairs from home, remember "Divorce Italian Style"), and unrepeatable. When there was a different sensitivity toward the stories films told, perhaps more naive but certainly missed (at least by me). It may be a very provincial idea of cinema, but in this case (and in several others), long live the province! Fortunately for us, John Milius, with those few and wonderful works of the seventies, before hopelessly losing his way starting in the eighties, reminds us that cinema is above all dream and illusion (and enchants as long as it remains so), and he goes back to that desire I speak of, buried but for some strange genetic reason we still harbor.
"The Wind and the Lion" is Milius's hidden masterpiece. "Big Wednesday" is the most mentioned, "Apocalypse Now" (the screenplay) the most flaunted, "Jeremiah Johnson" and "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" (for both, the script) the jewels to be dusted off. John Milius shot it when he was thirty, but he already had unlimited credit with production houses. He had the particular talent of striking a balance between auteur cinema and profit, without which you can't get anywhere in Hollywood. This film demonstrates it brilliantly. An adventure film. A political film in the best sense that can be attributed to politics. A pro-American film (and here many will turn up their noses or worse, close the page). A love film about a love that cannot be born. First and foremost, it is the film that consecrated Sean Connery (late, it's true), along with "The Man Who Would Be King" - of the same year - by John Huston (who also acts in this film as the American Secretary of State John Hay). He plays the role of Mulai Ahmed Er Raisuni (transliterated as Mulay Achmed Er Raisuli), sheriff of the Berbers of the Rif, who kidnapped the Greek-American playboy Ion Perdicaris and son at the beginning of the 20th century. Historically, this action was part of Raisuni's personal fight against the Sultan of Morocco, nothing more than a puppet in the hands of European powers. Historically, it was resolved with the ransom payment.
In the film, John Milius reshuffles things a bit, imagining a more imaginative and complex scenario and taking the opportunity to paint the double portrait of two great men, enemies yet more similar than they themselves suppose. On one side, President Theodore Roosevelt, a myth of Milius: a very popular president (demagogue, the malcontents would say), who doesn't consume sweets to stay in shape, a physical shape he maintains by boxing, archery, hunting, and much more. But Brian Keith (a forgotten actor), who portrays him, is excellent when it comes to revealing his underlying melancholy, that of a man who cares too much about his life to see it taken away day after day by fragile health and impending blindness. He worships weapons (his bosom friend is a Winchester), eager to show the world the novelty and strength of his nation - sweet words and a big stick - and he doesn't care much for diplomacy. Here is the film's first polarity: political action (of Roosevelt) versus diplomacy (of the European powers): we aren't so far from today. So much so that Roosevelt seems to wait for nothing but that kidnapping to stir international waters: only in the film, the one kidnapped is a woman, Eden Pedecaris (two or three fixed chapters in a hypothetical treatise "The history of cinema through the women who made us dream") and her two children. She is determined and bold, unafraid or pretends not to fear Raisuni before understanding that the "barbarian" who kidnapped her is not as she believes: he is a cultured, religious, and aware man, not an extremist fanatic at all, who would not dare harm a hair on her head. Even his men, while visibly rough and less educated, know the respect they owe her and look at her more with curiosity than lust. The incident pits the Moroccan government, more in the hands of Tangier's pasha than in those of his nephew the Sultan of Morocco, against the United States. France and Germany, who have significant troops in Morocco, support the pasha, who does not intend to accede to Raisuni's requests: a lot of money, a safe-conduct for himself and his men, political control of the Rif, and... the head of the pasha.
After ten counted minutes of diplomacy, the American navy occupies Tangier militarily, taking advantage of the fact that the German garrison is stationed in the capital, and forces the pasha to meet Raisuni's demands, except for his head, of course. Raisuni is dissatisfied and stalls, but in the meantime, new German troops land in Morocco. Raisuni finally agrees to hand over the hostages, but at the place of exchange, he is betrayed and captured by the Germans before the surprised though impotent American garrison. The captain of the American patrol escorts Mrs. Pedecaris and the children to a house, waiting for the morning to leave. If it ended like this, the sense of injustice would knot in our throats, and we would hardly be able to release the tension that invades us. The ending is instead a delirious political fantasy where all the sentiments the film has insinuated beneath the surface within us find expression or sublimation: Eden's impossible love for Raisuni, the rebellion, the hope that the new century will bring a better political order, the hatred for war that has slipped into inhumanity - fought with the first machine guns - and the triumph of the kalos kai agathos hero. Epic, needless to say.
John Milius was an extraordinary storyteller, even in his less successful films. Here he is in his full maturity, and it shows. Few films are equal in speed and vigor of narration, for the varied suggestions it can transmit; it is apparent that Milius has total control over the material from which to carve out the film, with very clear ideas on how to animate it: watching this film gives the impression of admiring a river in flood that does not overflow but flows torrentially towards the mouth. The two protagonists, Roosevelt and Mulay Achmed Raisuli, idealists, magnanimous, daring, have a mythological depth and at the same time are flesh and blood men. This is another genius touch. Those who know a bit of cinema will enjoy guessing the quotes ("The Wild Bunch," above all), those who do not, will simply enjoy the story; the effect is the same. The culmination of Milius's fantasy and the film's emotional peak and epilogue, I transcribe the telegram that Raisuli sends to President Roosevelt after the conflict ends:
"To Theodore Roosevelt.
You are like the wind and I like the lion. You create the storm, the sand stings my eyes, and the earth is burnt. I roar and challenge you, but you do not hear me. Yet between us there is a great difference: I, like the lion, must stay in my place; you, like the wind, never know what your place is.
Mulay Achmed Mohammed Er Raisuli, the Magnificent, Lord of the Rif, Sultan of the Berbers."
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