Filmed during the height of the Vietnam War, this is an intense film about a slave revolt on an early 19th-century Caribbean island. Like Gillo Pontecorvo's earlier "Battle of Algiers," the costs of the revolt are so high that I wonder what could possibly be worth the price in human suffering. The intended message was clearly to resist global imperialism, even if the film's star was playing the main agent of what is now called "globalization."

Marlon Brando, who had been active in support of desegregation in the US, teamed with the "radical" film-maker Pontecorvo to make an epic of resistance filmed in Colombia with more than twenty thousand extras. Brando got bored with Colombia and parts of the film ended up being shot in Morocco, Rome, St. Malo, and the Virgin Islands. Moreover, reputedly Brando was not on speaking terms with Pontecorvo by the end of filming.

The Story

The Caribbean island was first entirely burned in 1520 to put down an uprising by the enslaved indigenous inhabitants against the rapacious Spanish (the film transformed them into Portuguese under boycott pressure from the Spanish government of Franco). The sugar plantations were then staffed by slaves from Africa. Around 1845 an English traveler, Sir William Walker, who is really an English secret agent arrives on the island of Quemada. His goal is to foment a rebellion against the colonial regime and replacing it with a pliable regime that will ally with Great Britain.

Walker (surely named after the American adventurer and would-be emperor of Central America from about that time) picks a charismatic black dock-worker named José Dolores (Evaristo Marquez ) to lead the blacks and a light criollo (creole) patriot, Teddy Sanchez, to head a liberal government for the newly independent island.

Walker embroils the blacks in a bank robbery and trains them in using firearms to overthrow the colonial regime. Walker chooses Carnaval as the time to state a coup and literally steadies the gun with which Sanchez shoots the colonial governor before proclaiming independence. José Dolores agrees to disarm his men. Sanchez's government largely cedes control of the island's monoculture (sugar cane) economy to England and Walker leaves, having accomplished his mission with relative ease.

A decade passes (confusingly, since this is apparently where 20 minutes were lopped off the film for release in English prints). The Sanchez government has created a seamy record of corruption and José Dolores is leading a new revolt against the newer masters. This endangers English interests and Walker is sent back into the field to uncreate the rebellion his protégés are making. Sanchez realizes he has been a dupe, but Walker manages to get him arrested for treason and shot.

Having given José Dolores training and raised their expectations, Walker finds his protégés a formidable opponent. He is willing to destroy the island (again) to root out the rebels. No one who saw the film in 1970 could have missed the analogy to the "to save the village we had to destroy it" logic of America's Vietnam adventure, including the forced relocation of the rural population. "Burn!" showed the total destruction of the guerrillas' base with the massive "relocation" (concentration camps) of the people and then burning not only the forest, but the cane fields.

The brutal military campaign is strikingly photographed, and the whole film pulses to one of Ennio Morricone's most haunting soundtrack.

Marlon Brando Meets His Match

Even in the service of his anti-imperialist politics, Brando could not bear to be an unsympathetic villain (this was also the case in "The Ugly American" and his Nazi officer in "The Young Lions"). Brando insisted on making his Walker superior to all the other whites in "Burn!"

Walker, like Brando, wants to be loved by nonwhites, to be the exception who resonates with the downtrodden, and I think that Pontecorvo was able to use Brando's political vanity. Probably Brando decided on the foppishness (seemingly carried over from his eccentric performance as Fletcher Christian in "Mutiny on the Bounty"). Brando thinks it was his best work—along with "Apocalypse Now" in which he also dotes on nonwhites who he thinks love as much as fear him... I don't know whose idea his blond wig was.

Resembling a younger Nelson Mandela, Evaristo Marquez is a very satisfying hero, charismatic in victory, dignified in defeat, pained and eventually clear-eyed about the limited options (in the world economy and locally) and about the sufferings of the masses. He was an illiterate sugarcane cutter and had never seen a movie before becoming the heart and soul of this one. Brando's mannerisms attempt to command attention, but he proved unable to steal the scenes from the nonactor.

Conclusion

Though the middle section that shows Walker's dissipation back in England, away from where his machinations matters, is a mishmash, the scenes of Carnaval, the coup, and the campaign of destroying the rebel's base are stunningly filmed by Marcello Gatti (who also filmed Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers") and Giuseppe Ruzzolini (who filmed many Pasolini films including Arabian Nights, Oedipus, Teorema , and Porcile). The visual grandeur is matched by Morricone's score.

Only the 112-minute version is currently available (and only on VHS). I hope for a DVD with the additional 20 minutes (at which "Burn" would still be considerably shorter than "Apocalypse Now," Brando's next venture into colonial savagery). "Burn!" is one of the three masterpiece anticolonialist films of the decade after independence was granted across Africa, along with the long and gorgeously photographed Cuban film "Lucia" and Pontecorvo's horror movie "The Battle of Algiers," It is the most Marxist of the three, with some dialectical materialism flowing out of the mouth of the hyper-individualist Marlon Brando.




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS