Marlon Brando
'Burn'
Marlon Brando in Burn!
You can't have everything, at least not in one format. While I was working on a piece about Marlon Brando ("Orpheus Ascending") for the Sept/Oct issue of FILM COMMENT, I bought (for $6.95 via Amazon ) a VHS copy of Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn! issued in 1991 by MGM/UA and currently out of print. The color is faded, the image not letterboxed. Nevertheless, it is an invaluable relic of one of Brando's most complicated performances. The VHS is the American version, which was regarded as "butchered" by both the director and the star (who managed to agree on little else). UA eliminated 20 minutes from Pontecorvo's cut (which was released in Europe under the title Queimada), thus undermining the sweep of the action and rendering the film's attempt to map the historic cycles of white colonialist oppression and black insurgency fairly incoherent.
Through October 7, Film Forum is screening a restored print of the uncut Italian version of Burn! (A DVD release of the restored version will likely follow.) In all respects save one, this Burn! is preferable to the out-of print VHS. For the first-time, American audiences will be able to appreciate Pontecorvo's blending of cinematic romanticism with an analysis of black revolutionary struggle which is part Marx and part Franz Fanon. Unlike The Battle of Algiers, which made use of a cinema vérité style to tell the story of an actual liberation struggle, Burn! is a political allegory, styled like a costume action-adventure picture. The setting is a fictional sugar cane-producing Caribbean Island named Queimada. In the original script, this fictive island was part of the Spanish empire, which would have been a more accurate historical conceit, since Spain, rather than Portugal, was the dominant European power in the Caribbean. But since Portugal accounts for a considerably smaller share of international box-office receipts than Spain, the producers did the economically expedient thing by making the Portuguese the bad guys.
As we learn in the opening scene, Queimada (which means "burn" in Portuguese) has had a history of conflagration. In the 17th century, the Portuguese put down an uprising of the indigenous population by killing almost everyone and reducing the cane fields to scorched earth. They then rebuilt the labor force with slaves imported from Africa. By the mid-19th century (the point at which Pontecorvo's narrative begins), a slave revolt is brewing. The British see an opportunity to send the Portuguese packing and gain control of the island. Enter Marlon Brando in plantation whites and creams as Sir William Walker, the 19th-century English equivalent of a CIA operative. Walker has been sent by the British government to fan the flames of the insurrection and simultaneously to whisper encouraging words to members of the mixed-race middle-class so that when the Portuguese are routed, they will be ready to seize the reins of power. Not real power, of course, because it is British wealth to which this puppet regime will be permanently indebted.
All this comes to pass in the first half of the film in scenes that are sometimes overly schematic but just as often thrilling. Here, as in The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo is masterful at conjoining camera movement and the choreography of large groups of people so that the screen becomes charged with collective desire. Ennio Morricone's score, similar in its insistence and repetitiveness to the one he composed for The Battle of Algiers, employs the choral harmonies and modalities of Gregorian chants with a syncopated beat that has you just about leaping out of your seat when the victorious slave army, ragtag and radiant, comes dancing and prancing on the backs of plumed horses to claim the prize for their hard-won, bloody rebellion. The prize, of course, will not be theirs. The fork-tongued Walker will convince José Dolores (Evaristo Márquez), the rebel general he has mentored, that he's gone as far as he can go - that blacks cannot govern themselves or trade on the world market. "Who will buy your sugar, José?" he asks, even as the British have imposed a boycott on the island. Part I ends in compromise. Dolores is persuaded to lay down his weapons and take his army back to the cane fields. No longer slaves, they will be paid for their work, and in addition, there will be schools and hospitals - and you know the rest of that line.
Twelve years pass in a few seconds of black screen. The second half of the film is the mirror inverse of the first. Walker is sent back to Queimada to put down the insurgency he once fomented. The British have treated their freed workers no better than the Portuguese did their slaves. Dolores and his men have once again taken up arms and are fighting the government troops from hideouts in the mountains. When he refuses to negotiate with Walker, it's all-out war. As in the 17th century, the island is torched so that the fires of revolution will not spread throughout the Caribbean and beyond. Rather than the triumphant march that climaxed Part I, Pontecorvo gives us an equally riveting set piece, but this time of prolonged horror. Dolores's followers are smoked out of the burning brush. As they are forced into the open, they are slaughtered one by one as Walker watches through his spyglass.
Burn! is such an ambitious film and parts of it are so inspiring that one can't help forgiving its unresolved contradictions, the largest of which is the attempt to fit a dialectical reading of history into the form of an action drama with the opposing forces of colonizer and colonized embodied in the two leading characters. Brando often remarked that he was proudest of his work in Burn!, and certainly it's his performance that makes the film more than just a series of visually spectacular set pieces, and riveting from beginning to end. In terms of Brando's career, one can look at Burn! as a match with Reflections in a Golden Eye, which was made just two years earlier. In both films, Brando plays a member of the ruling elite who is eaten up by self-loathing and fights desperately against his attraction to another man. Reflection is specifically about repressed homosexuality. In Burn!, sexual desire is an undercurrent of the power game between Walker and Dolores.
Brando plants the notion right at the start when we see him looking at Queimada from a boat arriving in the harbor and fingering a lavender scarf flung casually around his throat. Brando knew how to communicate entire subtexts through a prop and the way he handled it. You can bet he didn't choose lavender because it was a pretty color. There is, however, a behind-the-scenes story: Pontecorvo, who was reputed to be highly superstitious, felt about lavender the way John Ashcroft feels about calico cats - that they are signs of the devil. Brando was at war with Pontecorvo throughout the production, and he may have chosen to make that bit of lavender silk the focus of the film's opening shot just to spite him. Nevertheless, a suggestion has been planted in the viewer's mind, and it's reinforced in the scenes that follow where we begin to see that Walker conducts his power games as he would a seduction. Walker seduces Dolores into becoming an outlaw and then the general of an insurgent army; having gotten what he wants, he subsequently abandons him. When he comes back and tries the game a second time, Dolores has become his own man and will have none of it.
And so Walker has to bring him to his knees by killing his followers. But at the last moment, he can't bring himself to kill the opponent he has been so obsessed with. If Dolores dies, he will not only become a martyr for the cause of freedom, he will escape Walker's power. One of the most amazing moments in Brando's performance comes when Walker is preparing himself for a last ditch effort to persuade Dolores to escape hanging by going into exile. Walker is aware that he has already lost the game, and as he tries to pull himself together to confront Dolores, he notices his own belly - a belly that he has most carefully concealed beneath tight pants and jackets buttoned - he knows how power is invested in the presentation of self. It's this belly, now bulging out in the open, that signals his loss of control over his own and Dolores's destiny. And then he makes the most extraordinary decision. Rather than trying to conceal the betrayal of the flesh, he lets it show, perhaps because he has nothing to lose but more likely because he seizes on letting it all hang out - as they were wont to say in 1968 - as the only manipulative strategy left in his arsenal.
Brando's greatness rests in his ability to invest his body and his gaze with multiple layers of meaning. His voice was part of that physical apparatus. Walker is vocally one of Brando's most risky and inspired constructs - the English accent plummy to the point of self-mockery (or mockery of the privilege it signifies), its whispery tone oddly intimate as if the person he is talking to is the only person special enough to understand what he's saying. The great deficiency in the restored version of Burn! is that all the actors' voices - Brando's included - have been dubbed into Italian. Which is why I suggest that in addition to going to the Film Forum you get hold of one of those few remaining VHS copies.
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