★★
I guess it’s obvious that a film's content affects the way we enjoy it, and though I try to look through aspects I find personally objectionable, sometimes I just can’t. I’ll never like
Birth of a Nation, its technical breakthroughs notwithstanding, and I can’t embrace
Rome, Open City because of the way Rossellini conflates homosexuality with fascism and sexual perversion. And I don’t respond to
The Four Feathers the way I want to either because I so dislike the imperialist ideology at the center of this 1939 British film.
Some argue that
Four Feathers is mostly about honor and duty, but in 19th century England, that was another way of saying imperialism. Whether fighting the Turks in the Crimea or the Sudanese in Africa, a man of honor would prove himself on the field of conquest somewhere in the Empire and, duty done, he would reap the social rewards in British society. This is the lesson of the child who likes poetry in
Four Feathers as he learns to embrace the Empire and outdo his doubting comrades by braving the natives and their harsh climate. In fact, everyone is brave, and everyone acts honorably in
Four Feathers. Among the colonialists, at least. I doubt the dialog given to the targets of British imperialism here would fill two pages of script because we never see them do anything except menace the Brits and serve as the agency for the white man to prove his courage and honor. The locals, apparently, have nothing that the audience might sympathize with.
The one part of this film I can have affection for, though, is the visuals. There's more than a little taste of David Roberts' orientalism in the cinematography here, and I also enjoy the path I can imagine between
Four Feathers and
Lawrence of Arabia. Less than a quarter of a century after Omdurman, David Lean’s desert adventurer has become complex, conflicted and flawed; the local people have identities and personal concerns; and 1.37:1 has become 2.20:1. Korda clearly sees the open beauty of the desert, but Lean’s aspect ratio and F.A. Young’s cinematography are able to turn this desert in vast expanses of color and motion that Korda tries to capture but can’t. Both also use a camera on a truck to track battle lines hurtling toward each other, though Lean’s later film takes advantage of 25 years of developing that technique and has smoother, more successful shots. Both films have bone breaking treks without water and the hot visuals to intensify the risk. As an outsized fan of
Lawrence of Arabia, I enjoyed seeing a desert epic that predates that film by nearly a quarter century.
Four Feathers is a measure of the refinement of cinematic technique and sensibility that
Lawrence represents.
My takeaway from
Four Feathers is that content can matter. This film has beautiful Technicolor and lavish sets, but that feels like attractive make-up on something very ugly. Powell and Pressberger’s 1943
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp manage to address many of the same issues as Korda does here, but their story manages to avoid the overt, grating imperialist assumptions that inform
Four Feathers.
