(1969) As Ennio Morricone’s score throbs and chants, black men ride white horses in seeming syncopation, a slave woman trundles a cart carrying her husband’s decapitated corpse past an island fortress, a blond-bearded Marlon Brando stands sternfaced before a burning cane field, and a secret agent and a rebel leader have a final confrontation in a prison cell. On a Caribbean island in the 1840s, Brando’s ambiguously-motivated British agent provocateur William Walker helps the black slaves to free themselves from their Portuguese overlords. But ten years later, after the leader he found for them (Evaristo Márquez’s illiterate sugar cane cutter José Dolores) has led a revolt of his own against the British-backed indigenous landlords, Brando returns — to suppress it. Gillo Pontecorvo’s followup to The Battle of Algiers was intended as “a marriage between a classic adventure and the film of ideas.” An almost laughably snakebit production: Márquez, an actual illiterate cane cutter who had never seen a film, eventually gained confidence, but in early stages he had to be so robotized as to be told to mimic Brando’s offscreen expressions; a tropical storm wiped out the sets; heat, humidity, and lousy food plagued the remote location; and, after a 44-take session, Brando walked off and demanded the shoot be moved from Colombia to Morocco. Re-edited and shortened by 20 minutes — and then dumped — for its initial U.S. release, this is the complete, unseen Italian-language version. “An amazing film. . . No one, with the possible exception of Eisenstein, has ever before attempted a political interpretation of history on this epic scale.” – Pauline Kael. Approx. 132 min.
AN MGM RELEASE

Links:

• Return to MORRICONE Series
• Click here to read the New York Times article on Gillo Pontecorvo's THE WIDE BLUE ROAD (1953), which had its New York premiere at Film Forum in 2001
• Gillo Pontecorvo on imdb.com
• Interview with Gillo Pontecorvo
• Gillo Pontecorvo Biography
• THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS page

ENNIO MORRICONE Film Music Volume 1 and 2
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