On Screen

...The villagers, who have always hated Rosy for being a "Princess," and now for carrying on with a British major, assume that she betrayed the Irish heroes and publicly strip her and shave her head...

...Why do his words make sense (let's not turn these blacks into martyrs) and his actions not...

...There were actually no such hostilities between England and Portugal in the mid-19th century, but I shall explain that later...

...Douglas Wilmer is wonderfully dour, decent, brave and scrupulous as that Fairfax whose name, Milton tells us, "fills all Mouths with Envy or with Praise...

...other bits were hacked out later in New York...

...Walker finds that the powerfully built black who carries his bags is material from which a native leader could be forged...

...So the oppressors had to become the Portuguese and the shooting was transferred to Colombia, the Caribbean and North Africa...

...The colonist regime, puppet of the British sugar company, has proved only slightly preferable to that of the Portuguese...

...It is sad to think that this high-sounding and essentially hollow film is the work of the man who in Battle of Algiers made one of the most restrained yet shattering films of recent times, so real that most people mistook large chunks of it for newsreel footage...

...Such contradictions can be resolved...

...their examination might, in fact, be most rewarding...

...They remind me, mutatis mutandis, of those in Henry V, and for battle sequences that is high praise indeed...

...A defeated victor, Walker is about to reembark for England when a voice, reminiscent of Jose's years ago, offers to carry his bags...

...On this note of tantalizing uncertainty the film ends, leaving me as unconcerned with its outcome as with its 189 minutes of preceding hokum...

...Still, the film holds one's interest, not least because of Geoffrey Unsworth's intelligent color photography...

...There is no getting round the feeling that in this Cromwell we behold a historic tapestry on which multitudes of exceptionally hungry moths have been feasting away...

...above all, he succeeds in keeping his rampaging intensity suitably leashed...

...Who is this Sir William...

...Here his modulations are almost microscopically subtle, his effects never easy, and the very pathos sternly soft-pedaled...

...Things are bloodier than ever, but when Sanchez finally makes a weak effort at doing right, Walker, with colonial and British support, gets him executed...

...For he seems to have nothing but contempt for the British, yet serves them all too well...

...This is the sort of film in which the lover appears on the scene with an immense sunset haloing him from head to dragging foot, seduces the heroine under orgies of sunlight in the overhanging leaves (and a forest of symbols all around), haunts his mistress as a mighty apparition silhouetted on a hillside against the night sky, and blows himself up only after watching the fieriest of suns sink into the sea...

...But the score by that most fascinating composer, Ennio Morricone, miscarries, and Marlon Brando gives his by now customary affected performance as Walker...

...Even if Alec Guinness looks and acts a slightly older and more threadbare Charles than history indicates, he gives a dignifiedly worldly, quietly feelingful performance, unmarred by that irritatha self-indulgence, or self-parody, Guinness has often fallen into in recent years...

...Like Walker, he is denied a private life, or any bit of personality unrelated to his function as a revolutionary general...

...Some of the film's inconsistencies are caused by the fact that it was first laid and shot in the Spanish colonies, where it would have made more sense...

...Of course, there was Pontecorvo's melodramatic and cliche-ridden first film, Kapo, to which Burn...

...Charles, the patient and kindly husband, waits for the passion to burn itself out and says nothing...

...He is a shell-shocked major with a leg wound that gives him a Byronic limp, but also likens him to the misshapen and hobbling village idiot...

...Most fatuous of the current big films is David Lean's Ryan's Daughter...

...In well over three hours of Super Panavision, with what seems like the entire West Irish coast getting into the act, with a whole elaborate stone village built for the film, and at a cost of $13.6 million, Lean and his scenarist Robert Bolt have told a simple-minded story...

...These include the nightfall when Pym and Ireton, at the beginning of the film, ride out to seek Cromwell, and, later, that strange, almost more steely than somber dusk in which Cromwell confronts the body of his fallen son...

...An ira commander comes to the village with his men during a violent storm to pick up guns and ammunition the Germans are floating over to him from a boat...

...Only Trevor Howard, as the priest, and John Mills, as the idiot, score Pyrrhic victories...

...It concerns a young publican's daughter in a tiny coastal village of Ireland who gets a widowed schoolteacher to marry her, only to find him not the romantic hero of her dreams...

...Some cutting has also been done--in this case by United Artists--on Gillo Pontecorvo's third film, now entitled Burn...

...But the Franco government stopped cooperating and threatened a boycott...

...Pontecorvo and his scenarists, Franco Solinas and Giorgo Arlorio, have proceeded too schematically, and produced a poster, a poster already frayed and half torn off its wall...

...The beginning of the film is quite gripping, and there are good crowd scenes...

...Otherwise, Harris does a very creditable, occasionally even stirring job...

...it is full of ideological rhetoric, pregnant with heavy political innuendo, virtually predestined for a primer of black revolution...

...Then there are some extremely fine performances...

...is basically uneditable...

...And though Robert Morley overdoes the Earl of Manchester, Charles Gray is a superbly contemptuous, glacial Essex...

...They are now beginning to revolt, and Walker is here to stir up trouble for Portugal to the benefit of England...

...The wise, hard-drinking, tough but kindly village priest--who, like the village idiot, keeps weaving in and out of the action rather arbitrarily --now helps Charles and Rosie leave the village for Dublin...

...As he holds them out to the supposititious porter, he is stabbed to death by him: Walker's lessons and Jose Dolores' example live on and bear fruit...

...The villagers are shadowy, the minor characters dimensionless, and the principals seem to be carved from used celluloid (B-movie variety...

...But here the cuts, while very likely inept and damaging, at least do not interfere with and obscure history...

...Some cuts and changes were necessitated by this...

...Timothy Dalton is a dapper Prince Rupert, but the script or the cutting turns him into a stereotype, and there is little justification for the scenario's fusing Bishops Judson and Laud...

...The film tries to show us the man, warts and all, yet it minimizes the outer and inner warts into mere beauty or blind spots...

...Richard Harris' Cromwell, to be sure, is rather uneven--largely because his vocal quality fluctuates between fascinating roughness and a constrained squeakiness that left me in doubt as to which would break first: Harris' vocal chords or my eardrums...

...and much more than in Christopher Jones as a darkly brooding, psychically and physically damaged, equally sensitive (if less repressed) British major...

...Jungle warfare, guerrillas being burned out of their hideouts and cozily mowed down as they come running through the flames, mass executions--many such grim incidents and details are well managed, though one misses the absolute life-likeness of Battle of Algiers...

...They are jeered by the crowd, but Father Hugh suggests to Charles that the profoundly chastened couple should not separate as they plan to upon reaching the city...

...Certainly what we are seeing is inconsistent with any logical presentation of the story...

...Cromwell (adding insult to injury, the American gala program misidentifies the distinguished Miss Walker as "Josephine Gillick...

...But the film prefers just to make pronunciamentos or shoot action sequences that can get along very well without involvement from us...

...So he trains this Jose Dolores and his followers in guerrilla warfare, gets them to rob a bank, then denounces them to the Portuguese authorities...

...Rosy's father, the publican, betrays them to the British, for whom he has been informing all along...

...Unsworth (best remembered for Becket and 2001) uses color vividly, not lushly...

...Sarah Miles is a sexy and charming Rosy, but not the actress who could carry this Leviathan on her back...

...But others come through handsomely...

...Here an important clue is let out of the bag, or, more precisely, hurled at us, bag and all...

...The one thing authentic about Jones is his accent, and that was dubbed in by someone else...

...Jose Dolores and his men have started a new revolution...

...Geoffrey Keen is a robustly upright John Pym (whom the program does not even bother to list...

...What remains of Cromwell is less than memorable, but Ken Hughes (whose Trials of Oscar Wilde is an unjustly neglected movie) provides us with some lively watching all the same...

...Queimada" means "burned," because the island was razed by fire in the 16th century and repopulated with African slaves...

...he strives for faithfulness rather than bravura, but can, in the right places, produce spectacular effects...

...Nevertheless, the battle sequences are among the very best I have ever seen, striking a nice equilibrium between detail and overview, between dizzying turmoil and clear perspective...

...Characters whose importance we know from history--or, failing that, from the billing they get on screen and in the program--are reduced to walk-ons or bit players in the released version...

...Moreover, though Renato Salva-tori's performance as Sanchez does not amount to much (he may have been cut too severely, his English is poor, and his make-up wretched), Evaristo Marquez, an illiterate Colombian peasant, is marvelous as Jose Dolores: handsome, masterful, exuding both strength and strength of purpose, and surprisingly convincing as an actor...

...The major, with whom Rosy had already broken off her affair, commits suicide by blowing himself up with some of the German dynamite...

...The characters are rudimentary, like Sanchez, or do not make sense, like Walker...

...A curiously unmoving film, this, where even Jose Dolores, finally, makes no sense: His transition from illiterate slave to quite well-informed, worldly-wise, and profoundly philosophical leader is too swift, easy, and unconvincing in the script or editing...

...He may have sunk more effort into his accent than into his acting...

...One learns that Hughes' version is at least 45 minutes longer than the print Columbia has seen fit to release, and that the director is thoroughly unhappy about it...

...The new film is the story of Sir William Walker, a British secret agent sent to Queimada, a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean...

...Our heroine, Rosy Ryan, and this young, unhappy, dashing aristocrat fall instantaneously and madly in love...

...No less important are the performances by a number of excellent British character actors...

...But who needs the puny people and trite plot, not to mention the dialogue straining to be understated and significant, to clutter up the Panavision...

...he appears to be full of admiration for Jose Dolores and his cause, yet he destroys them, or tries to...

...As Walker returns to England, he mentions another assignment in Indochina...

...There are times, also, when the actor strikes poses more suited to pageants on the village green than to film, but this may be the director's dark doing...

...His English accent, though not bad, sounds rather like an impersonation of Queen Elizabeth II, and I expected him to break into that notorious "My husband and I...

...What remains, despite its historical inaccuracies, is often impressive though rarely affecting...

...Lean has got the usual eloquent imagery from his immaculate cinematographer, Freddie Young...

...But where the mind at work is not that of a true creative artist, only that of a competent literary or filmic journalist, observance of historical facts becomes, if not a necessity, at least a useful compensation for what is lacking in genius...

...Frank Fin-lay's John Carter and Patrick Ma-gee's Hugh Peters have been chopped down to a few shreds, as has Zena Walker's Mrs...

...although Charles I is presented in an essentially balanced manner, Cromwell is made more pure than puritanic, more profoundly right than priggishly righteous...

...Now it is Walker and several regiments of British redcoats against his former disciple and protege, once almost his friend...

...about Mitchum, undubbed, nothing is genuine...

...With the help of his cinematographer, Marcello Gatti, he captures colored skins and colorful costumes against white buildings with a genuinely pastel vivacity...

...Jose and the freed slaves withdraw to the mountains of the interior, and the settlers and mulattos rule the island with the help of the British sugar company...

...Now they are outlaws and the rebellion is on...

...This comes to pass...

...What is bothersome about this film is its unsubtle idealization of Cromwell...

...The time is 1916, and a new British commander is appointed to the small local garrison...

...The question of faithfulness to historical data is a tricky one...

...The years of Cromwell's protectorship are summarized in a few sentences of narration as the image switches from the troubled living man to his catafalque-like cenotaph...

...I would say that where the historical fiction merely incorporates facts in a magnificent imaginative construct, a certain amount of poetic license can be forgiven...

...What sort of private life does he have...

...But Burn...

...Walker's next step, taken with the assistance of a friend, the mulatto clerk Sanchez, is to persuade the colonists to join the blacks in a revolution against Portugal...

...As his queen, Dorothy Tutin may be a mite more shrewish than necessary, but she strongly resembles Henrietta Maria and is a good enough actress to make even a simplistic interpretation come bitingly alive...

...any moment...

...Walker helps Sanchez kill the governor, and when Jose Dolores, though a most able general, discovers that he and his blacks cannot govern the island, Sanchez is appointed President...

...Ten years later, Walker is summoned back to Queimada...

...Nigel Stock is a tower of tormented strength as Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon: Michael Jayston is a grimly headlong Ireton...

...The astutely chosen locations, the marvels of nature are shot with a scope and definition and technique that would have made James Fitzpatrick of the travelogues slobber with envy...

...Jose is finally captured and, firmly resisting Walker's attempts to save him, chooses martyrdom for the cause...

...bears a greater resemblance...

...He may look less like a grandiose van Dyck than a modest Ter Borch, but he still looks quite splendid...

...But I could even believe in this dime fiction more than in Robert Mitchum as a shy, sensitive, somewhat repressed, Beethoven-loving Irish schoolmaster...

...Despite this, Pontecorvo shows ability...

...and 25 minutes shorter than the director intended...

...Both the island and the agent are, often painfully, imaginary...