RICK MCGINNIS AT STEYN ONLINE: This Butcher’s Yard: Michael Caine and Zulu.
Zulu is the sort of film that it’s become imprudent, even inadvisable, to write about. Nearly six decades since it was released, its subject matter – a battle between white colonial troops and an African army – would certainly never be attempted by a filmmaker today, and certainly not in the same manner as it was in 1964, which it’s worth remembering is as far away from us today as the Civil War was from the first stirrings of the Roaring Twenties.
(These temporal comparisons are facile, to be sure, though we’ve certainly seen as radical a social transformation in the last six decades as the stunning technological changes that happened between the presidencies of Lincoln and Coolidge.)
When it was released, Zulu was billed as a spectacle, an epic action picture that delivered the sort of widescreen thrills that television was two generations from capably providing. Even then, it was made at probably the last plausible moment for this sort of unironic celebration of valour by British redcoats on a foreign field; Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, released just four years later, would cast a far more acerbic eye on another celebrated instance of Victorian military bravery, reflecting the cultural sea change that had happened on either side of the ’60s.
Zulu retells the story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, which was fought from January 22-23, 1879, between a tiny British garrison of just over a hundred men and a Zulu army that outnumbered them nearly forty to one. It might not have been memorialized in film nearly a century later if it had not happened just hours after the worst British battlefield defeat until the next century’s world wars, at the hands of a native army wielding mostly spears and shields against professional soldiers with rifles, cannon and rockets.
The film was directed by Cy Endfield, an American escaping the blacklist in Britain, based on a script co-written by Endfield and John Prebble, and inspired by an article Prebble had written for Lilliput magazine. It was produced by Endfield and actor Stanley Baker, who plays Lt. John Chard of the Royal Engineers, commander of the defense of the supply depot at Rorke’s Drift, a former trading post turned mission station near the bank of the Buffalo River in Natal Province.
The film was meant to be a star vehicle for Baker, but he would be forced to share screen time – and ultimately stand in the shadow – of his co-star, a young cockney actor from London’s named Michael Caine.
Read the whole thing — and then go and rent or stream the whole thing — it’s a brilliant film. Just as Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest are unintentional documentaries of San Francisco and New York in the late 1950s, Zulu is an unintentional documentary of a worldview which would soon largely be lost on the movie screen.