OR THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM.

The action-driven historical epic flourished in the early Sixties. Many of these films looked back nostalgically at the glory days of American or British expansionism, in some instances functioning as an extravagant platform for Cold War rhetoric. The high point of the genre is no doubt David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a remarkably literate and intelligent work for all its romanticizing of the anguished loner T.E. Lawrence, not to mention its delicate handling of the political dynamics of British colonialism in the Middle East during World War I. Lawrence was especially important for attempting to give the viewer of the early Sixties a reasonable sense of the racial Other, here the Arab world. A considerably lesser but almost as influential representative of the form is John Wayne's The Alamo (1960). A long-term idee fixe for actor/director Wayne (and very likely his summary statement), The Alamo is less about the legendary Last Stand during the Texas Revolution of 1836 than it is a vehicle for Wayne's extreme rightist sentiments, especially his convictions about the "flabby" patriotism of Americans at the end of the Eisenhower era. A critical and commercial flop at the time of its release, The Alamo gained a substantial following over the last four decades, along with critical reevaluation and several rereleases on home video. More important, The Alamo, with its often ludicrous valorization of sacrificial violence and deliberate evasion of historical fact, had an enormous impact on the historical epic and the action cinema overall. While this film genuflects in the direction of the racial Other (Mexico), it does so by alternately romanticizing Mexicans as noble savages and ignoring entirely the attempts by the Anglo-Americans in Mexico to expand the southern slavocracy.

Various films fall somewhere within the spectrum created by these two works, including Nicholas Ray's 55 Days at Peking (1963), about the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the unsuccessful attempt by China to expel its Western colonizers. Filled with widescreen battle action and assorted pyrotechnics, this vulgar vehicle for Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven portrays the Chinese as a horde of screaming fanatics, with nothing better to do than kill missionaries and raise hell for the European legations in Peking. Very much a Last Stand movie, with the meager American and European armies successfully repelling the Yellow Peril, 55 Days at Peking owes much to The Alamo and the concept of sacrificial death it ennobles, at the same time that it aspires to the enlightened sophistication of Lawrence. A half-rung above this film is Basil Dearden's Khartoum (1966), another Heston vehicle about the British incursion in the Sudan under Lord George Gordon, that hides its politics behind a stately veneer, demonizin g the swarthy hordes while valorizing Gordon's dedication and courage.

Filling a unique position in the genre is Cy Endfield's Zulu (1964), one of the most highly regarded action epics of the period. Very successful commercially and critically at its release, Zulu has steadily increased in reputation and influenced a variety of films about the Zulu nation and the Zulu War of 1879 (including the flaccid Zulu Dawn [1979], and the 1987 TV film Shaka Zulu). The film's longevity is difficult to miss, since it appears regularly on cable outlets like American Movie Classics or The History Channel, and has enjoyed several home video editions on VHS, laser disc, and DVD. A tautly-directed film that is an instruction to all action filmmakers, Zulu makes superb use of its then-popular Super Technirama 70mm format, a thunderous martial score by John Barry, a voice-over introduction and coda by Richard Burton, and a cast consisting of some of the best British character actors of the postwar period, including Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, James Booth, Patrick Magee, Nigel Green, and Michael C aine in his first major role.

Zulu is most distinguished, however, by the respect it gave to the racial Other, attempting to recreate Zulu culture in a way that struck many journalistic reviewers as extraordinarily dignified and fair-minded for a work that deals with the British occupation of South Africa very much from a British perspective. It seems apparent, however, that for all of Zulu's many accomplishments, it reveals not only the commercial cinema's failures in the representation of race, but also the way that a narrow Cold War ideology impinged on action films of a seemingly sophisticated stripe. Zulu also shows the limits of multicultural analysis, that is, it fails to keep ideological issues out of its representations of a racial Other.

Zulu deals with the Battle of Rorke's Drift, one of the most famous engagements in British military history. On January 22, 1879, a small garrison of less than one hundred British troops defended a mission station in Natal province, South Africa, against an attack by four thousand Zulu warriors. The attack occurred just after a major battle at Isandhlwana, a mountain five miles north of Rorke's Drift, where the Zulus overwhelmed and destroyed an entire column (over a thousand men) of British infantry. The grueling siege of Rorke's Drift lasted a day and a night, during which the British lost seventeen men while the Zulus suffered almost four hundred dead. Eleven of the defenders of Rorke's Drift were awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain's most coveted military decoration, an extraordinary accomplishment given that the medal has been awarded just over thirteen hundred times since it was authorized by Queen Victoria in 1864.

Often re-creating the events of Rorke's Drift with genuine historical accuracy, Zulu was a labor of love for its creators. The film's research is obvious, and its attention to the details of the conflict makes all the more evident the film's eccentricities. Its deviation from the extant historical record and recourse to genre convention is clearly motivated by ideological concerns. Although helmed by blacklisted American director Cy Endfield, Zulu is really the brainchild of actor/coproducer Stanley Baker, who was almost as fixated on the Battle of Rorke's Drift as was John Wayne on the Alamo (Rorke's Drift has always been seen as a kind of 'successful' Alamo, with the tiny besieged garrison surviving its onslaught). With considerable effort, Baker convinced Joseph E. Levine to fund the project, with Baker having almost total authority in the casting and staffing of the film. Baker also managed to gain the cooperation of Chief Buthelezi, leader of the Zulu nation through the second half of the twentieth cent ury. Buthelezi's cooperation was crucial, since the film employed thousands of people of the Zulu nation as extras for the battle scenes and Zulu rituals.

While Buthelezi was very familiar with Rorke's Drift, he had no idea what Baker wanted when the actor began describing his vision of the battle action. To illustrate his intentions, Baker showed Buthelezi a series of Gene Autry Westerns. Buthelezi, who was cast as King Cetshwayo (Zulu leader of the late nineteenth century), laughed at Baker's ideas, but agreed. The Western is indeed crucial to the film, and is one of two genres from which Zulu gains its impact and on which it depends for its notion of the Other. In a striking early scene of the film, the Zulus appear lined up along the ridge of a far hill just before the attack, replicating many a scene in John Ford's films in which Indians eye a wagon train. The difference in the rendition of the scene is the distance of the low-angle camera (from the garrison's point of view) from the hill, with a slow panning shot revealing a vast army of warriors as far as the eye can see, conveying the overpowering, majestic might of the enemy. The battle scenes owe a g reat deal to the Western, and The Alamo in particular. The garrison itself (a bit grander than the ramshackle bungalows of the historical Rorke's Drift) has stockade-like features, and the curved upper facade of its church recalls the Alamo chapel. The British troops stand shoulder to shoulder, and have sufficient time to regroup before the next wave of Zulus attack. In each battle sequence, the British create a striking set piece while the Zulus are often caught prancing in front of the enemy, doing a stereotypical 'ooga booga' routine as they are gunned down. As in the Western, the racial Other seems to have no rational strategy whatever, although mention is made of "the classic attack" of the Zulus, and the camera lingers over their massed ranks, spears outstretched as if pronouncing benediction over the enemy.

An important convention from the Western is the appearance of several 'men who know Zulus,' like the men who know Indians discussed by scholars in relation to Ford and other directors of the Western. Lt. Adendorff (Gert van den Bergh), a Boer cavalryman who warns the garrison of the attack, outlines the Zulu strategy, chiding the commander for his racism and bolstering the notion of the Zulus as a formidable enemy. Later, Corporal Schiess (Dickie Owen), a Swiss member of the Natal Mounted Police recovering in hospital, also chides the foolish bigotry of the British 'rednecks,' telling two soldiers that "a Zulu regiment can run, RUN fifty miles, and fight a battle at the end of it!" This complements an early remark that the Zulus are "a great people."

As in the Western, the emphasis on the superhuman skills of the Other makes all the more grand the white victory. It is noteworthy that both Schiess and the men he dresses down are among the Victoria Cross winners in the film's epilogue. The most obvious recourse to the Western is the final engagement, the scene of the Last Redoubt, where the British troops make a valiant Last Stand behind a huge heap of mealie (corn) bags. The actual Rorke's Drift defenders indeed built a redoubt, but it was hastily improvised and used chiefly to provide shelter to the seriously injured. Other elements of the Western include a cattle stampede that crushes the Zulus, who for some reason stand in the way (hearkening also to any number of Tarzan films), and the failure of the meager garrison to get much-needed reinforcement.

But the film uses other genre conventions to ennoble the British at the expense of the Zulus' ostensibly gallant warrior image. A more egregious use of conventions comes from another genre: the horror film. The surging chords of John Barry's main theme suggest a terrible great host advancing, an idea immediately conveyed in the first image of the film, the overwhelming devastation at Isandhlwana. The Zulus slowly appear on this bloody battlefield to strip the dead troops. When a Zulu soldier picks up a British rifle and brandishes it toward his commander, the main title, in huge, burning block letters, comes zooming toward the audience, recalling sci-fi films like Gorgo. The title itself is significant, since the film is about the British defense of a garrison, not the Zulu nation. The massive word "Zulu" connotes a terrible threat, comprehensible to the white audience only as a racial threat. When the Zulus approach Rorke's Drift, Lt. Chard (Baker) and Lt. Brombead (Caine) initially hear rather than see them. Bromhead notes that their approach (they strike their shields with their spears as they march) sounds "damned funny" and "like a train...in the distance."

The emphasis on the sheer mass of the Zulu army underscores their monstrousness, like the swarms of bugs and aliens in sci-fi (at the time of the historical attack, one of the Rorke's Drift defenders reportedly yelled: "Here they come! Black as hell and thick as grass!"). The sense of the Zulus as an implacable preternatural force becomes a constant. During the attack on the Rorke's Drift hospital, one defender, Private Hook, spots the Zulus pecking through a door with their spears, very much repeating a moment in The Birds, an image that would recur regularly in the zombie films of George Romero and others. The otherworldly aspect of the adversary is underscored by the portrayal of Africa itself as a beautiful but threatening Dark Continent. When Chard finishes his work on a pontoon bridge early in the film, he kicks at a dry stump, complaining that "every piece of wood in this blistering country is eaten by ants."

The recourse to the horror film is not surprising when we consider the film's ultimate perspective toward the native population. In the first scene after the Isandhlwana prologue, we witness a Zulu mass marriage presided over by King Cetshwayo. This scene, a bit startling to audiences of 1964, portrays the Zulus as both menacing and enticingly exotic, "splendid but horrible," as stated by Margareta (Ulla Jacobsson), who attends the ceremony with her father, Rev. Otto Witt (Jack Hawkins). As Zulu ritual music fills the soundtrack, we see near-naked Zulu people, women bare-breasted, dancing in Cetshwayo's kraal. Audiences wondered how the filmmakers could get away with this at a time when the American and British production codes were quite strict. The answer is fairly manifest. American suburban audiences had already been treated to full frontal nudity in such preMondo Cane 'documentaries' as The Sky Above, the Mud Below (1960), a questionable peek at the peculiarities of Amazon peoples. The ethic here and in Zulu follows that of National Geographic magazine: these native populations are simply not human, therefore showing them naked is no violation of social mores. One must note that this nonviolation continued into the 1970s, with bare-breasted 'African' women appearing in films like Roots. The dignity allowed the Zulus in their rituals and battle action is always played out under the sign of exoticism, the noble savage who provides both threat and erotic allure.

The spectatorship of the Witts during the marriage ceremony is key, revealing some of the film's contradictory attitudes toward the British occupiers. Indeed, the film's view of the British is more complicated than its portrayal of the conquered natives. When the Rev. Witt and his daughter watch the ceremony (they are trying to Christianize the king), the camera closes in several times on the enraptured/terrified face of Margareta, a cauldron of Victorian repression. For an instant she shows a slight smile, then seems downright orgasmic, finally overtaken by wide-eyed panic. She very much anchors audience point of view and embodies its sensibility, showing delight and revulsion at the naked savage horde, with its display of sexuality that is a wish-dream projection for the Anglo-European-there is perhaps no irony in the fact of the Zulus' own rather strict moral and civil codes.

Much of the film's tinkering with the historical defenders of Rorke's Drift must be explained as a strategy for bolstering its conservative outlook and its embrace of England's nineteenth-century war policies in South Africa. The historical Otto Witt was a rather nondescript Swedish clergyman who played a minor role in the defense of Rorke's Drift, leaving Natal when he heard the false rumor that his wife had been killed. He became an unpopular person in Britain when he attempted unsuccessfully to sue the Crown for the destruction of the buildings and personal property, commandeered by the army.

In the film, Rev. Witt is a hysteric, an irrational Bible-thumper and hypocritical alcoholic. While at first appearing to be a man of peace sympathetic to the Zulus and wishing to prevent the conflict, he is dismissed by Lt. Chard, who immediately spots him as a troublemaker. Witt tells the garrison's native levies to flee, invoking the biblical admonition about the sin of Cain, a moment that enrages Chard. When Witt's request to evacuate the hospital patients is rejected, he deteriorates rapidly, becoming so much the foaming-at-the-mouth madman that Chard has Sgt. Bourne (Nigel Green) lock him in a storehouse, from which he continues to spout apocalyptic proclamations until he and his daughter are driven from the post.

For so traditional a film, Zulu's attitude toward organized religion seems odd, but it has much in common with an outlook in some phases of the action cinema. The clergy is portrayed here as a symbol of a soft-headed liberalism that gets in the way of a man's duty. Witt's concerns are caricatured as feminine, in marked contrast to Chard's hardheaded pragmatism and can-do militarism. The film dispenses with Ford-like religious pieties; when Sgt. Bourne tells Chard that "it's a miracle" the garrison survived the battle, Chard retorts: "If it's a miracle, Color Sergeant, it's a short chamber Boxer-Henry .45 caliber miracle."

Perhaps the quirkiest characterization in the film is Private Henry Hook, played by British tough guy character actor James Booth in perhaps his most famous role. Hook is a social miscreant, a ne'er-do-well goldbricking hospital patient; he is described by Bromhead as "a thief, a coward, and an insubordinate barrack room lawyer." Hook spends his days hustling a gullible admirer with a shell game, and shouting at his delirious former commander, Sgt. Maxfield (Paul Daneman). While Hook seems to want Maxfield dead and buried ("If a dog were that sick they'd shoot him"), we get the idea that Maxfield is Hook's conscience. At a moment of clarity following Margereta's nursing, Maxfield jumps to his feet and takes on Hook: "I know you, Hook... you're no good to anyone but the Queen and Sgt. Maxfield.. .but I'll make a soldier out of you yet!" The real Henry Hook was from all accounts a model soldier and one of the most venerated defenders of Rorke's Drift, a Victoria Cross winner for his protection of the hospital patients. Certainly the filmmakers knew this, so why this tomfoolery with one of the legends of the battle? At the moment of the hospital siege, Hook shows what he is made of, driving off the Zulus with a savage fury while the patients are evacuated. At one point fighting with a spear, Hook becomes a 'white Zulu,' filled with the primeval ferocity of the enemy yet a civil man who eventually grieves for Sgt. Maxwell. The dying Sgt. Maxfield yells: "That's my boy, Hook! I made a soldier out of you!" While the film no doubt wants to add some picaresque characters to its landscape, the suggestion here is that the worst dregs of British society are more than a match for "a bunch of savages," in the words of a soldier, one of many remarks not really fully refuted. Hook, like Rev. Witt, once again shows the film's dependence on genre conventions. He is one of a long line of cowards and slackers in war films and Westerns who are redeemed at the penultimate moment, and whose worse qualities eventually aid their countrymen.

Casual racism recurs in various forms, and accompanies Zulu's antidemocratic sentiments. Such sentiments are most noticeable in the relationship between Chard and Bromhead, the garrison co-commanders. The film gains texture by portraying them as rivals (another strange violation of the historical record). Bromhead, as rendered by a young, thin, and very blond Michael Caine, is an effete aristocrat who dusts his cloak with a horsetail and prides himself on his distinguished forebears in the British military. He speculates on when the "fuzzies" will reach the outpost. When he is told that several hundred native levies died with the British troops at Isandhlwana, Bromhead says: "Damn the

levies, man-more cowardly blacks!" Although scolded by Lt. Adendorif ("What the hell do you mean cowardly blacks?!!") and rebuked by the evidence of the Zulus' courage, Bromhead's view is never totally repudiated, and he gains in swashbuckling heroic stature while the Zulus remain an ominous horde. Baker's Et. Chard is by contr ast a solidly practical man with no time for Bromhead's affectations. Chard digs at Bromhead's social class, noting that "someone's son and heir" was probably responsible for the disaster at Isandhlwana. Chard quickly usurps command, citing his rather slight seniority. While the two men quickly learn to work together, there is little question that the film poses the characters as contrasting masculine styles. Bromhead's foppish bearing and his humiliation by Chard are probably less about the film's homophobia than a typical assault on authority and class structure from the right. The notion is consistent throughout the film; the ordinary soldier is portrayed as a colorful "damned ranker" (Bromhead's words) who becomes part of the better class of men not by social privilege but by courage at bloodletting, a common cliche of the war film.

Zulu's main sins are of omission. There is no attempt at all to differentiate the Zulus, although their military regiments were at least as complex as those of the British. The film ignores, for example, a number of famous officers, such as Dabulamanzi Kmapande -- half-brother of Cetshwayo--who led the attack on Rorke's Drift against his king's orders never to assault an entrenched position. Given the intelligence of the film, such omissions are far more troubling than, say, John Wayne's ignoring of Santa Anna in The Alamo. While this is a 1964 film about the glories of Britain's past, an understanding of the Zulu nation was always central to historians and aficionados of the Rorke's Drift story, at least when it ceased being a propaganda weapon for Queen Victoria's foreign policy. The viewer never has a sense of why the Zulus attack either Islandlhwana or Rorke's Drift; we have no information beyond the notion that they are a bloodthirsty "bunch of savages." There is passing mention of Lord Chelmsford in th e film's prologue, as Richard Burton reads his letter to the Secretary of State for War after the Isandhlwana defeat. Chelmsford was the military attache to Sir Henry Bartle Frere, British High Commisioner to Natal and Gape colonies. Bartle Frere is notorious in diplomatic history for his barbaric colonialist campaigns in South Africa, deliberately forcing the Zulu nation into war by a series of provocative actions against the Zulu people and their territory, and insulting demands of King Cetshwayo. The battles of Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift were but the first phase of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, and were followed by a series of amoral campaigns that all but destroyed the Zulu nation. King Cetshwayo was driven into the wilderness, eventually captured and put on display in Britain, much as the fate of Sitting Bull in the United States. There is none of this in the film, nor any association of the events of 1879 with the Dutch-British apartheid policies that dominated South African native populations in the l ast century.

Zulu remains both an eminently watch-able and enormously problematical film. In some respects it is a forerunner of the antiwar films of the Sixties, its sentimentality and martial values leavened by a noticeable cynicism. When a wounded Chard staggers into the camp hospital, an angry Surgeon Reynolds (Patrick Magee), sickened by his operating table, glares up: "Damn you, Chard! Damn all you butchers!," collapsing Self and Other. After the battle, Bromhead says he feels "sick and ashamed." Chard surprises Bromhead, who thought Chard a seasoned combat officer. Chard says: "Do you think I could stand this butcher's yard more than once?" Yet one could argue that such dialog emphasizes the British as essentially peaceable, as opposed to the warlike Zulus, particularly since at every turn the superiority of Britain and its culture is emphasized. Just prior to the final battle sequence, Chard and his weary soldiers hear the morning prayers and war chant of the Zulus. Sensing the need for some contagious magic, Cha rd exhorts the company choirmaster, Private Owen (Ivor Emmanuel) to see "if the Welsh can do better than that." The garrison breaks into the medieval Welsh battle hymn "Men of Harlech." In some fine crosscutting, we see a 'culture war' between the exhausted but ever-proud British versus the rather frenzied Zulu legion. The Zulus charge the redoubt; the British, as it turns out, can both fight and sing.

The film concludes with a recapitulation of the sudden appearance of the massive Zulu army on the ridge above Rorke's Drift. Much to the relief of the beleaguered garrison, the Zulus salute the British as 'fellow braves' instead of attacking them, an apocryphal moment that has long been part of Rorke's Drift mythology. As if to return the gesture, Chard makes a monument of a Zulu shield in the final image of the film. Thus the battle indeed becomes a contest of two groups of valiant 'braves, two masculine tribes who recognize each other's mettle. As in many representations of conflicts between colonizers and colonized, Zulu demonstrates that the civilized British have maintained contact with their 'primitive' (read: macho) self, gaining from the exposure to the raw, uncivilized world of the native while preserving the cultured qualities making them superior. The Zulus in turn gain a dignity associated with the organization, discipline, and sacrifice of the Western world, even as they remain an undifferentiat ed mass. While Zulu indeed highlights the dignity of the native, and in so doing evidences some of the liberal sensibility characteristic of Western interventionism during the Sixties, Zulu may finally be about nothing so much as the limits of liberalism.

Christopher Sharrett is Professor of Communication at Seton Hall

I am indebted to Mikita Brottman for comments on the British occupation of South Africa and Zulu. Similar thanks to Tony Williams for our conversations about Zulu. Thanks also to Cynthia Lucia and Krin Gabbard for their helpful remarks.

* The best extant source on Rorke's Drift and the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 is Donald R. Morris, The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965). Ian Knight has written numerous books on the Anglo-Zulu War, including Brave Men's Blood: The Epic of the Zulu War, 1879 (London: Greenhill, 1990).