Horizon

Shipshape

In his book The Hollywood History the World, George MacDonald Fraser (author of the Flashman series) writes of Hollywood's sword-and-sandal epics:

"There are few things audiences like better than a good persecution. The Children of Israel oppressed by the Philistines or bound in Egypt; the Early Christians martyred by the Caesars; the tyranny of Rome and pagan despots; the struggle for physical and spiritual liberty - these were common if not universal themes, and they were preached in ringing tones. Freedom is a simple, straightforward message, as every politician, demagogue, and film-maker knows who has employed its rousing phrases without examining too closely what freedom means. It is not simple at all, but historical film acknowledge that fact only rarely, as in the throwaway line in The Ten Commandments when Edward G. Robinson, the renagade slave master, is himself subjected to march discipline during the Exodus, and observes wryly: 'So now, my brother, we have new task-masters.'"

And he adds in a discussion of Quo Vadis (a film I have never been able to get through):

"My one cavil concerns the suggestion that Early Christianity was anti-slavery; Hollywood is always eager to suggest that its heroes, be they Christians, Jews, American colonists, or Elizabethan sea-dogs, were champions of universal liberty, and I am not aware that this is the historic truth. Slave-owners and slave-dealers were numerous among all of them."

It's a truism that American movie audiences will only root for a demotic hero who espouses (at least in theory) vaguely egalitarian principles of organizing life. So it was particularly interesting to see in the recent Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World the leading character "Lucky" Jack Aubrey, who the film makes clear is not a small-d democrat and who adheres to a strictly hierarchical vision of the good society. This ought not to be in the least surprising given that his character is an early nineteenth century ship captain: maritime life in the age of sail was based upon a rigidly understood system of ranks and privileges even stricter than that imposed contemporaneously on shore. But Hollywood finds it so difficult to imagine a sympathetic character without Jeffersonian values that Aubrey's predecessors on the cine-poop deck have almost always been clearly labelled as tyrants or rebels. Look at the limp handling of the HMS Bounty story over the years; Charles Laughton and Trevor Howard were brooding monsters apiece, and both pictures presented a travesty of the historical Captain Bligh, who cared deeply about the condition of his crew and whose faults were vacillation and bad judgment of character, not cruelty. Anthony Hopkins' take on Bligh was the only one that came close to authenticity, and it's interesting that his 1984 version of the story is unique in presenting Fletcher Christian in a less than wholly commendable light and in being decidely ambivalent about the mutiny itself. Aubrey is another break in the tradition, but unlike Hopkins' Bligh he is portrayed as being a successful, popular character to boot. I think Master and Commander must be the first film to show a naval flogging in which our sympathies are meant to lie (mostly) with the instigator of the punishment, not its recipient. (Lest the film seem too one-sided, I should mention that there's an intelligent dissenting viewpoint presented by Aubrey's surgeon, Stephen Maturin. Indeed, another of the film's interesting novelties is its suggestion that two people can have starkly contrasting visions of government and yet remain good friends).

Posted by Alan Allport at May 8, 2004 08:01 AM