Well, this is a complete and total mess. It's weird how a movie about protecting elephants actually has fears of nuclear proliferation at its core, but that goes to show how this film ultimately is so totally out of its mind with competing fears, ideas, and subplots that it really feels like what was being filmed was an afterthought to Huston as he went back to Africa to film another film after The African Queen. This time, though, he had Zanuck and Fox money behind him, which we all know means that Huston will be more radical, daring, and less restrained narratively than if he were spending his own money. And that, ultimately seems to be the problem with Huston at this point: he wanted to experiment, but he was always doing it with other people's money while never caring if he was making something audiences actually wanted to actually see.
The problem starts with the fact that it's really unclear for a very long stretch who the main character ultimately is. It ends up being Morel (Trevor Howard) an elephant lover that seems to do nothing other than protect elephants on the Savannah, starting the film by punching a poacher out to kill the fourth element in a quick string, dropping him off at the bar owned by the guy's boss where the bar is being run by Minna (Juliette Greco). With her, he outlines his theory on life, and it's something of a joke about how humanity needs friends, and the animals are our friends, and we have to do everything to preserve them. The target of this film's ire is big game hunting (which John Huston participated in regularly), but the way Morel talks, it sounds like a call for veganism at best. What underlines all of it, and what gets brought up at least four times through the film, is a fear of nuclear annihilation. That's the factor under it, and it feels so unaddressed and underserved at the same time which, when combined with the kid-gloves treatment of Morel, ends up creating this weird mishmash of ideas and concerns that never really wants to dig into any implications because, I presume, to actually show Morel as a full-on terrorist would make him too unlikeable for audiences.
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REPORT THIS AD Anyway, he gets mad when no one in authority will back his ill-defined and highly generic petition to make big game hunting illegal in all of Africa, including the governor of French Equatorial Africa (Andre Luguet), and he begins his reign of terrorism by burning down one ivory shot and shooting some hunters in the butt from hundreds of yards away and with pinpoint accuracy, including the American journalist Cy Sedgwick (Orson Welles) who uses his position of power in the media to rile up the American public against the government and on Morel's side...and we barely see it. It's talked about more than it's actually shown, mostly with a single scene of the governor looking through newspapers that are against him. It's unclear how it's actually affecting his governance or the nation at large beyond a sudden influx of reporters. What is the focus of this film? Heck, this is the section where Morel simply disappears from the film, having escaped into the wilds of the country to hide out and...do nothing?
Minna, given directions by a government minister on how to find Morel for reasons, takes along the rich drunk Major Forsythe (Errol Flynn) to go into the country and find Morel, both of them being the only two people to have signed Morel's petition. The first half of the film is something of a competent but not really interesting look at how a radical moves against an institution, but the second half starts interesting before completely devolving into abject nonsense because it has simply too many conflicting ideas at play that it can't iron out.
There's something in there about colonialism against native populations that's supposed to get manifested by the local leader Waitari (Edric Connor) who teams up with Morel, using Morel's suddenly popular cause to help advance his small movements in a popular revolt (that we never see anything of, by the way). What's this saying about revolutionaries in imperial territories? Nothing? Then why is it there at all? If it's nothing, then what's with Waitari having two separate arguments with Morel about their use for each other, only for Waitari to end up hunting elephants later? Is it a comment on how everyone is too concerned with human affairs to really care about animals (animals that Huston liked to hunt, by the way, even though he said he never hunted elephants)? What about Morel's kid gloves treatment of his terrorism by the film? He goes, gets control of a printing press that immediately does what he says without complaint, goes next door to a swanky party where he has the wife of one of the powerful men spanked. This is the stuff of satire...against terrorists, not a drama in their favor. This is a mess.
The film ends with a big herd of elephants, a stand off, and then Morel getting off scot-free for reasons.
This is easily Huston's worst film up to this point. The actual shoot was long and, apparently, very hard with harsh African conditions that led to sickness for nearly everyone, Flynn mainlining heroin through the whole shoot, and just general issues. Huston would later say that it's proof that bad shoots lead to bad films, and I would more lean towards the script being a complete mess. Maybe it got heavily modified as they went along, shut down for days at a time, and Huston went off to big game hunt in the middle of his film about how big game hunting is bad.
From a purely technical point of view, there's nothing wrong with the actual filmmaking craft. The film looks good as Huston's complex, Wyler-inspired eye continues to degrade slowly over time. The performances are fine, especially from Flynn who seems to essentially just playing himself: drunk. I also found Eddie Albert a welcome addition in the final act, providing some sense of life to the proceedings that the more restrained and less compelling performance from Howard did (he's much better as a stuffy Englishman like in David Lean's Brief Encounter than as an impassioned activist here). Huston did what he could while the cameras were rolling, but he seemed to be otherwise completely disengaged from the film outside of that. The result is a complete mess of a message film that can't get it's own message straight while piling in a bunch of other stuff, confusing itself with its array of characters and bad structure, and doing everything possible to make the nicest terrorist fiction could create.
The problem starts with the fact that it's really unclear for a very long stretch who the main character ultimately is. It ends up being Morel (Trevor Howard) an elephant lover that seems to do nothing other than protect elephants on the Savannah, starting the film by punching a poacher out to kill the fourth element in a quick string, dropping him off at the bar owned by the guy's boss where the bar is being run by Minna (Juliette Greco). With her, he outlines his theory on life, and it's something of a joke about how humanity needs friends, and the animals are our friends, and we have to do everything to preserve them. The target of this film's ire is big game hunting (which John Huston participated in regularly), but the way Morel talks, it sounds like a call for veganism at best. What underlines all of it, and what gets brought up at least four times through the film, is a fear of nuclear annihilation. That's the factor under it, and it feels so unaddressed and underserved at the same time which, when combined with the kid-gloves treatment of Morel, ends up creating this weird mishmash of ideas and concerns that never really wants to dig into any implications because, I presume, to actually show Morel as a full-on terrorist would make him too unlikeable for audiences.
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REPORT THIS AD Anyway, he gets mad when no one in authority will back his ill-defined and highly generic petition to make big game hunting illegal in all of Africa, including the governor of French Equatorial Africa (Andre Luguet), and he begins his reign of terrorism by burning down one ivory shot and shooting some hunters in the butt from hundreds of yards away and with pinpoint accuracy, including the American journalist Cy Sedgwick (Orson Welles) who uses his position of power in the media to rile up the American public against the government and on Morel's side...and we barely see it. It's talked about more than it's actually shown, mostly with a single scene of the governor looking through newspapers that are against him. It's unclear how it's actually affecting his governance or the nation at large beyond a sudden influx of reporters. What is the focus of this film? Heck, this is the section where Morel simply disappears from the film, having escaped into the wilds of the country to hide out and...do nothing?
Minna, given directions by a government minister on how to find Morel for reasons, takes along the rich drunk Major Forsythe (Errol Flynn) to go into the country and find Morel, both of them being the only two people to have signed Morel's petition. The first half of the film is something of a competent but not really interesting look at how a radical moves against an institution, but the second half starts interesting before completely devolving into abject nonsense because it has simply too many conflicting ideas at play that it can't iron out.
There's something in there about colonialism against native populations that's supposed to get manifested by the local leader Waitari (Edric Connor) who teams up with Morel, using Morel's suddenly popular cause to help advance his small movements in a popular revolt (that we never see anything of, by the way). What's this saying about revolutionaries in imperial territories? Nothing? Then why is it there at all? If it's nothing, then what's with Waitari having two separate arguments with Morel about their use for each other, only for Waitari to end up hunting elephants later? Is it a comment on how everyone is too concerned with human affairs to really care about animals (animals that Huston liked to hunt, by the way, even though he said he never hunted elephants)? What about Morel's kid gloves treatment of his terrorism by the film? He goes, gets control of a printing press that immediately does what he says without complaint, goes next door to a swanky party where he has the wife of one of the powerful men spanked. This is the stuff of satire...against terrorists, not a drama in their favor. This is a mess.
The film ends with a big herd of elephants, a stand off, and then Morel getting off scot-free for reasons.
This is easily Huston's worst film up to this point. The actual shoot was long and, apparently, very hard with harsh African conditions that led to sickness for nearly everyone, Flynn mainlining heroin through the whole shoot, and just general issues. Huston would later say that it's proof that bad shoots lead to bad films, and I would more lean towards the script being a complete mess. Maybe it got heavily modified as they went along, shut down for days at a time, and Huston went off to big game hunt in the middle of his film about how big game hunting is bad.
From a purely technical point of view, there's nothing wrong with the actual filmmaking craft. The film looks good as Huston's complex, Wyler-inspired eye continues to degrade slowly over time. The performances are fine, especially from Flynn who seems to essentially just playing himself: drunk. I also found Eddie Albert a welcome addition in the final act, providing some sense of life to the proceedings that the more restrained and less compelling performance from Howard did (he's much better as a stuffy Englishman like in David Lean's Brief Encounter than as an impassioned activist here). Huston did what he could while the cameras were rolling, but he seemed to be otherwise completely disengaged from the film outside of that. The result is a complete mess of a message film that can't get it's own message straight while piling in a bunch of other stuff, confusing itself with its array of characters and bad structure, and doing everything possible to make the nicest terrorist fiction could create.