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| Images courtesy of Columbia Pictures |
Years before the Oscar winning writer-director of Elmer
Gantry would churn out two of the most searing crime dramas of the late
1960s-70s with the serial killer film In Cold Blood and the
self-destructive sexual addiction film Looking for Mr. Goodbar, American
filmmaker Richard Brooks like many others before and after him (Francis Ford
Coppola most notably with Apocalypse Now) tried his hand at
adapting Ukrainian novelist Joseph Conrad’s literature to the silver screen
with an adaptation of his 1900 adventure novel Lord Jim.
Previously adapted in 1925 as a silent drama by Gone with
the Wind and The Wizard of Oz director Victor Fleming, the story
told of a disgraced 19th century seaman who drifts into the
fictional country of Patusan, a remote backwater in the South Seas functioning
almost like a Shangri-La ruled by Malay natives, and receives a shot at
redemption when the town’s chief asks for his help at repelling a bandit ambush
led by a warlord only known as The General.
Much like Apocalypse Now, the jungle set saga depicted warfare
fought by indigenous natives against the modern western world and functioned
for its main actor as a character transformation watching a man from the
industrialized world gradually syncing up with nature in the act of fighting
back.
Circa 1957, after directors such as Orson Welles tried their
hand in the past at attempting Conrad onscreen, Richard Brooks optioned the
novel and in 1965 in the wake of gargantuan Super Panavision 70mm widescreen
epics such as Lawrence of Arabia starring Peter O’Toole, Brooks and
O’Toole teamed up for what turned out to be the second stab at Conrad’s Lord
Jim. This time a multimillion-dollar
epic shot in English studio lots before going on location to Cambodia and
Malaysia, the criminally underseen and underrated wartime epic though clearly
wearing on its international cast of British and Japanese actors like William
Friedkin’s equally grueling blood, sweat and tears shedder Sorcerer is
well worth the bruises and scars that come with it.
Up and coming titular merchant English seaman Jim (Peter O’Toole)
is on the rise to becoming a first officer but suffers a brutal setback when he
boards a damaged freighter carting hundreds of Muslims on a pilgrimage to Mecca. During a violent storm at sea, Jim and the crew
abandon ship leaving the passengers behind but to their shock find the ship at
port ahead of their arrival. With the
crew leaving Jim to take the fall, he is stripped of his sailing papers and is
left adrift to wander with self-hatred over his failure. However, redemption comes in the form of a
gunpowder transportation job (The Wages of Fear?) to the fictitious land
of Patusan to reload their ammunition against a bandit uprising.
From here the film takes on the form of an action-adventure
wartime thriller as Jim is forced to hide his cargo from being intercepted by
cronies working for The General (Eli Wallach) including but not limited to
enduring torturing in an effort to extract the location of the ammo. Eventually, the natives of Patusan and a
young woman only known as The Girl (Daliah Lavi) come to his aide and they
jointly mount an armed attack on the General’s compound, earning the newly
reformed warlord Jim the status of Lord among the people. Lord Jim has found new meaning and happiness
in his life, but the General’s private war is far from over with survivors of
his crew recruiting ruthless assassins such as Gentleman Brown (James Mason)
after hidden treasure in the General’s compound is discovered. Jim might be a Lord now in the eyes of the
people but his presence in Patusan threatens the peace and stability of the
country with rogue killers closing in.
A star-studded expensive Super Panavision 70mm widescreen
epic lensed in glorious 2.20:1 widescreen by the legendary Lawrence of
Arabia cinematographer Freddie Young and given a traditionally sweeping orchestral
score by Polish composer Bronisław Kaper which integrated the use of gamelan
musicians, stunning production design and the help of Cambodian translator Dith
Pran whose own life story was eventually made into the 1984 film The Killing
Fields, Richard Brooks’ Lord Jim is simultaneously one of the prettiest
as well as one of the grungiest 70mm big studio epics in the celluloid
landscape. Filled with hot, dimly lit
and sweaty vistas that even screened on 70 is difficult to see, the rainy jungle
infused actioner looks like it was grueling for its cast and crew and actor
Peter O’Toole later remarked the location shooting in Cambodia included some of
the most difficult nights of his career wading through lizards and bugs.
As aforementioned, the film is loaded with notable actors
including but not limited to Eli Wallach, old Hollywood British acting legend
Jack Hawkins, eventual The Exorcist star Jack MacGowran, Paul Lukas and
Andrew Keir. The film also boasts more
than a few international cast members such as Akim Tamiroff, Juzo Itami, Tatsuo
Saito and Daliah Lavi as Lord Jim’s unlikely love interest. O’Toole, a fantastic actor in his own right,
looks worn down by the elements here but would later remarks the film was the
best work he had ever done. While
featuring terrific later tier appearances by James Mason, the central focus of
the film never leaves O’Toole who like his portrayal of T.E. Lawrence comes
across as exhausted but determined and intensely focused on his mission to
protect his newly discovered secret utopia.
Sadly, unlike the Academy Award winning Lawrence of
Arabia which won the Best Picture Oscar, Lord Jim took a beating from
critics and especially the box office.
While garnering two BAFTA nominations for Best Art Direction and Best
Cinematography, the film floundered in theaters taking in a measly $5 million and
so incensed Cambodian Head of State and former King Norodom Sihanouk he made
his own film Aspara in response a year later. Much like David Lean’s own stumbling with Ryan’s
Daughter (also lensed by Freddie Young), the film remains under the radar
of cinephiles keen on either big widescreen epics, Peter O’Toole or the oeuvre of
Richard Brooks and it remains something of an outlier for all three respective
subcategories. Still, years later the
score was nominated by the AFI for 100 Years of Film Scores and was further
preserved by the Academy Film Archive in the year 2000.
Having caught an authentic 70mm print of the film at the
Music Box Theater a few years back with the only proper home video release of
the film being a French blu-ray disc from Wild Side Video, I can confirm Lord
Jim to be an imperfect yet underrated take on Joseph Conrad with O’Toole in
usual top form giving both a physically and emotionally daunting
performance. Boasting brilliant
cinematography, a rousing score and offering another side of Conrad on the
silver screen that isn’t directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Lord Jim is
tragically clandestine and more than worthy of domestic reappraisal rather than
only offering US customers a cropped digital presentation. Maybe the good folks at Arrow who just put
out the O’Toole action-adventure epic Murphy’s War are listening in?
--Andrew Kotwicki
