IMPERIAL EPIC WAR MOVIE KHARTOUM WAS RELEASED 55 YEARS AGO!

-General Charles Gordon: “Colonel, what are the chances of my sacking you as my aide?”

-Col. John Stewart: “If any exist, General, please be assured that I'd be the first to point them out to you!”

Directed by Basil Dearden, Khartoum, a British epic film released in early June 1966, was a big-budget, fact-based account of the Siege of Khartoum (1884–85), in which General Charles Gordon led an unsuccessful defense of the Sudanese city against an army headed by the religious leader Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdī. The interiors were filmed at Pinewood Studios in England in five weeks, with actual location shots in Egypt lasting ten weeks. Since the film is entirely from the British perspective, the Mahdist warriors are depicted as an undifferentiated mob of bloodthirsty howling fanatics. The paddle steamer early in the movie which takes Gordon and Scott from England is the Princess Elizabeth. Built in 1927, she was a veteran of the May 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk, where she made four trips carrying British soldiers back to Britain. 

Movie still from Khartoum with Charlton Heston as Charles Gordon, and Richard Johnson as Colonel John Stewart

 

Khartoum was on the list of Martin Scorsese’s 130 “guilty pleasures”:

“I like anything about the British in the Sudan; I love the 1939 version of Four Feathers. In Four Feathers, the British avenge the killing of "Chinese" Gordon in Khartoum by the Mahdi, the holy redeemer. Khartoum takes place ten years earlier. Charlton Heston, as Gordon, is marvelous; and Laurence Olivier has a lot of fun as the Mahdi, with a space between his front teeth. It isn't very good filmmaking, but it has a mystical quality about it. This was a holy war. At the end -- when Mahdi killed Gordon, and then six months later he died himself -- it was as if the two of them canceled each other out, religiously and historically. It's a story I want to be told, over and over again, like a fairy tale.”-Martin Scorsese, Film Comment Magazine, May-June 1998. 

Movie still from Khartoum with Charlton Heston as Charles Gordon

Although a failure at the box office, Khartoum earned critical praise for its intelligent and entertaining retelling of the historical event. Khartoum has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes!

-Photograph: Movie still from Khartoum with Charlton Heston as Charles Gordon, and Richard Johnson as Colonel John Stewart.