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.

MILITARY LEADER OF THE DAY: ALI PASHA OF EGYPT'S SWORD: HIS OWN SON IBRAHIM PASHA, CONQUEROR OF GREECE AND SYRIA.

By Eric G. L. Pinzelli,
April 9, 2019 

Ibrahim Pasha was born at Kavala, Rumelia (now Greece). A son (or adopted son), of the famous Albanian vali Muḥammad ʿAlī, in 1805 Ibrahim joined his father in Egypt, where he was made governor of Cairo. During 1816–18 he successfully commanded an army against the Wahhabite rebels in Arabia. Muḥammad ʿAlī sent him on a mission against the remnants of the Mamluks to the Sudan in 1821–22, and on his return he helped train the new Egyptian army on European lines.
When the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II asked for Egyptian assistance to crush the Greek revolt, an expedition commanded by Ibrahim landed in Greece in 1824 with 17,000 men and subdued the Morea (Peloponnese). He defeated the Greeks in the open field, and though the siege of Missolonghi proved costly to his own troops and to the Ottoman forces who operated with him, he brought it to a successful termination on April 24, 1826. But he suffered setbacks in Mani (Southern Peloponnese), the Greek guerrilla bands harassed his army, and in revenge he desolated the country and sent thousands of the inhabitants into slavery in Egypt. These measures of repression aroused indignation in Europe and led to the intervention of the naval squadrons of the United Kingdom, the Restored Kingdom of France and Imperial Russia in the Battle of Navarino (October 20, 1827). Their victory was followed by the landing of a French expeditionary force, the Morea expedition. By the terms of the capitulation of October 1, 1828, Ibrahim evacuated the country.
In 1831, his father's quarrel with the Porte having become flagrant, Ibrahim was sent to conquer Syria. He took Acre after a severe siege on May 27, 1832, occupied Damascus, defeated an Ottoman army at Homs on July 8 defeated another Ottoman army at Beilan on July 29, invaded Asia Minor, and finally routed the Grand Vizier Reşid Mehmed Pasha (with whom he had conquered Missolonghi 6 years before) at Konya on December 21. There were now no military obstacles between Ibrahim's forces and Constantinople itself! In May 1833, Ibrahim became governor-general of the provinces of Syria and Adana ceded to Egypt after his victories during the Egyptian–Ottoman War. In 1838, the Porte felt strong enough to renew the struggle, and war broke out once more. Ibrahim won his last victory for his father at Nezib on June 24, 1839. But the United Kingdom and the Austrian Empire intervened to preserve the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. By 1848 Muḥammad ʿAlī had become senile, and Ibrahim was appointed viceroy but ruled for only 40 days before his death on November 10, 1848.