A long-time pet project of Bob Rafelson: the story of the search for the source of the Nile undertaken by littérateur, explorer, diplomat, swordsman, and all-around Renaissance man, Sir Richard Burton. (The Richard Burton, just as to a few of us the Elizabeth Taylor will always be the author of The Sleeping Beauty and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, not the star of Cleopatra.) Rafelson's journalistic bent, his avidness as a cultural data-collector, finds here a vast new field to survey: the pair of severed ears worn as earrings by an African medicine man, the friendly gesture of spitting drinks in one another's faces, etc., etc. The first and continuous clue to the movie's orientation is the surprising absence of a wide-screen: this is not so much a David Lean-sized "epic" as a Robert J. Flaherty portable sketchbook of impressions and observations. It takes the close view, not the broad one. The story proper, filled out with such small-scale ordeals as a beetle crawling into a sleeper's ear and playing Sousa on the eardrum, is abundantly interesting, mainly because it takes its time and allows us to settle in to its special pace and ambience. Even at that, it's a little hard now to understand the compellingness of the expedition: a preliminary conference at the Royal Geographical Society in London raises expectations of, or yearnings for, an expedition more in the line of Jules Verne: mountains of the moon indeed! Then, too, the hero-worshipping, wart-removing attitude toward Sir Richard, coupled with the finger-wagging attitude toward his one-time partner and later rival, John Speke, is a journalistic cul-de-sac. And the seedy little backstabbing in polite Victorian society, the aborted public debate, and the private fondling of the death mask, do not add up to much of a climax: the personal bond between the two men has not been made vivid enough for any of this to mean so much. (The homosexual theme, so to call it, is even more inaccessibly submerged here than in Rafelson's Black Widow.) Still and all, the silliness common to historical re-creations is kept to a minimum, and the distortions common to such types is kept decently to an average. In any event, all sillinesses and distortions that come into it are amply compensated by the would-that-it-were-true incident when the illustrious Burton meets the illustrious Livingstone, and the two seasoned explorers fall to undressing themselves in a one-upmanship comparison of old battle scars. Patrick Bergin, Iain Glen, Fiona Shaw. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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