Raisuli, the Berber chieftan, kidnaps an American widow and her two children in far-off Tangiers; and Roosevelt, the cowboy President, sends the U.S. Marines to the rescue, double-time. The vision of history is something a fanciful adolescent might have concocted, eyes closed, dozing over his schoolbooks. What dances into view is often just the handiest stereotype: a Moroccan prince lolling, sleepy-eyed, on mounds of pillows; Teddy Roosevelt skipping energetically from whistle-stop to target range to sparring session to Yellowstone hunting party to a private moment of reverence at the foot of a stuffed grizzly bear; and, in the action scenes, some of the most requested stunts in Hollywood (horses crashing through garden walls, or a rifleman, picked off in his tower perch, doing a forty-foot dive into an awning at the first-floor level). Still, in the fleshing-out or puffing-up of the facts of the case, writer-director John Milius tries out any number of appealing and conflicting possibilities (all more or less remote), and the resulting mixture has an interesting, elusive, overrich taste -- it's partly idealization, partly debunking, partly put-on, partly traditional Hollywood technique. The Americans, whose reputation marches ahead of them in the threatening query, "Have you ever heard of the Big Stick?", are depicted, even in their noblest moments, as trigger-happy; the Berber chieftan, accompanied by Jerry Goldsmith's quasi-Scheherazade music, is thoroughly glamorized, striding tall in black dress against the bright desert, or appearing alone on the crest of a hill and galloping full tilt to the rescue of a damsel in distress with his sword held motionless above his head like Mifune's in Hidden Fortress; and, for an adversary everyone can unite in loathing, Milius offers up the close-cropped Germans, who, unlike the Berbers, have not mastered the English tongue. Sean Connery, Brian Keith, Candice Bergen. (1975) — Duncan Shepherd
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