KHARTOO N

Released in 1966, Khartoum was given the hard ticket treatment based not just on the scope of British troubles in the Sudan in 1883 and the subsequent slaughter the Brits and the Sudanese inflicted upon each other in the battle for the city. There was also the prestige boast of Charlton Heston as British General Charles “Chinese” Gordon in reluctant battle with Laurence Olivier as the Muslim leader Mahdi. United Artists decreed the movie, running 2 hours and 16 minutes and photographed in Ultra Panavision 70, needed the additional heft of seamless Cinerama, used impressively for the 3:44 minute “explanatory” preamble. The reviews were good to excellent, with Heston receiving some of his best notices since Ben-Hur and El Cid, especially from the London press, and with Life magazine blurbing Khartoum had “the most realistic battle action in movie history” and the London Daily Express, in fainter praise, writing “the battle scenes are a frenzy of action”—closer to audience experience as they’re staged and edited in scrambled fashion—and Robert Ardrey’s talky script nominated for an Oscar. But the epic was a disaster at the box office, perhaps because it wasn’t as spectacularly deserty and unsettled as Lawrence of Arabia, perhaps too many process shots overexposed on the big screen. Other factors possibly accelerated its doom: one, subject-interested moviegoers might have remembered the 1955 travesty Storm Over the Nile, nonsense about what took place in the Sudan after Gordon starring an ineffable Laurence Harvey demonstrating, likewise in Carol Reed’s The Running Man, that any movie with him in blond hair is begging for it, and, two, audiences for reserved seaters were in sharp decline by 1965, having had their appetite for Heston made surfeit by two more—The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Agony and The Ecstasy—and the wanna-bes The War Lord and Major Dundee.

Regarding Oscar-nominated Audrey who was in the 40s and 50s MGM’s highest paid wordsmith: his scipts include 1942’s Thunder Rock, a controversial anti-isolationist creed as first a play unpopular in all but England, 1948’s The Three Musketeers, 1949’s The Secret Garden & Vincente Minnelli’s exhausting Madame Bovary, and the messed up 1962 Minnelli remake of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (He had been contracted to adapt Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa and wrote an adaptation of John Master’s novel Bhowani Junction, neither script filmed.) Although the long-rumored boozing by Gordon is included yet sanitized, Ardrey avoided the dishier attractions of his character issues. A life-long bachelor as devoted follower of Christ, committed to celibacy in order to “subdue the flesh,” he admitted in his writings to using his extreme dedication to military assignments to counter ceaseless “sexual temptation.” But there are no records of any women in his life; there were no men in his life, either, except the soldiers he eyed everyday. Another one of those “war making as sublimation” quandaries in the T.E. Lawrence vein? Not unexpectedly, there’d be openly expressed accusations of inversion concerning Gordon after Seven Pillars of Wisdom and re-accelerating with Lawrence of Arabia; it became prerequisite for gossips to create an adoxographic kinship between Lawrence and Gordon, who died three and a half years before for the former was born. (What little we know: Lawrence held the general in esteem after attending military course studies of his campaigns and missions, consumed his personal letters and journals in a series of compendiums, and was surely empathetic to his guarded celibacy and the grant of the moral pillar of due respect to the indigenous.) No doubt, Ardrey had a more stabilized general in mind, especially after the London press went hysterical over David Lean and Robert Bolt’s assumptive sex positing in Lawrence of Arabia, and quite aware Heston could be defensively self-conscious playing another sexual cripple after The Agony and the Ecstasy. Reticent to use unconfirmed personal details, Ardrey slips in his pet intellectual theme of anointed and/or geographically inherent aggression—published in his 1961 book African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man to great success amongst the general readership due to its accessibility in layman terms. And in defiance of receiving harsh criticism by experts in the science of anthropology claiming that he failed to understand the connections between human beings and geographically “caused” adaptations in violent behaviors. Dropping his thesis into the fictitious Heston/Olivier philosophical discourse seems a last sensational dare. The two face-to-face exchanges between “desert stars” Gordon and the Mahdi are visually teasing with anticipation and importancy, partially based on correspondence each sent to the other about preoccupation of religious anointment and conversion, individualised destiny, and foreign governmental hegemony threatening further bloodshed. Leaving out readers of African Genesis, it’s likely most viewers didn’t notice.

Some of us did notice the miniscule or absence of Gordon’s more public peculiarities—for starters, his life-long addiction to Turkish cigarettes, his infamous disobedience to civil and military superiors, his arrogance and hot temper, his excessive Pecksniffian praying and exalting of his actions as the will of God. There’s neither significant detailing of Gordon’s military and diplomatic missions nor suggestive groundwork for his private foibles. In past expeditions Gordon got away with acts otherwise deemed insubordinate if not punishable by court martial because they proved fruitful and very popular with the public, kept informed by a hungry press. But at Khartoum luck would run out; rejecting his superiors pleas to wait until reinforcements arrived to battle the forces of the Mahdi—who in the second face-off virtually begs Gordon to depart before combat—the British rescue sailed into Khartoum two days too late. His fate is captured to reflect the famous George William Joy painting, substantially less gruesome than what transpired; six months after he was hacked to death and beheaded against explicit orders from the Mahdi, the aggrieved “Expected One” would die from typhus.

Heston manages a bit of fun with his slight British accent (gone long before the climax) and sporting a natty look in the gold-laden embroidery atop black and red finery, in graying sideburns and, due to frequent bouts of dehydration causing weight loss, remarkably more attractive than he had been in previous epics. Olivier, on the other hand, looks like he dashed from the theatre set of Othello, already in dark tanning makeup, to the Pinewood soundstage to enter the desert tent. Their scenes might have made for the pleasure of the senior’s innate competitiveness to wipe his rival with tent rugs but as most know by now, the two actors did their acting separately, with good editing stitching them together. Filming his in Egypt, Chuckles holds his own, delivering his share of duologue very unHeston-like, possibly smirking with foreknowledge of what his dual antagonist will try to pull. Adding in the tricks of moviemaking, these moments—some of them surprising in effectiveness—are the stuff of a wry New Yorker series of cartoons. (Confrontation within each other’s presence that never happened in history can be seen in Mary, Queen of Scots, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role vs Glenda Jackson reprising her Elizabeth R regality; in HBO-Channel 4’s Elizabeth I with Helen Mirren popping in on Barbara Flynn’s Mary; and in 2018’s Mary Queen of Scots with Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie’s Elizabeth navigating the lines of protective cloth to avoid the latter’s face ravaged by smallpox.)

Directed by Basil Dearden, produced byJulian Blaustein, narrated by Leo Genn, with supporting cast Richard Johnson, Ralph Richardson, Alexander Knox, Michael Hordern, Nigel Green and Douglas Wilmer, photographed by Edward Scaife and scored by Frank Cordell, Khartoum would be the last Ultra Panavision 70 presentation before Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 The Hateful Eight. Originally presented in single lens Cinerama, it has been released in blu-ray without the use of SmileBox technology to simulate Cinerama perspective. But YouTube offers up a 5 minute clip using the rival Ultra-Curve, suggesting an alternative choice, beyond demonstration, might become available. (Opening 6/22/1966 at the McVickers, running 11 weeks.)

ROLL OVER IMAGES

OR IMAGES, from PART ONE

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Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER (Revised 10/2026) All Rights Reserved.