KHARTOO N

Released in 1966, Khartoum was given the hard ticket treatment based 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. Boasting a prestige cast including Charlton Heston as General Charles “Chinese” Gordon and Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi, with Richard Johnson, Ralph Richardson, Alexander Knox, Michael Hordern, Nigel Green and Douglas Wilmer, United Artists decided the movie, running 2 hours and 16 minutes and photographed in Ultra Panavision 70, needed the additional heft of seamless Cinerama. (For those who saw it during the first run, only the 3:44 minute opening “explanatory” sequence would be an impressive enhancement.) Though reviews were good to excellent, with Heston receiving his best notices since Ben-Hur and El Cid, especially from the London press, and Robert Ardrey’s often verbose script nominated for an Oscar, the epic was a disaster at the box office. Perhaps because it wasn’t huge enough—the spectacle wasn’t very spectacular, with a few too many process shots further exposed by the gratuitous blowup. Life magazine blurbed Khartoum had “the most realistic battle action in movie history”; the London Daily Express, in faint praise, wrote “the battle scenes are a frenzy of action,” which is closer to viewer experience as they’re scramblingly staged and edited. Other factors possibly accelerated its doom. Those interested might have remembered the 1955 travesty Storm Over the Nile, fictional nonsense about what took place in the Sudan after Gordon, starring an ineffable Laurence Harvey who demonstrates, and confirms in Carol Reed’s The Running Man, any movie with Harvey in blond hair is begging for it. Audiences for reserved seaters had also sharply declined in 1965, having had their appetite for Heston made surfeit by two more—The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Agony and The Ecstasy—and would-bes The War Lord and Major Dundee.

But back to that praised script. Although the boozing is included, Ardrey ignored the juicier attractions of Gordon’s character issues. A life-long bachelor as devoted follower of Christ, committed to celibacy in order to “subdue the flesh,” he used his extreme dedication to military assignments to counter what may have been ceaseless “sexual temptation.” There are no records of women in his life; apparently there were no men in his life, either, other than the soldiers he saw everyday. Only war making—or aggression, one of Ardrey’s pet intellectual subjects—as sublimation. Inevitably, this would be interpreted by some as suspicion of inversion; after Seven Pillars of Wisdom and accelerating with Lawrence of Arabia, it became sine qua non for sensation-seeking authors to create an adoxographical kinship between T.E. Lawrence and Gordon, who died three and a half years before for the former was born. (He held the general in high esteem after attending military course studies of his campaigns and missions and reading personal letters and journals published in a series of books, empathetic to granting any country’s indigenous the pillar of due respect.) Miniscule or absent are Gordon’s peculiarities in Khartoum—for starters, his life-long addiction to Turkish cigarettes, his infamous disobedience to civil and military superiors, his perturbing instability in excessive praying and exalting his actions as the will of God. Ardrey likely had a more stabilize general in mind, especially after the London press went hysterical over David Lean and Robert Bolt’s notorious sex positing in Lawrence of Arabia, and quite aware Heston could be defensively self-conscious over playing another sexual cripple after The Agony and the Ecstasy. With neither much significant detail of Gordon’s successful military and diplomatic missions nor suggestive groundwork for his foibles, we get two face-to-face sequences between “movie stars” Gordon and the Mahdi that history insists never happened. Visually teasing with anticipation and importancy, they are in fact based on letters each sent to the other, in this scenario about the religious preoccupations and governmental situations threatening further bloodshed. In past campaigns Gordon got away with acts deemed insubordinate if not punishable by court martial because they proved fruitful and very popular with the public, but at Khartoum luck ran out; rejecting his superiors pleas to wait until reinforcements arrived to battle the Mahdi's forces, the British marched in 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 being hacked to death and beheaded against the Mahdi’s orders, the “Awaited Guided One” would die from typhus.

Without the overdoses of Gordon’s militaristic religiosity and arrogance and hot temper, Heston has a bit of  fun with his slight British accent and sporting a natty look in the gold-laden finery and graying sideburns. Olivier, on the other hand, looks like he dashed from the set of Othello, already in dark tanning makeup, to the London soundstage to enter the flimsy tent and surrounding vegetation not matching very well the corresponding exterior shots. Their scenes together during which you might expect the pleasure of the latter’s innate competitiveness to wipe the former with the tent rugs, but Chuckles holds his own; these moments the stuff of wry New Yorker cartoons. (Equivalent moments that never happened can be seen in Mary, Queen of Scots, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role and 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.)

Directed by Basil Dearden, produced by Julian Blaustein, narrated by Leo Genn, photographed by Edward Scaife and scored by Frank Cordell, Khartoum would be the last movie in Ultra Panavision 70 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. 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.)

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OR IMAGES, from PART ONE

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Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER (Revised 9/2026) All Rights Reserved.