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 decreed 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, the 3:44 minute “explanatory” preamble would be an impressive enhancement.) Though 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 Robert Ardrey’s talky 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 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 staged and edited in scrambled fashion. Two factors possibly accelerated its doom even before opening: Moviegoers 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 him in blond hair is begging for it. And audiences for reserved seaters had sharply declined 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.

But back to that Oscar-nominated script from a writer experienced in screen writing: 1948’s The Three Musketeers, 1949’s The Secret Garden, Jennifer Jones’s exhausting Madame Bovary and 1962’s remake of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Although the long-rumored boozing is included, Ardrey avoided the dishier 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 admitted in his writings to using his extreme dedication to military assignments to counter ceaseless “sexual temptation.” But there are no records of women in his life; apparently there were no men in his life, either, except the soldiers he saw 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 accelerating with Lawrence of Arabia; it became sine qua non 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 and reading personal letters and journals in a series of compendiums, and was surely empathetic to his celibacy and 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. Long time critics of Ardrey’s pet intellectual theme of anointed and/or geographically inherent aggression published in layman terms making him popular to general readership (and would be his eventual ruin when publicly ridiculed by experts in the science of anthropology), have wondered if the thesis was deliberately dropped into the Heston/Olivier sequences as filler and to make one last sensational dare. Maybe, but viewers didn’t notice.

We all notice the miniscule or absence of Gordon’s peculiarities in Khartoum—for starters, his life-long addiction to Turkish cigarettes, his infamous disobedience to civil and military superiors, his arrogance and hot temper, his perturbingly excessive praying and exalting of his actions as the will of God. With neither significant detail of Gordon’s military and diplomatic missions nor suggestive groundwork for his foibles, Ardrey submits not one but two face-to-face exchanges between “movie stars” Gordon and the Mahdi that history is confident never happened. Visually teasing with anticipation and importancy, they are partially based on correspondence each sent to the other, in this scenario about preoccupation of religious anointment and governmental situations threatening further bloodshed. In past expeditions 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 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 being hacked to death and beheaded against the Mahdi’s explicit orders, the “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 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 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 the 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 by Julian Blaustein, narrated by Leo Genn, 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.)

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OR IMAGES, from PART ONE

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