I love a good adventure.  There’s something about British soldiers in their spiffy red coats off fighting the barbarian hordes… or at least there used to be, before political correctness made these stories difficult to pull off.  The golden age of this kind of filmmaking was back in the 40s and 50s, when people still believed that the British had any right to grab chunks of Africa and Asia for the Empire.  These days of course we realize that the ‘barbarian hordes’ were just trying to reclaim the land that was stolen from them in the first place.  The British had it coming.  But I still love those old films: Beau Geste, Gunga Din, The Charge of the Light Brigade.  One of my favorites is the oft-filmed A.E.W. Mason novel, The Four Feathers.

The Four Feathers tells the story of a British soldier, Harry Faversham, who resigns his commission on the eve of war.  His friends and his fiancée each send him a white feather, the symbol of cowardice.  To regain his honor, Harry goes off to Sudan on his own and rescues each of his friends one by one, returning their feathers to them.

There are seven versions of The Four Feathers on film, the definitive one being the 1939 technicolor version starring John Clements and Ralph Richardson. There was a tv movie in the 70s starring Beau Bridges and Jane Seymour.  Now the story has been revisited again by Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapur.

How does it stack up against the others?  Well… it’s all right.  All the elements are there: the proud British soldiers marching off to war, the sand duned vistas, an intense battle scene in the desert, and yet… something is missing.  Except for the out of place Kate Hudson, the cast is game.  Heath Ledger has a sincerity that serves him well in period movies, Wes Bentley is American, but he looks right in a British uniform, the others are played by British actors.

What is lacking is a sense of involvement.  I felt distanced from Harry and his dilemma.  A little time was given to establishing the characters and the comradery between them, but it feels false somehow.  As for Harry himself, I just didn’t feel his inner turmoil.  It was as though he arbitrarily decided not to go into battle and then just as arbitrarily decided to go.  There are also some strange lapses in the storytelling.  Scenes that should have been high points are anti-climactic, such as when Harry encounters his old friends in the middle of the desert.  Each one of these scenes had a surprising lack of energy and they bungled the subplot in which Harry rescues his friend Jack, the only one who didn’t send him a white feather.  In the 1939 version of the film, it slowly dawns on Jack (played by Ralph Richardson) that the stranger who saved him was Harry (Jack is blinded in battle and never sees Harry’s face).  In the 2002 version, this never seems to come up.  It’s very disappointing.

Even the reunion scene with Ethne feels lethargic.  And they completely fail to cover an important scene between Ethne and Jack.  It’s as though a decision was made that the film was too long and they haphazardly chopped scenes out without consideration for their importance.  The one scene that did work was the desert ambush.  The British form a square and fire on the enemy who attack on all four sides.  This was nicely shot with an overhead angle so you can see how outnumbered the British forces are.

I will say that I liked The Four Feathers a lot more than Elizabeth, a film that I found really annoying, save for Cate Blanchett’s excellent performance.  The flaws in The Four Feathers are not the flaws that one would expect from a modern version of a story that is now extremely dated.  They are basic flaws in pacing and exposition, not in modifying the story to suit modern audiences.  I did not object to the British being portrayed as arrogant and pig-headed.  The jabs are pretty gentle, all things considered.  But they could have filled in some plot details and they could have fleshed out the feather-givers.  The only one who gets much screen time is Michael Sheen as Trent, who spends some time in a hell-hole prison with Harry.  More time is spent with Djimon Hounsou, a desert prince/slave who inexplicably takes it upon himself to be Harry’s protector.  I like Djimon Hounsou but they never adequately explain his motives in following Harry around and getting him out of trouble at every turn.  He’s basically reprising the part he played in Gladiator.

If you are starved for some old-time pageantry and adventure, you could do worse than The Four Feathers.  But you could do a lot better as well.  I’d recommend renting the Korda version, if you can find it.  For a more recent film of British derring-do, try Mountains of the Moon or The Man Who Would Be King.

© 2002, Keeba