THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: It has been a long while since we
have had a good African adventure picture. This
one, claiming to be an accurate account, is plotted
by William Goldman just a little too closely to
JAWS. Still, it is a tense and effective film of
a type we don't see much of any more. Beautiful
African photography recreating the late 19th
century is a definite plus and may even be worth
the price of admission all by itself. Rating:
high +1 (-4 to +4)
The story is basically true. At the turn of the century the British were anxious to consolidate their holdings in Africa and connect Kenya and Uganda together strategically with a railway that would allow them to move freight, probably ivory, and perhaps even troops easily. The rail was intended to get permanent lines of communication into Uganda and get it there ahead of the German rail line moving up north from the south. This was to be the Uganda Railway and Britain was racing with Germany and to a lesser extent France to complete it. In 1896, 32,000 workers were brought to Africa from India, principally from Gujarat and the Punjab, just to work on the railroad. In Kenya one river that blocked the way and that the British rail would have to cross was the Tsavo. Col. John Henry Patterson was selected to build the Tsavo Bridge. His experience told him that it would be a difficult task, but he did not know how difficult.
Patterson's biggest problem turned out to be not from workers but from the animal population. There were frequent attacks of at least two lions who would come at night and drag workers out of their tents. It fell to Patterson to kill the lions, and he had a hard time of it. Between understandable problems with his workers and the efforts to hunt the lions, building the bridge turned into something of a fiasco. However, Patterson was able to collect in his diaries information never available before on just how lions attack and even how they eat humans in the wild. (The sensitive may want to skip to the next paragraph at this point.) The screams and the crunching of bones frequently could be heard from the camps. The victim would be dragged off by the head, often mercifully breaking the neck in the process. The clothing and skin would be licked off by the lion's rough tongue and the blood sucked out. The trunk and legs, being meaty, were eaten next, and then the arms. The head and feet are not thought by lions to be worth the effort to eat.
Unarmed humans are extremely vulnerable to lions, but are usually safe from such attacks. That is because lions just do not want to bother with this unfamiliar prey that walks on two legs and behaves in ways unpredictable to lions. The Tsavo attacks could have been just an incident of elderly lions forced to attack easy prey in spite of the unfamiliarity. Or perhaps it may have been that the railroad workers had hunted out the lions' usual prey. While this film makes the lions out to be extremely large and powerful, doing the killing for the pure enjoyment, it is unlikely that they would have chosen human prey as anything but an act of desperation and a last resort. The lion attacks in the region lasted for ten months, though by some accounts there were several lions involved. Twenty-eight of the workers were killed and it is estimated that over a hundred other people were also killed. One lion even got so bold as to pull human victims off of trains. The lions were eventually killed in ambush and the Tsavo Bridge was finally completed under Patterson's direction. His later book about his experiences, THE MAN EATERS OF TSAVO, was a best- seller. (I have not read the book, incidentally and know only very little of its content from another reference. It is, however, still in print.) Now a somewhat fictionalized version of Patterson's adventures has been made into a movie. Early in the film Patterson, played by Val Kilmer, is given five months to complete the bridge. His employer is John Beaumont (Tom Wilkinson), characterized here as the world's worst manager. Patterson is experienced with what appear to be similar tasks in India, but has never been to Africa. He has, however, always dreamed of a job that would take him to that mysterious continent, so he takes the position. He and the audience are treated to the breath- taking East African landscape and animals as he travels to the Tsavo. Almost immediately there is a crisis with a man-eating lion. Patterson, however, makes short work of the lion and makes himself a hero in the eyes of the workers. But there are more lion problems to come. Also to come is Charles Remington, a Great White Hunter in the classic tradition, played by Michael Douglas. Remington will be hired to solve the lion problem. The screenplay for the story is by William Goldman who certainly knows how to write action from films like MARATHON MAN.
This is Val Kilmer's second role this year with intelligent animals. His performance is slightly more restrained than the one in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. It is an odd piece of casting, but one that works reasonably well. Not so successful is Michael Douglas whose American Southern accent seems to come and go. He seems to take to his acting a little more casually than the role really called for. The producers clearly were going for something of a horror film feel for this historical film as director Stephen Hopkins is known for horror films like NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5 and PREDATOR 2 and action films like JUDGMENT NIGHT and BLOWN AWAY. Vilmos Zsigmond does as much for the film as any of the actors with his beautiful images of Kenya. Though the photography is generally straightforward, it is not really clear why he uses repeated images of brambles. Also slightly cliched is the use of a distorting lens to show the lions' point of view. There are a few other little cliches that the film could have done without, but to mention them would be spoiler. Jerry Goldsmith's score is decent, though one tends to expect more from his scores.
In general this is a good, old-fashioned African adventure with a fair amount of suspense. I give it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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