WEST INDIES (1979)

Long unavailable (its rep undoubtably helped by inaccessibility), now restored, French-Moroccan filmmaker Med Hondo built an agit-prop historical, from Daniel Boukman’s play ‘The Slavers,’ into an unlikely piece of Brechtian Epic Theater.  A big, colorful pageant play about the West Indies struggle for independence, interspersed with musical numbers, staged entirely on a former slave ship (looking incongruously spic-and-span).  It opens in the 20th century as a plebiscite is being debated in what looks like a symbolic kangaroo court of current West Indies rulers: Continue as a French Colony or Risk Independence?  We then jump back to cover episodes from a long miserable history of White domination: slavery; the sugar cane trade; forced immigration to supply cheap labor to Europe; collaboration by ambitious locals; waffling sentiments from a hypocritical Catholic Church.  All the usual suspects.  Ambitious as hell, but Hondo fails short; one more political playwright downed by following what German playwright Bertold Brecht says (intellectual distancing & didactic lessons) rather than what he does (emotional involvement & theatricality).  Here, the caricatures are as stiff in personality as Hondo is in his staging.  (He’s very big on keeping his cast seated.  Movement reserved for the chorus.)  The songs repetitive; dances out of an exotic floorshow.  And it’s not as if this were a great period in French lyric theater; mostly plotless revues for the tourist trade.  Imagine one of Roberto Rossellini’s late, arthritic ‘teaching pictures’ done as a stage musical.  Those films also well reviewed.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Richard Attenborough, a large budget and an all-star cast fall just as short taking on WWI in the form of Brechtian Epic Theater in OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR/’69.  OR:  For eye-popping Hollywood horror on the slave trade, SLAVE SHIP/’37.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/fascinating-and-appalling-this-little.html