Director/Coscreenwriter: Richard Brooks

The Days of High Adventure: A Journey through Adventure Film

By Roderick Heath

Amongst his achievements as an author, Joseph Conrad intellectualised the adventure story. In his tales of high seas drama, derring-do, conquest, and exploration, he concentrated consistently on the psychological makeup of his heroes, and the problems inherent in their attempts to find inner peace with external action. Even if this did, in the reckoning of some colonial voices like Chinua Achebe, essentially turn the rest of the world into a playground for unravelling white men, Conrad diagnosed something vitally important in the state of the modern world as it entered the 20th century: that its demons were not at held at bay by official perspectives, that its roots were its present and future, and that its securities and reassuring institutions were about to collapse due to processes already in motion but unexamined—evolutionary theory, industrialisation, scientific advancement, Marxist economics—all phenomena that questioned the truisms that had governed so much human activity.

Lord Jim, a blend of heroic myth-making and an interior experience dismantling that same myth, was one of Conrad’s best-regarded works. Richard Brooks’ film version, by contrast, is still desperately underrated as attempt to transfer Conrad’s vision to the big screen. Lord Jim is one of the great adventure films, but I know I’m lonely in this opinion. Indeed, I suspect the reasons I love it and others dismiss it are the same. The film gives us the adventure, but much more: the psychology, even philosophy, the forceful and committed exploration of its hero and his friends and enemies in terms of how they see and react to the world. Jim is presented as a proto-existentialist desperately trying to recreate the fabric of not only his own sense of self-worth but all of humankind’s sense of security in its own works and capacities.

Richard Brooks is also today not as well-recognised as he might be, but he was, at the height of his career, one of Hollywood’s most prestigious directors, included in at least one serious survey made of the most important directors of the 1960s at the time. Brooks, like John Huston, for whom he worked on Key Largo (1948), first gained repute as a screenwriter, and specialised in literate but muscular cinema. One quality of his that was distinct from Huston was a sharper concern for immediate issues: Brooks, whose birth name was Reuben Sax, had made his name chronicling the anti-Semitism he grew up with in the novel Cross-Fire, filmed in 1948. His early films saw him working in thematic territory close to the new breed of New York blow-ins like Elia Kazan et al, but in a manner closer to genre blacksmiths like Phil Karlson, combining forceful aesthetics and hot-button topics in sweltering interplays of ethics, social concern, morality, and character, from his debut Crisis (1950), through Trial (1955), to his most famous early film, The Blackboard Jungle (1955).

After the latter film’s huge success, he became a prominent studio helmsman. His neurotically romantic Fitzgerald adaptation The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) confirmed he had a way of sustaining emotion and substance through layers of studio gloss and compromise, and that he could get good performances out of Elizabeth Taylor, which he proved again with the first of his two Tennessee Williams films, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Many of his subsequent films were adaptations of notable literary works, like his solid version of The Brothers Karamazov (1958) and his Oscar-winning Elmer Gantry (1960). Later, he combined his social scientist and littérateur sides in films like In Cold Blood (1967) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1978), gritty true-crime tales that tried to shine light into the darkest pits riddling modern society. At the same time, he also made several high-riding action films just for the hell of it, starting with Lord Jim and continuing with his superlative, hip western The Professionals (1966), the caper flick $ (1972), and Bite the Bullet (1975).

Lord Jim stands in the shadow of another elevated adventure film starring Peter O’Toole, Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Certainly there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two, if only to the extent that Brooks’ adaptation of Conrad gave O’Toole a chance to explore a similarly charismatic but mentally fraying antihero, and Lawrence’s hit status made it seem for a very short while as if audiences might now have a taste for grown-up, substantial epics. Although hardly exclusive, it can be said broadly that where David Lean’s film was an exercise in cinematic poetics built upon the framework of an historical character study and adventure tale, Brooks offers rigorous and textured filmic prose. Where his versions of Dostoyevsky, Williams, and Fitzgerald were hampered by Hollywood niceties, Lord Jim came in a window when Brooks could make the film he wanted without bogus happy endings imposed, but he still revised Conrad’s tale to a degree that irked many. Brooks’ approach had some felicities, however, particularly in the way he changes the warlord that Jim battles in the remote South East Asian nation of Patusan from an Indian bandit to a French militarist, exacerbating the sense of Jim battling doppelgangers and the misbegotten by-products of colonialism.

Stylistically, Lord Jim is a portrait of cinematic technique in transition, poised between the mystique of Hollywood and the intensity and tactile authenticity of a more modern brand. It’s not just the common roots in Conrad that makes Lord Jim feel like a precursor to Apocalypse Now (1979) amongst others, but its yearning to engage more seriously with the percolating themes of race and sexuality, politics and personal character that thrum beneath the surface of such storytelling. Lord Jim also offers the pleasures of big-budget cinema seriously handled and engaged with superior material, a rare combination.

Conrad’s story was based upon a real person, James Brooke, the so-called “White Rajah of Sarawak”, who founded a ruling dynasty, with the patronage of the Sultan of Brunei, which governed part of Borneo from the early 1800s until after World War II. Whether the real Brooke ever had as much introspection as Jim is unknown, but Conrad’s fantasia on his theme presents Jim as a study in human potential and limitation. Brooks transmutes him into a figure at once titanic and pathetic, troubled by his own nature as he tries to sustain himself between cultures and harboring a complex identity based in a veiled background. The character of Jim was a fittingly abstract vehicle for Brooks to explore his own identity, just as Elmer Gantry had given him scope to explore his status as elevated flim-flam man. Brooks furthers the emblematic quality of Conrad’s narrative by excising many names, like a mixed-race woman (Daliah Lavi) Jim falls in love with, whose name is Jewel in the novel but here is merely “the Girl,” accompanying “the General,” the “French Officer,” and the polar temperaments of “Lord” Jim and “Gentleman” Brown, a faintly Kafkaesque reduction to type of each figure to render them universal.

Brooks’ take opens with a clipper ship knifing the ocean with majestic grace, matched to Bronislau Kaper’s soaring score, providing the essence of a certain fantasy about an age of sailing and venturing. But this is a dream-vision, both evergreen and about to be dismantled. James “Jim” Burke (O’Toole) is introduced in retrospect by the narrator Marlow (Jack Hawkins), the old salt who also guided the reader into the Heart of Darkness, speaking here of his days training cadets, and the remarkable Jim who stood out as the most enticing and ambitious of his students. Jim’s fantasising cues mocking moments of his imagined rescue of Marlow from pirates, holding off a mob of scurvy villains with a Union Jack flowing behind him. This funny pastiche looks forward to the more intensive lampoons of British Imperial-era heroics in films like The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) and Royal Flash (1975). But Jim’s fate is to find what he wants only through the most agonising of trials.

Serving as an officer on Marlow’s ship in a frustratingly workaday career, Jim breaks his leg and has to be put ashore in Java. Once recovered, he signs on with the first ship he can, a disgraceful rust-bucket called the Patna. The captain (Walter Gotell) is a burly, aggressive drunk; the engineer, Robinson (Jack MacGowran), a scruffy coward; and the ship is jammed with hundreds of Muslim pilgrims heading to Mecca like so many cattle. On a dark and foggy eve with a storm rolling in, the ship seems to hit an underwater object, and Jim, inspecting the damage, is so rattled by the situation that he imagines the slightly leaky hull is about to give way to sink them all. As the storm buffets the Patna and the crew launch a lifeboat to save themselves, Jim assures the pilgrim’s spokesman (Rafiq Anwar) that he won’t abandon them. Nonetheless, he gives in to the appeals of the crew and jumps ship with them, leaving the pilgrims to their fate. The crew hope the sea will erase their crime, but upon reaching a nearby port they find the Patna already in the harbour, having been found and taken in hand by a French officer (Christian Marquand). Whilst the others scurry off into hiding, Jim hands himself over for judgment.

In a degrading public hearing, the French officer dubiously regards the moral certainties of the spokesman for traditional sailing virtues, Brierly (Andrew Keir), but this does not prevent Jim having his ticket cancelled and official disgrace hung about his shoulders. Jim buries himself for years as a common labourer about the Far East, still pursued by infamy as he learns of Brierly’s suicide, seemingly caused by the gnawing uncertainty about any man’s reliability and nerve. But fate gives Jim the second chance he wishes for, when, working in an unnamed South East Asian port, he saves a launch loaded with cargo, including a shipment of repeating rifles and gunpowder, from sabotage. The weapons have been imported by an aging trading company representative, Stein (Paul Lukas), for the citizens of Patusan, who are ruthlessly oppressed and exploited by tin mine owner, The General (Eli Wallach). Stein commissions Jim to take the weapons to Patusan for the day of resistance, and an encounter with Robinson, who needles him for money, inspires Jim to accept Stein’s offer. Stein’s plan is stalled when the steam launch he was counting on hiring becomes unavailable because its sleazy owner, Schomberg (Akim Tamaroff), has been bought off by The General. But Jim is now determined, and he and some coolies laboriously row and sail a boat upriver to Patusan. One of the coolies is an agent of The General (Ric Young), and he escapes to warn his boss. Jim manages to get the weapons into the hands of the Patusan rebels before being captured.

Enter Wallach as a more intellectual, imperious version of his malicious Mexican bandit in The Magnificent Seven (1960): The General, equipped with great intelligence and a vividly strategic mind, is a strutting sadist who makes a show out of his ability to find men’s weak points and hurt them. He’s turned Stein’s trading agent in the area, Cornelius (Curd Jürgens), an alcoholic and craven failure, into a pet. Whereas The General is merely wary of Jim as an enemy, Cornelius develops a real hate for him, as a man of moral fibre and endurance. When Jim is delivered into his hands, The General tortures him to discover the hiding place of the weapons. In a scene laced with discomforting undercurrents, The General’s delight in his own psychological insight and desire to find the quickest way to the best result meets an equal and opposite force, in Jim’s distinctly masochistic hunger to redeem himself by way of intense suffering.

This means that in spite of his talents in terror, The General finds himself only satisfying Jim’s desires. Only when he comprehends that Jim must only fear death does he know how to break him. The erotic dimension of all torture and especially between the two uncommon men is given a mediator when The General grabs the first girl on hand, one giving water to the captives of The General’s regime: he rips open her shirt and proffers her as a last sensual indulgence to Jim before his next round of questioning, a taunt to his sensual enjoyment of life before that life is extinguished. That Girl, however, is one of the rebel leaders, daughter of a local woman and another European interloper, and she helps Jim escape. Once free, Jim’s moulded officer’s mind gives him an edge in planning how to use Stein’s weapons gainst The General’s fortified compound, but his ever-threatening instability in the face of horror still lies in wait.

The insurrection that follows is a superb, intricately detailed action sequence that pays off in a terrific feat of arms that provides Jim with his greatest repudiation of his past. The General tries to fend off the attack he knows is coming by shielding his men with captives, including Buddhist monks, cueing a scene of sacrifice and slaughter that sends Jim into another dissociative fit, whilst his fellows charge the enemy. A whirlwind of slaughter ensues, from The Girl hacking men to death with glowering fervour, to the monks beating at their captors with their chains. An attempt to knock out The General’s ammo dump with an antique cannon fails when the artillery cracks and explodes. But Jim conceives of a way to break open the fortress by filling dozens of spears with gunpowder and throwing them against the doors. Jim and Waris (Jûzô Itami), the son of local elder Du-Ramin (Tatsuo Saitô), work in concert, with Jim making a devil-may-care dash with a barrel of gunpowder on a wheelbarrow that blows up The General, the remnant of his men, and the ammo in a thunderous crescendo.

Only Cornelius escapes, ironically through a secret passage The General intended to use himself, and, still desirous of the large amount of loot and treasure The General possessed, he contacts Schomberg, who puts him on to Gentleman Brown, another malignant Western profiteer. Brooks and his cinematographer Freddie Young paint Jim’s story in lush, incisive colours and tones and a wash of intricate mise-en-scène that stands with the best-looking films of the ’60s. The film shifts steadily from the wide open seas of Jim’s training days, flush with tones of sea blue and white, to earthy, organic tones that bring out the electric distress of O’Toole’s eyes, the jewelled perspiration on Wallach’s skin, the damp and filth of Jürgens’ jacket that signals Cornelius’ rotten soul, the smouldering, nocturnal mysticism of the Patusan temples, before reaching the expressionistic, intensely psychologised fog and dark, whittling reality down to the starkest human contentions, and haunting, smoky interiors, of his reckoning in Patusan with Brown.

These stylised later scenes deliberately echo early scenes on the Patna, where the small world Jim appoints himself responsible for and then deserts is painted in deep contrasts and slivers of light and colour, as encroaching psychological terror gives way to erupting chaos as the storm rises and Jim disintegrates, clinging to the ship’s steering wheel like his personal crucifix and then giving in to the temptation to flee precisely because of the crushing terror of the lofty status for which he had longed. New Wave-inspired film tricks were just starting to infiltrate large-budget cinema at this time, and Brooks adapts them sparingly, in an opening montage that offers up a sprawl of human life, teeming and strange all at once, amongst whom Jim is to be sighted, and flash-cuts to the memories and associations that torture Jim. Jim’s intense torture sequence anticipates several variations on the same technique, intercutting The General searing Jim’s flesh with battling martial artists, the swirling music and vigorous action counterpointing and transmitting the impression of Jim’s livid agony.

Jim’s status as a philosophical figure and exemplar of a powerful modern question emerges intact, a singular achievement for an adaptation so top-heavy with distractions and blockbuster elements. Conrad’s story seems predicated around questioning the simplistic assumptions behind the bravery in a story like A. E. W. Mason’s much-filmed The Four Feathers, where the hero exculpates his guilt over wimping out from battle by performing feats of bravery. Conrad dug into the issue of what such feats really meant for the state of the hero/coward’s soul and psyche, and moreover what they meant to the social ideals they served, an aspect that particularly interests Brooks. But Conrad’s story was a story of an enigmatic man through the eyes of other temperaments—closer to what Lean and Robert Bolt did with T. E. Lawrence—whereas Brooks places Jim’s perspective at the centre after Marlow’s narration concludes. Brooks’ heroes often tend to wrestle deeply with their own natures in the context of their immediate worlds. Jim’s great failure on the Patna for Brooks is not his fear, but his abandonment of his post, a failure both of his own heroic self-image but also of the only real element of that image, which was his duty of care to passengers. The French officer’s cautious replies to Brierly’s questions knock away old canards like going down with the ship, which the officer describes in return as a myth propagated by insurance companies to ensure a stricken vessel can’t be claimed as salvage.

The true substance of the problem, which opens up chasms of existential angst, is whether men are equal to a role whose robust self-security must remain unquestioned, one of upright conduct and self-sacrificial worthiness: the entire presumption of Victorianism is called into question. Jim’s failure, as Brierly says with tinges of hysteria, casts doubt on every other professional sailor, a terrifying notion if one has accepted such things as god-given securities. Jim therefore hunts not only to restore his self-respect and worth, but to reprove the ethic he failed, without recourse to abstract principles but in himself, overcoming the worst lapses with acts of bravery only to realise how close in nature they are: “I’ve been a so-called coward and a so-called hero and there’s not the thickness of a sheet of paper between them.” Thrown into sharp relief by Jim’s romantic masochism are the degrees of quality and frailty others display: Jim’s heaviest burden is in his very human self-awareness, where others scarcely care, and therefore scarcely can be called human. The psychopathic General and Brown are spared such tortures because for them life is a bartering of force and ego, so they can’t be consumed by the id like Jim. When Cornelius asks Brown what Jim has done when Brown comprehends his guilt complex, Brown replies that it doesn’t matter what he’s done, only that it will operate like a button to be pushed to their own advantage. Cornelius seeks to destroy whatever is stronger than himself, or attach himself to it. When Jim asks The Girl if she would have had sex with him if he’d wanted it when The General “gave her” to him, and she replies yes, because it would’ve been necessary, an opposite extreme of subordination of self to a general cause that is beyond degradation, a sagacious note struck by a proto-revolutionary entering an age of upheaval.

Lavi, an Israeli actress who first found success as a singer and actress in Europe, including a stint as a replacement for Barbara Steele in the eye of Mario Bava in The Body and the Whip (1963), had a brief moment of wider stardom in the mid-’60s, but this was certainly her most major role. Her strikingly vivid eyes and intensely sensual looks give her the aspect of an embodied fetish, and she inhabits her role here with poles of spiritual serenity and Amazonian fury. She is as defined by her place between cultures as Jim: when he asks her if she wants him to stay, she replies, no, “only because I do not wish to die crying like my mother,” whose “golden god” of a European lover went back home. It’s peculiar then that Jim’s eventual journey toward self-destruction is evidently happier for her than such an abandonment.

Brown, when he arrives with Cornelius and Schomberg, forces another crisis for Jim, one that involves his new authority in Patusan. While trying to raid the treasure kept in a Buddhist temple in a heavy night fog, Brown kills a boy. The locals manage to drive off the raiders and capture their boat, and Brown, figuring he can manipulate Jim from what he knows of him, calls to parlay. Brown’s nickname is both accurate—he maintains the appearance of a dapper Londoner complete with bowler hat—and ironic, as he’s really a vicious pirate. Schomberg describes him: “This ‘Gentleman’ Captain Brown has given more business to Death than the bubonic plague. From Java to Fiji, he’s wanted for piracy, slavery, mutiny, rape, murder, and some things that aren’t even mentioned in the Bible.” He’s the incarnation and image of the evil underbelly of European colonialism, and his suppositions about Jim are correct, as he twists Jim’s conscientiousness and horror of bloodshed into a double-bind that forces Jim in spite of the entreaties of his friends and his own doubts to give Brown and company safe conduct.

Mason’s late appearance in the film, although brief, is nonetheless superbly succinct, contrasting the epic, neurotic power of O’Toole’s performance with his own serpentine skill with words, as Brown easily turns the damaged man’s mind inside out. “Perhaps your justice is tempered by the colour of your skin,” one of the Patusan elders (Marne Maitland) says sharply. Whilst the elder’s statement fails to appreciate the specifics of Jim’s dilemma, it does potently summarise the contradictions of his larger position. Both Jim’s battles, with The General and Brown, are as much about intelligent men fighting with psychology as with guns, and for competitive ascendancy as much as worldly gain. Brooks’ attentiveness to the narrative form transforms Conrad’s saga into a kind of passion play, but one with Buddhist inflections: each phase of Jim’s life pits him against forces inner and outer that eventually prepare him for death as the consummation of his journey, and the wheel that is the constant refrain of his fears is revealed not as crucifix but as the wheel of life. Not for nothing does his final conquest of Brown, and his own defeat, converge in a Buddhist shrine, rendering coherent the flickering spirituality throughout the whole film. Brown, Cornelius, and others raiders sneak off under the cover of the fog after Jim has released them, and they attack and mortally injure Waris, who dies in Jim’s arms.

Jim has already declared that his life is forfeit if one person dies for his decision. Jim exterminates Brown and company by discharging two of The General’s cannons, kept as prizes loaded with gold sovereigns in the temple, but Du-Ramin, grief-stricken by his son’s death, promises Stein that he’ll extract Jim’s life if he’s still in town in the morning. Just as his obedience to his moral compass forced him to deal with Brown, now Jim cannot leave, and in spite of Stein’s arguments (“There’s too much pride in your humility!”) he nonetheless presents himself for Du-Ramin’s judgment in the morning in his full uniform. The gunshot that ends Jim’s life segues into the pyre of rebirth that consumes him, Waris, and the rest of Browns victims. Jim’s end, whilst tragic on one level, is nonetheless heroic not merely in his sublimation to a creed, but also in the completion of his journey of reproving the individual in the face of awesome forces. As Stein sails away in salutary contemplation on a river transformed into a flow of dappled light, The Girl weeps not in pain but in joy.