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Director: Cy Endfield
Screenwriters: Cy Endfield, John Prebble

By Roderick Heath

The Anglo-Zulu War was, for the most part, an inglorious episode amidst the colonial enterprise carving up Africa in the 1800s, but it included two closely linked incidents that gained the lustre of legend. Britain had been accruing control over what is now South Africa since the early 1800s, in competition with enclaves of Dutch-descended Boer settlers, and native peoples. Assigned as High Commissioner to knit the patchwork quilt of small states and regions into a federation, Henry Bartle-Frere worked by hook and by crook to that end, but faced two strong and fractious opponents, the Boers’ South African Republic and the Zulu Kingdom of Cetshwayo. Bartle-Frere tried to bully Cetshwayo into surrendering his kingdom’s sovereignty, on pain of war justified by scattered violent incidents and disputed borders. Cetshwayo chose to fight. Early in 1879 a large military expedition under the command of Lord Chelmsford invaded Zululand. One of Chelmsford’s columns, numbering about 1,800 soldiers plus civilian followers, camped under the mountain of Isandhlwana. A huge Zulu force assaulted the camp on January 22, slaying the bulk of the column in one of the most startling upsets in military history and temporarily foiling the invasion. The Zulu reserve forces decided to venture on and wipe out the small contingent of soldiers at Rorke’s Drift, a mission outpost by a river ford about six miles away.

By the late 1950s, around the time the last veteran of the battle died, the events of Rorke’s Drift might well have seemed a colourful anecdote of a lost age, the kind Angry Young Men liked to mock, and which would eventually gain an emblem in the character of the dotty old Pvt Jones in the TV series Dad’s Army, eternally recounting his colonial ventures. Cy Endfield read an article written by historical writer John Prebble about the Battle of Rorke’s Drift and became so excited he shared it with his actor pal Stanley Baker, who was equally enthused, partly because it roused patriotic feeling for his native Wales, where many of the soldiers in the battle came from; this aspect also attracted the input of Richard Burton. Endfield worked on a script with Prebble and Baker used it to attract the interest of producer Joseph Levine. The film was shot in South Africa at the height of the apartheid regime for a budget that belied the film’s epic look and feel, about a hundred kilometres from the real battle site. Baker took the role of Lt. John Chard, the military engineer who found himself ranking officer during the defence. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a descendent of Cetshwayo and soon to be one of the leading figures of agitation against apartheid, played his ancestor. A 31-year-old Cockney Korean War veteran turned actor who had taken the stage name of Michael Caine, and who had been playing small movie roles since 1956’s A Hill in Korea, was initially tested for the role of private soldier Henry Hook, a role that went to James Booth instead. Caine instead landed the second lead, as the company’s upper-crust commander Lt Gonville Bromhead, in part, Endfield told him later, because they didn’t have time to cast anyone else.

Zulu today stands as a perennial, if not an entirely uncontroversial one. It’s in no way to be taken as a documentary, and despite the title it neglects the actual Zulu perspective on events. From a contemporary standpoint it’s easy to look askance at a movie where the African warriors are largely presented as a great, undifferentiated mass whose only aims are to exterminate heroic white men. The film avoids the political backdrop noted above, except in fleeting references. Endfield would write a prequel about the events leading to Isandhlwana, Zulu Dawn (1979), balancing out the story in that regard, unsparingly depicting the mixture of arrogance and cynicism that led to such a disaster for the British and the simple defensive will of the Zulus. But Zulu is also much more complex than the above description allows. Endfield was a creative figure who in addition to being a writer and director also had a reputation as a magician and inventor: his magic skills made him friends with Orson Welles, who gave him a job at the Mercury Theatre. Endfield began making short films that quickly earned him a reputation both as a talent and as a troublesome figure politically. His educational short film Inflation was rejected for government use for being too sharply critical of capitalist institutions. After arriving as a feature filmmaker with an impressive early run of noir films like The Underworld Story (1950) and The Sound of Fury (1950), Endfield found himself on the wrong side of the blacklist and decamped to Britain, making films under a pseudonym at first before forging a good working partnership with Baker on punchy working-man melodramas like Hell Drivers (1957) and Sea Fury (1958). Endfield concluded his resurgence helming the Ray Harryhausen special effects vehicle Mysterious Island (1961), before embarking on Zulu.

Endfield opens with Burton’s inimitable strains, reading the official dispatch reporting Isandhlwana. A shock cut to the midst of that battlefield, surveying blazing carts and sprawled, red-clad soldiers, through which the Zulus calmly march and take up the fallen rifles of the soldiers, one posing with a potent attitude of declarative revolt, the title Zulu sweeping out at the audience in flaming letters. The mood is utterly present-tense, attuned to the ructions going on in Africa in the early 1960s, one of post-colonial turmoil. Endfield shifts the scene to find the nominal master of Rorke’s Drift, the Swedish missionary Otto Witt (Jack Hawkins), visiting Cetshwayo at his kraal and watching a mass wedding rite between warriors and maidens, along with Witt’s daughter Margareta (Ulla Jacobsson). Endfield offers the surreal oppositions apparent in this time and place, effete European piety and tribal earthiness each making a great play of honouring and respecting each-other, as the virginal, white-clad Margareta senses the metaphorical sexuality in the Zulu wedding rite, Endfield cutting between her eyes in colossal close-up and the stamping legs and phallic spears of the Zulu girls. News arrives of the victory at Isandhlwana, a moment of celebration for the Zulus but a moment of utter shock to Witt, who exclaims, “While I stood here talking peace a war has started.” Father and daughter flee.

At Rorke’s Drift, Bromhead’s detachment of about a hundred and fifty men, mostly consisting of B Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th Regiment of Foot, has been left defending the mission, whilst Chard has been assigned to build a bridge over the river. Chard’s repeated summation, “I came here to build a bridge,” has almost spiritual connotations as well as practical immediacy: although a soldier he sees himself more as a builder, a knitter-together of worlds, who soon finds himself obligated to wreak tremendous violence and destruction. Bromhead meanwhile is out hunting, gunning down antelope and failing to take out a dashing cheetah before mildly chastising Chard with facetious bonhomie for using his men without asking permission, before leaving him to it. The men of Bromhead’s command are bored, tense, and overheated, particularly the men in the mission hospital, including Hook, described by Bromhead as “a thief, a coward, and an insubordinate barrack-room lawyer.” Hook’s bête noir is the feverish and very sick Sgt Maxfield (Paul Daneman), still determined to make a soldier out of Hook when he’s not raving out of his head. Also in the hospital are the Swiss-born Natal policeman Corporal Schiess (Dickie Owen), laid up with a bandaged foot and limping about on a crutch, and the sarcastic Welsh privates William Jones (Richard Davies) and Robert Jones (Denys Graham), who must explain to Schiess the general practice in the regiment of calling each-other by their service numbers rather than by the all-too-common Welsh surnames.

Other figures of note around the camp are Colour Sergeant Bourne (Nigel Green), the epitome of the soldiering creed, and the equally competent Sgt Windridge (Joe Powell) and Corporal Allen (Glyn Edwards), who must guide unseasoned fighters like Pvts Cole (Gary Bond) and Hitch (David Kernan). Pvt Owen (Ivor Emmanuel), leader of the regimental choir, is anxious about one of his best singers, shanghaied for Chard’s service. Pvt Thomas (Neil McCarthy) is a gentle farmer whose instincts are stirred to worry about an ailing calf in the corral. Store keeper and camp cook Louis Byrne (Kerry Jordan) is upset when Chard orders him to pour out his soup on his fires to stop the Zulus getting it. Surgeon-Major Reynolds (Patrick Magee) lances a boil on Hook’s back with vengeful pleasure in whiling away a tedious detail. News of the calamity at Isandhlwana is brought by a survivor, the Boer Lt Adendorff (Gert van den Bergh), alerting the stunned Chard and Bromhead and necessitating swift decisions. First of these is who should take command – Chard has seniority despite not being a combat soldier, to which Bromhead comments, “Oh well, I suppose there are such things as gifted amateurs.” Facing clear orders not to abandon the post, Chard decides to fortify it. When the Witts arrive, they appoint themselves saviours of the men in the hospital although Chard believes it far safer to keep everyone in one defensive position. The two missionaries soon infuriate him so much by openly criticising his decisions and inspiring desertions that both are locked up.

Endfield emphasises isolation and tension throughout these scenes through a measured sense of space about his actors, almost entirely avoiding musical scoring except for very scattered chords from composer John Barry and the intense rhythms of the ritual songs in Cetshwayo’s kraal, sensitising the viewer to the immersion of the men in an environment that seems at once placid and alien. Thomas grasps a handful of parched soil and sadly notes there’s “nothing to hold a man in his grave.” All the soldiers are eddying in their fetid private spaces, mentally and physically, even as they’re supposed to be units of a coherent whole. Bromhead, the born-to-command scion, confesses to feelings of inadequacy before his noble heritage as the moment of truth comes and finds the weight of history and expectation almost unbearable compared to the less ethereal worries of his enlisted men. The enlisted men aren’t necessarily the salt of the earth however. The air seems glutinous with the promise of violence. Margareta’s venture into the hospital to tend to the casualties sees her hungrily appraised and molested by a delirious man. The sound of the advancing Zulus bashing their assegai spears on their shields makes for an eerie forewarning that sounds like a steam train chugging, echoing about the surrounding hills. Past and future do not exist; all is in a sunstruck eternal present, waiting for death to fall like a hammer. As the threat of action slowly comes closer, Endfield’s camera becomes more dramatically mobile, surveying the defenders and their environs in long, swaying camera dollies that gain in speed and intensity.

The appeal of the Rorke’s Drift story is, despite its roots in unromantic history, essentially existential, a story where courage and discipline are answers to the terror of overwhelming odds and seemingly universal indifference. Endfield and Prebble’s script emphasises this aspect, particularly with the totemic exchange of Cole and Bourne: “Why us?” Cole asks, when confronted by the imminent prospect of being steamrollered in the sorry adjunct to a disastrous venture. The Sergeant replies, “Because we’re ‘ere lad – and nobody else.” It’s also a story that bespeaks the most cherished self-image of the British: brave, resolute, unflinchingly professional, unfazed by furore, eternally individualist but capable of extraordinary collective action. Small wonder Zulu is held in much fonder regard than Zulu Dawn, which deals with quite a few of the worst national traits. The grinding gears of private concern, official requirement, and guiding paradigm shoot sparks everywhere, for no-one more terribly than Witt, who becomes increasingly desperate to make his voice and moral authority heard in a situation that has become subordinated to an entirely different philosophy with dizzying speed. After trying to reach some of the soldiers like Bourne, who he gets to dredge up some biblical phrases of relevance – “He breaketh the bow and snappeth the spear in sunder” – Witt takes refuge in a bottle of brandy and gets pie-eyed, spiralling into despair and bellowing out admonitions to the soldiers, begging them to abandon their posts. The most pathetic and exposed vignette comes when Chard has wagons Witt wants to use to ferry away the sick turned on their sides for barricades, and Witt tries to pull back over, begging for righteous strength that doesn’t come, a moment of great testing that leaves the great and the insignificant alike alone on a barren hill, baking in the sun.

Endfield was unabashed in seeing the film as a transposed Western, and it has strong affinities in sensibility with the likes of John Ford’s Cavalry trilogy, particularly Fort Apache (1948), which in turn took inspiration from the Battle of Little Big Horn, a military debacle with many similarities to Isandhlwana. Endfield’s cool compunction and sense of intensifying rhythm were however radically different to Ford’s style, as well as his scepticism about the sorts of social projects Ford celebrated. Endfield’s portrayal of his soldiers, mostly plebeian and entirely uninterested in dying for ideals, is something very different. He sees them as spiritual kin of the variously exalted and exploited working men of his earlier melodramas, as he notes them in all their inglorious attitudes, some bordering on antisocial, stuck with the ultimate shit job this time around. Zulu however also represents an evolution of the theme, as Endfield struggled to encompass the ugly as well as noble side of the human character, always struggling for pre-eminence within all people. In this regard Endfield was a highly prognosticative filmmaker, as precisely this conflict would be taken up by many major filmmakers in the next decade or so, as diverse as Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah. The driving irony of Zulu, crystallised at the very end, is that the two sides in the battle represent both facets at the same time, united in martial honour and in the happy dealing of death. His next film after Zulu, Sands of the Kalahari (1965), would repeat the same basic theme in an even more remote and existentially blighted situation, with various he-men battling the desert and apes, a woman caught between them over whom they try to establish rights to conquest.

Characters like Witt and Hook are then presented not according to any historical record – the real Witt for instance was 30 and Margareta was a child, whilst Hook was regarded as a quality soldier – but as avatars for Endfield’s concerns, his favoured variations of troubled and exiled protagonists, defined by violent extremes of self-loathing and temptations to passion that cannot be contained by their apparent roles and stations. Endfield notes maternal qualities in some of the men, including Thomas and Bourne, in the way they foster and nurture in a situation otherwise without femininity. Such men, artists like Owen, and builders like Chard prove astoundingly accomplished as killers when push comes to shove. Endfield strays awfully close to anticlericism in considering the Witts, denying the relevance of a transcendental system in a situation where immediate reality has a powerful stink, and Chard dismisses the use of the word “miracle” to describe their survival with his own correction: “It’s a short-chamber boxer Henry point-four-five calibre miracle.” Witt collapses in upon himself as he faces the ruination of his self-image as well as the foiling of his credos, whilst others suddenly find themselves elevated to titan status by qualities that have hitherto rendered them black sheep. The stiff, pristine whiteness of Margareta’s jacket demands ripping, and her dark-eyed gaze as she listens to the bawdy remarks of the soldiers signals the struggle of official piety with boding sexuality within.

Chard is celebrated at the ideal persona at the axis of such events, workmanlike in the best sense, his ideals and his pragmatism bound together in his mind’s approach to things, although there are spurts of class tension between him and Bromhead. Endfield avoids didacticism, however, as he gives Bromhead as much empathy as all the other characters: “I rather fancy he’s no-one’s son and heir now,” Bromhead snaps at Chard when he’s sarcastic about an order given by some probably slain high-ranker. The attack becomes the essential levelling event, ransacking each defender’s reflexes of character and muscle to determine who will live and who will die. With further ironic cunning, Endfield makes the tough and canny Adendorff, the only major Boer character in the film, not just a voice to make explicable the Zulu battle tactics and culture, but also the voice of awareness in both racial and political dimensions. “Just who do you think’s coming to wipe out your little command, the Grenadier Guards?” he asks when Bromhead makes a bitter comment about “cowardly blacks,” and notes that the price the British will demand for putting down “the enemy of my blood” (as he calls the Zulus) might be a steep one for his people too. Adendorff is a character completely without illusions about the nature of the larger struggle of the age but committed nonetheless to the fight at hand, where nearly everyone else is essentially an interloper (Van den Bergh would go on to appear as a wrath-stirring bigot in Cornel Wilde’s discomforting exploration of Darwinian race clashes out on the veldt, The Naked Prey, 1963). Another man defending home turf is Schiess, although he’s a Swiss émigré, who notably saves Chard after he’s knocked down by some foes and creaming the Zulus with his crutch.

Zulu plays out almost in real time for much of its length: the first hundred minutes are essentially one, long, concerted sequence. The first appearance of the Zulu impis on the hills above the mission, surveyed in one, long, seemingly endless camera pivot, is a high-point of the use of widescreen cinema in the use of presenting to the audience a vision of awe and fear. But Endfield immediately contrasts it with the claustrophobic hysteria of Witt, glaring out from his cage as he hisses desperate appeals to heed the word of the Lord: the twinning of opposites that drives his world view realised on the most immediate level. Stephen Dade’s great photography aids Endfield’s igneous sense of composition, constantly catching the actors against the arena-like mountains or the mission buildings in stark framings as if the humans are insects picking over the colossal bones of an enormous monster. Endfield drops in some expert touches of comic relief: Owen’s quip, “That’s very nice of him,” after Bromhead allows free fire, has a special zing as it captures the way the commencement of battle counts as something of a relief after the excruciating anticipation. Adendorff helps the commanders see the way the Zulus, far from randomly provoking them, are carefully probing their defences. The crashing tides of Zulu warriors test Chard’s quickly assembled but cunningly laid defences, spilling over at points and demanding the defenders battle hand-to-hand. Chard is lightly injured in the first battle, and others like Hitch and Allen are badly wounded but still keep trying to help out, crawling around with bullet wounds handing out ammunition. Reynolds works with sweating industry, pausing only to berate Chard as representative of the entire soldiering profession.

Caine would remark years later that he felt he owed his casting here, and through it his career, to the fact Endfield as an American looked past his background, and Baker, just as working-class in roots as Caine, had similarly benefited from working with visiting Hollywood directors. Baker had been the ideal lead in Endfield’s melodramas as he wielded both quotidian grit and also the stature of a star. The two actors make a great contrast in looks and screen energies, Baker with his square jaw, strong build, and tight grin, suggesting both intensity of personality and width of vision, Caine gangly, blonde-thatched, sleepy-eyed, investing Bromhead, who seems initially to be a right arse, with qualities of both guts and sensitivity. They’re surrounded here by a grand company of actors, from the towering Greene, who cleverly conveys Bourne’s authority and prowess not by acting like the traditionally bellowing sergeant but through the impression of consciously restrained strength, to Booth, who never quite gained the level of attention his performance here might have warranted, playing Hitch as a man who covers up a war with the entire world with a glaze of smarmy humour and whatever the opposite of noblesse oblige is. Hook is finally obliged to work for a living as the Zulus target the hospital, as he predicted, as a blind spot, he and other men furiously battling the invading warriors in a dizzying scene of intimate combat. Spears and bayonets clash, the thatched roof catches fire and walls are dug through frantically, whilst Bromhead battles on the roof. Finally an unsecured gate latch unleashes a stampede of cattle that halts a Zulu charge and ends the great assault of the first day.

Endfield plainly offers the British and Zulus as well-matched foes, both meeting with the sharp edge of their martial culture, as the soft edge of politesse and religion fall by the wayside early on. “I think they have more guts than we have, boyo,” Owen allows as they fend off yet another charge. Endfield signals cultural clash in the early scenes of the Witts confronted by a very different approach to life, but also the presence of affinities, the vitality of ritual and universality of certain gestures, giving shape and procedure to communal expressions. Violations of that order are the by-product of individual flaws that also testify to the reason behind such order: Endfield makes a point of having both a Zulu warrior and a British soldier rudely grab Margareta in plays of erotic possessiveness. The former is immediately punished by Cetshwayo who has another warrior execute him summarily; the latter transgression isn’t officially noticed. Language is an unsurmountable barrier but gestures so often speak for themselves, as Endfield parallels Chard and Bromhead trying to figure out their enemies to shots of the Zulu commanders doing the same thing. The attacking Zulus are always warlike and determined, but in Chard’s battle with some Endfield privileges him with seeing, in close proximity, fear and uncertainty in their faces, facing like him the same ultimate truth of life and death decided by reflexes of mind and muscle virtually beyond sense.

Endfield’s emphasis on such oppositions and equivalencies reaches apogee in the film’s two most emotive moments before and after the climactic bout of bloodletting. In perhaps the most famous scene in the film, the British soldiers, facing a new charge by the Zulus at dawn of the second day of the siege, sing a version of the Welsh marching song “Men of Harlech” in riposte to the Zulus chanting one of their war songs. Endfield borrowed this flourish directly from the Val Lewton-produced, Hugo Fregonese-directed Apache Drums (1951), although he offers it with more canny showmanship and a greater suggestion of peculiar accord: Endfield turns the clash of the two songs into a bizarrely harmonic experience, the challenge of aggression and pride apparent in both camps mirrored and transformed into poetic exaltation. Endfield’s sharpest irony lies in his observation that given warfare is a most human phenomenon, even when bracketed under the heading of inhumanity, it is a form of communication, replete with agreed cues, signs, and converse values. When the time for singing ends, the Zulus charge, the British retreat to one of Chard’s prepared redoubts and wield the massed power of their rifles.

When the guns fall silent, Endfield surveys a bloodcurdling mass of black bodies, spread across the ground right up to the defenders. Suddenly outmatched defence has become a scene of carnage declaring the birth of the modern world where mass destruction is a basic fact and raw courage a mere expeditious way of getting killed. No wonder Bromhead soon confesses, “I’m ashamed.” The second gesture of unexpected affinity comes as the Zulus suddenly reappear to regale the defenders, initially scaring the hell out of the remaining defenders before Adendorff realises they’re being saluted as “fellow braves.” Of course, reality was nowhere near so romantic or ethically stirring: after the departure of the besiegers and the arrival of Chelmsford’s relief, the soldiers brutally killed many of the wounded and captured Zulus in payback for the mutilations many of their own had received at Isandhlwana. This is instead Endfield’s attempt to knit the story into a contemporary context, forces at a standstill of mutual respect pointing the way forward to modernity. One reason the battle was remembered to posterity was the astounding tally of eleven Victoria Crosses awarded to the defenders, often seen as an official attempt to save face in the midst of the campaign’s general disaster. Endfield brings back Burton’s narration for a coda that succinctly unifies Endfield’s mission, message, and aesthetic, his camera moving in long, gliding reveries through the mission in the wake of the battle, noting the men who received the Victoria Cross in the midst of their comrades, caught in attitudes of boredom, pain, exhaustion, business, even indifference, still trying to work out if what just happened to them had meaning or was just a nightmare that left with the rising of the sun.