The Four Feathers
With Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley, Kate Hudson, Djimon Hounsou, and Michael Sheen.
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Second-rate novels often make better movies than first-rate ones, and The Four Feathers is a good example: every filmed version I’ve seen takes great liberties with its rather convoluted story line, and more often than not they’re improvements. Yet the basic premise is timelessly romantic: Harry Feversham, scion of a military family, joins the army to please his hardened father, though like his late mother he’s a sensitive soul, ill equipped for the brutality of combat. During a dinner with some fellow officers he announces his engagement to the stunning Irish lass Ethne Eustace, dealing a terrible blow to his dear friend and romantic rival, Lieutenant Jack Durrance. The same evening Harry receives word that his regiment has been ordered to active service in the Sudan, where Muslim extremists have begun a jihad against their British and Egyptian occupiers. Terrified of battle, he resigns his commission, disgracing himself and his father. Three of his friends in the regiment send him white feathers–a symbol of cowardice–and when Ethne learns what he’s done, she adds a fourth, breaking off their engagement. Incapacitated by shame, Harry secretly sets off for the Sudan and disguises himself as a native, hoping somehow to redeem himself.
That simplicity made the novel a hot property during the silent era: different sources have different counts, but according to Robert K. Klepper’s Silent Films, 1877-1996, adaptations of The Four Feathers were released in 1915, 1918, 1921, 1925, and 1929. The last of them was produced by David O. Selznick, who assigned the project to naturalist filmmakers Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper (the team that four years later would make King Kong). That version, which I haven’t seen, was a great critical and commercial success at the time, but it’s since been eclipsed by the 1939 version, a lavish Technicolor epic produced by Alexander Korda.
The film’s most significant invention is the friendship between Harry and Abou Fatma, a Sudanese mercenary played by the imposing Djimon Hounsou (Gladiator). Abou is a noble savage in the Hollywood tradition, serving to grease the plot, dispense wise aphorisms, and shake his head at the white man’s foolishness. When he and Harry discover that the British are heading into an ambush, Abou rides ahead to warn the Brits and is captured and whipped for his troubles (the sort of thing that happened to Tonto all the time). He’s apparently Muslim, though his spiritual discussions with Harry are purposely vague, soft-pedaling the friction between Christianity and Islam that ignited the Sudanese conflict. And though Abou admits that he’s killed many men, Kapur uses him to reproach the British for their cultural arrogance. When Harry resolves to rescue one of his friends from prison, Abou declares, “You English walk too proudly on the earth.”
