Cinema
Potboiler
Ted Whitehead
Slavers (Filmcenta) With Roots in the ascendant, I suppose a film about the Imperial land-grab in Africa and about the conflict between rival slave traders must have looked a surefire investment. All that savagery and scenery, and bare breasts too. But while Roots is a good melodrama, Slavers (X) is a bad one, messily constructed, confusingly narrated, and proceeding by fits and starts to a botched climax. It leaves the impression that Africa is a fine place for Arabs and vultures, and a rotten one for Africans and Europeans, particularly German film directors.
Jurgen Goslar is the producer and director of this potboiler, in which he acts the part of a German nobleman, Max von Erken. The film opens with a duel in the Prussian snow between Max and a young man (Wolf Goldan) who looks rather meaningfully towards Max's wife, Anna (Britt Ekland). I felt rather sorry for Herr Goldan because after managing the look very promisingly, all that happens to him is that he gets shot, says `LIgyahr and expires. Cut from European airs to tribal drums, from the snows to an African village where a wedding is being negotiated between two Young people who, it's obvious, are going to be major figures in the movie because they are much whiter than the rest of the natives. The young man (Don Jack Rouseau) escapes when slave traders raid the Village, led by Musulma (Ken Gampu), who looks authentically black, under the general supervision of Hassan (Ray Milland), who looks as authentically Arab as my Irish Catholic grandmother in her wedding dress. One of the few pleasures in watching this movie is in examining the director's desperate attempts to explain the simultaneous presence of his international cast. Trevor Howard plays Alec MacKenzie, who runs a trading post, and looks the classic English remittance man, a raddled alcoholic banned forever by the family for some terrible disgrace (a fate I have often envied, provided the postal orders arrived). Max and Anna reach this Post accompanied by Steven, Alec's nephew (Ron Ely), a young Englishman who inexplicably speaks with an American accent — but then its explained that he has spent some years in the States. Max normally speaks German English, but when he is feeling jealous he addresses his wife in German, and she replies in Swedish English. The Africans, of course, speak English or say nothing, usually nothing. The bridegroom-to-be, Mazu, reaches the Post and reports the slave raid, after Which he and Steven set off after the slavers. Hut when Steven describes Mazu as a Bigger, Mazu reacts like a contemporary New York black, and they fight, only to be seized by a group of passing South Americans, who turn out to be leading the slave trek. The chief is Da Silva, who is played by Cameron Mitchell and speaks like an American but was, apparently, born in Puerto Rico but arrived in Africa when — but I give up. The slave traders war with each other. The treacherous Hassan tricks Da Silva into killing Musulma's group, and then kills the South Americans. Young Steven recognises the V-brand of the slaves as his own uncle's brand, and suddenly realises that old drunken Trevor Howard is the biggest slaver of them all. There is a ludicrous finale in which all the white people shoot each other, and Howard is choked with his own gold dust.
A bit more of such grotesquerie, and the film might have become a cult. There is still some dialogue to cherish, like Howard grunting 'Wealth is like sea-water, the more You get, the more you thirst for,' and 'Your husband is running the German flag up some unsuspecting giraffe.' And there's the doctor saying of this terminal drunk 'He'll five another twenty years if he can learn to adjust.' There are also glimpses of crocodiles, lions, vultures, suns, moons, dhows, nipples and hypogastric hair (female, of course).
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