A man goes great lengths to redeem his name from the charge of cowardice in 1939's The Four Feathers. Every source I read on this film sees fit to mention it is "widely regarded as the best of numerous film adaptations of the 1902 novel" it's based on. I've never read the novel nor seen the other adaptations but the 1939 film is damned good.
Directed by Zoltan Korda and actually filmed on location in Sudan and England, it concerns the Mahdist War from the end of the 19th century. Harry Faversham (John Clements) comes from a military family who has pressured him all his life to join the ranks. Only, when it comes to it, it turns out all their stories of bloody war and people shamed for cowardice has had the unintended effect of convincing him to bow out entirely. He seems to think he can do so without any shame and explains to his fiancee, Ethne (June Duprez), in a calm and even slightly enthusiastic tone that he can stay home and build a family with her.
How do you sympathetically show a woman disappointed that her man is not going off to war? With great restraint and an intensely beautiful actress. Deprez in her soft blue gown and magenta lipstick has no reaction but to cast her eyes down in some visible confusion. Harry's three best friends are more strident, each sending him a white feather with obvious symbolism. Ethne won't give him one but Harry bitterly takes one from her fan in ironic self-reproach. That makes four.
After his friends have gone and Harry seems basically separated from Ethne, he regrets his actions and takes the extraordinary measures of going to Sudan and disguising himself as a mute local worker. So begins his adventures that culminate in a terrific sequence where he leads a young Ralph Richardson, one of the three friends who sent him feathers, through the desert after he'd been blinded by sunstroke. Those looking at this film through a modern lens might deplore the implicit approval for British colonialism, though it would be hard to argue the British were morally in the wrong in this conflict. But I suspect the most jarringly antiquated cultural aspect is in its celebration of bravery. For decades now, placating fear has been more encouraged than overcoming it with emphasis on therapy and sketchy pseudo-psychological concepts like trigger warnings. I sometimes feel I'm one of very few people left on earth who still dislikes cowardice. The imperative to avoid difficult issues and uncomfortable confrontations that has now been deemed a virtue seems to me detrimental to a society's ability to properly function. As John Milton put it, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race."
So I found The Four Feathers a deeply satisfying film. Ralph Richardson gives a great performance and you can see how carefully he studied the mannerisms of the blind to play his part.
The Four Feathers is available on The Criterion Channel.
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