DVR Diary: TAMANGO (1958)

On one hand, John Berry's Tamango feels like a film about a decade ahead of its time in its blunt treatment of slavery and resistance. On the other, it might be of a piece with such contemporary pictures as Salt of the Earth and A King in New York, gestures of nothing-to-lose leftism from filmmakers blacklisted or effectively exiled from Hollywood. This was a time when the film mecca could still produce stuff like Band of Angels with Clark Gable as a sympathetic slaveowner. In Europe, Berry and a team of writers adopted a story by Prosper Merimee, the original author of Carmen, about a blighted romance between a slave ship captain and his black mistress Ayesha -- she who must obey. The girl is Dorothy Dandridge, going farther afield in search of work after Hollywood failed to do much with her. The captain is that improbable international he-man, Curt Jurgens. She thinks she has a privileged position as the captain's lover, but is told he plans to dump her and get married when he finishes the current middle passage, his last. That is his plan, but he finds Ayesha more difficult to dump than he thought. Meanwhile, a captive warrior, the title character (Alex Cressan) appeals to her sense of morality and racial solidarity. When Tamango leads an uprising, Ayesha must choose between her white lover and the outgunned but adamant Africans. She chooses the Africans, which is to choose death.

Jurgens carries the film, making his slaver something more subtle than a seaborne Simon Legree. He has a great scene when he tries to cajole some hunger-striking prisoners to eat. He addresses them patiently, soothingly explaining how good the food is. When one still refuses to eat, he lets it slide, merely suggesting that he might try it later. But when the next man knocks his bowl away, the captain gestures to his crew and the victim is abruptly grabbed and unceremoniously thrown into the sea. It's a great shock moment to remind the viewer that lethal force never lies far below the slavers' civilized surface. During the revolt, he's determined above all to make sure that Ayesha survives, and you can see some quiet agony as it becomes clear to him that she won't leave the hold and prefers to share the rebels' fate. Yet it seems he can write her off all too easily after he orders a cannon fired into the hold. Dandridge has a much more flamboyant moment of agony moments earlier as Ayesha's survival instinct struggles with her conscience, with a feeling that she should not abandon the rebels even if it means her death. In a way it's a camp moment out of classic cinema, almost out of silent cinema as she marches toward the steps to the deck while the rebels chant some sort of defiant death song. She's about to climb up as the song seems to possess her. Haltingly she babbles the syllables, almost not knowing what she's saying, until finally she gives in completely as if ironically liberated by her choice of certain death. I can't quite say hers is a great performance, but that's a great melodramatic movie moment. It's right, however, to close the film with Jurgens and the cannon in Berry's abruptly matter-of-fact fashion. Snuffing the romanticism of Dandridge's big scene that way drives home the indifferent injustice of slavery in effective fashion. Tamango's grim finish helps make it seem more like a Sixties of Seventies film than the Fifties film it is, though Dandridge's histrionics are more in keeping with that decade. Compared to later slavesploitation cinema, Tamango is arguably more politically correct because it insists on the dignity of the enslaved in a way more hard-hitting treatments of the peculiar institution would not. That doesn't make it a better film than, say, Farewell Uncle Tom, but Tamango definitely deserves more attention from movie buffs than it's received in the last sixty years.