Brits v. spears: "Zulu Dawn"

Here's another leftfield Seventies reissue. 1979's Zulu Dawn was the belated, semi-forgotten prequel to 1964's Zulu, released to mark the centenary of the central Battle of Isandlwana, and released into a moment where the tattered remains of the British film industry was falling back on old ideas and properties. Cy Endfield, the hardy American director of the original film, turned over the screenplay he'd written at the start of the decade for the versatile Douglas Hickox - Endfield's former AD, fresh (if that's the right word) from Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Theatre of Blood and Brannigan - to direct. Hickox called in a battalion of the industry's usual suspects (Peter O'Toole, John Mills, Denholm Elliott, Peter Vaughan), plus a Hollywood presence to secure overseas sales and funding (Burt Lancaster, whose unconvincing Scots accent suggests the producers may have been eyeing Connery) and cannon-fodder new faces (a pre-fame Bob Hoskins as a sergeant-in-arms whose look is going to appeal to a very specific gay demographic; Phil Daniels as a mournful bugle boy; Paul Copley as a cadet who gets the script's best line: "Killed by a stray bullet made in Birmingham!"). The story had much the same story structure as had set the cash registers ringing a decade-and-a-half before. Zulu Dawn is thirty minutes of barrack-room and parade-ground chatter followed by a full ninety minutes of Sealed Knot recreation on a ruddy big plain to the accompaniment of a terrific, old-school Elmer Bernstein score played by an exceptionally well-marshalled Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Trust me, your dad is going to wet himself - although you might like to gently break it to him that there isn't a happy ending, one reason Hickox's film flopped first time around.

As one might expect from a follow-up boasting American investment and the presence of the liberal figurehead Lancaster, Zulu Dawn proves both more expansive and more complicated than its flagwaving predecessor: this British Army presents as far less of a unified front, with dissent in the ranks as well as racism of various stripes. Hickox uses his ensemble to present what we must now call a spectrum of opinions and attitudes, ranging from unsmiling martinet O'Toole to the vastly more liberal Simon Ward, formerly Dickie Attenborough's Young Winston. (Bishop Freddie Jones, meanwhile, can only pray for peace.) Being a 1970s British film, I think we still have to declare it more pre-woke than it is postcolonial: Hickox can't resist cutting back to the topless local girls dancing under the opening credits, and Anna Calder-Marshall (Tom Burke's mum, recent winner of a Berlin festival acting gong for Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea) is stuck playing an Army wife with the unfortunate name of Fanny ("Same old Fanny!"). But Endfield and Hickox do at least seem to have absorbed some of this decade's political lessons. This Empire's priority is shown to be protecting its own commercial and industrial concerns, Mills's functionary positions this combat as (yikes) "the final solution to the Zulu problem", and Zulu king Cetshwayo (Simon Sabela) gets to say his piece before it all kicks off, somewhat more aggressively in 1979 than it had in 1964 (albeit still within the confines of a PG certificate). You have to wait for them, but the initial scenes of the Zulus rising up against their oppressors even made me wonder whether the producers had had half an eye on the blaxploitation audience. It's destined to remain in the shadow of its much-memed predecessor: Hickox's battle choreography - diffuse, circular and finally very samey - makes Endfield's seem like Miklós Jancsó. But it's made for lazy matinee viewing, allowing the viewer to powernap in the gaps between attack and counterattack, and in this newly restored version, it surely looks better than it ever has: properly widescreen (in the days when that term meant something to our cinematographers) with rich film-stock colour picking out every uniform, tea party outfit and, indeed, war wound.

Zulu Dawn is now playing in selected cinemas.