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I just believe in making the best of all possible ancient worlds
I watched South of Algiers (U.S. The Golden Mask, 1953) because when the universe hands you a Technicolor archaeological adventure starring Van Heflin and Eric Portman in search of cursed Carthaginian treasure, you don't waste time asking questions like "But really, will it be any good?" or "What?" You plant your butt on the couch in front of your Linux-driven pseudo-TV and, at least if you are me, you have a wonderful time.
The premise deserves a title with more pulp. In his silvery, brisk, genteelly obsessive way, Portman's Dr. Burnet has spent the last fifteen years chasing the legend of the Roman general who stole a golden mask of Moloch—let's just pretend the film means Baʿal Ḥammon, Flaubert casts a long shadow—out of the sack of Carthage and carried it as his standard into battle, where he was never victorious again and in the end, believing themselves cursed by their commander's sacrilege, his men mutinied and gave him a grave in the Libyan desert, his ill-luck emblem with him. (Me, I am not one to set much store by cursings, or I was not in the old days.) The ruins of Cuicul seemed to offer a promising lead at last, but then a fatal accident stalled further excavation. With his permit expiring in weeks and his team short-handed, the professor's only hope of continuing the dig is to accept the assistance of the last kind of archaeologist he wants associated with his life's work, a globe-trotting amateur with a CV of "cheap, trashy books and childish articles for newspapers!" As he candidly admits, Heflin's Nicholas Chapman can afford to offer his services for free because he plans to recoup his losses with future publications; his brazen charm as much as his trenchcoat completes the picture of the American sensational journalist. Academics can't be choosers. Rounding out the party with the professor's daughter, his old friend's son, and the inevitably local comic relief, our explorers set out for an assortment of ancient sites across North Africa and I do not feel it is any kind of spoiler to reveal that in addition to bandits, sandstorms, and double crosses, they will have to contend with a competitor in the person of Charles Goldner's Petris, one of those urbanely unscrupulous operators who'll steal a find out from under a colleague's nose and make a fortune from it in the illegal antiquities trade. The curse itself hovers in plausible-deniable reserve: a toppling statue, a tomb cave-in, the shadow of sacrifices offered in blood and fire. All the same, anyone who bets against the advent of adorable child sidekicks will lose. Don't forget the donkey.
Written by Robert Westerby and directed by Jack Lee, South of Algiers never fully gears up to the thrill of the chase rather than the fun of the ride, but its pride in its location shooting is justified—under the semi-documentary eye of DP Oswald Morris, the souks of modern Tunis are photographed as vividly and ethnographically as the Antonine Baths of Roman Carthage, caravans assembling and spahis on maneuvers as naturally part of the terrain as the amphitheatre of Cuicul or the climactic broken-walled forum of "Sidamus, which is not on any map." Truthfully, the film could have trimmed some of its travelogue, especially as it shifts into the desert sojourn of its second half; I am legitimately more interested by the tribal dances than by the honeytrap fantasia of the belly dancer played by Simone Silva, but then the screenplay needed either to be loose enough to accommodate such digressions or tight enough to resist them entirely. However mission-focused our heroes, the audience should never forget that the vultures of Petris and his accomplices are shadowing them at every turn. Jacques Brunius' Kress got Chapman companionably drunk at the hotel bar in Tunis and then rifled his room for the inside dope on the expedition. George Pastell's Hassan inveigled himself onto the dig at Djémila where the wrong Marcus Manilius was buried, the son patre parum faustior scelerato whose hastily flash-captured epitaph was nonetheless a stroke of luck for Burnet, or anyone else on the trail of a million dollars in Punic gold. "Burnet may have led the way," Petris doesn't even gloat; he merely has the upper hand and a gun in it, "but I'll be the first to recover it." There is sufficient suspense and adventure in these machinations if left to themselves. A full-fledged battle between desert bandits and Algerian cavalry just gets in the way.
The cast at least can hold their own against the scenery. Past the zenith of his film stardom by the early '50's, Portman had lost none of his gift for attractive ambivalence: I was introduced to him with the cracked mysticism of A Canterbury Tale (1944) and it is somehow not entirely surprising to find him as an eminent yet quixotic scholar at the end of his funding, insisting to the head of his department at the British Museum that "it is a fact that Marcus Manilius was buried with the loot from the temple in Carthage" and receiving the dry reminder, "It is a fact to two obscure Roman historians and yourself." Extra-diegetically, we know he must be right or what are we watching this movie for, but we also grasp instantly why he gets on the museum's nerves. His interactions with Chapman are so brusque and corrective that it isn't until he abruptly apologizes for being "rather more like myself than usual" that we realize there's more going on than contempt for the American's credentials. He accepts his daughter's description of himself as "pig-headed and arrogant" and confesses to her, "Shyness is an agony you've been spared, my dear. You're lucky. It can make you very lonely." It should be a sentimental gesture when he finally unbends enough to hug a small child goodbye instead of trying to thank her with a handshake, but Portman performs it so unselfconsciously that it becomes as revealing as if this awkward man has stepped aside from himself for the moment, or perhaps back in. No stranger to ambiguity himself, Heflin handles the heel potential of Chapman by cheerfully denying none of the mercenary motives imputed to him, a kind of snake-oil sincerity which could signal almost anything. He disclaims an expertise in Punic Africa and identifies a find of Burnet's from Sbeitla. At the end of an exhaustive day in Tunis, he is grimly but perhaps not unfairly assessed, "His mind's a combination microscope, camera, and vacuum cleaner." For a hardened hack writer, he's peculiarly embarrassed about a crush of paparazzi at the airport, and he sounds much less commercial standing among the late-lit ruins of Carthage, musing on its ghosts; as he walks down a grass-patched, sun-bleached colonnade with Wanda Hendrix's Anne Burnet, he reveals a rueful, wistful awareness of how short his self-taught treasure-hunting falls of his youthful dreams of "real" archaeology even when he's just proven his mettle with a crowbar, a chisel, and a camera in a tight spot. He's kind to children and sarcastic to camels and when he's held at gunpoint by Petris in the dunes not far from Sidamus, we should be able to trust his apparent switching of sides as a ploy. He's risked his life for this expedition; surely he's playing to the cynicism of his reputation when he shrugs, "Anything Burnet finds, he'll just stick in a museum someplace, and that's not going to do me any good." Then he adds with the slight, wry wince of a grin, "Anyway, Burnet doesn't carry a gun," and it is suddenly, miserably possible that Heflin whose screen persona was never exactly a moral lodestone has fucked it up again. I like actors who can get reality, which is to say uncertainty, out of type-scenes. Anne has her tart, gauche moments, as her father's daughter should; I wish more were made of her own archaeological bona fides. It's good that she refuses to be cut out of the most exciting part of the adventure for her own protection, but it would have been even better had she read just one relevant inscription along the way. Jacques François' Jacques Farnod exists primarily to talk shop and bow out gracefully when he sees the romantic loyalty of the girl he always expected to marry waning in favor of a complicated stranger, but at least he does it without being a drip. The presence of Marne Maitland as the native gofer whose real name goes by so inconsequentially that even the credits refer to him as "Thankyou" mostly reminded me that in a film industry with any justice he would have made a beautiful Ezra Jennings.
There is no getting around the fact that when we finally behold the legendary mask, presiding balefully over the undisturbed tomb of Marcus Manilius, the victor whose spoils brought him to grief, it doesn't look a thing like our surviving examples of Carthaginian art, although with its twisted horns, starting eyes, and spiked and gaping maw, it might have done very well as a Lovecraftian cult object. To the bloodied wraith of Petris, staggering suddenly out of the dark with his gun still in his hand, it is nothing more than the weight of its wealth: "It's gold, Burnet! Pure gold!" He's just, desperately touching it when he dies, tumbling in a smear of blood to its feet like the tophet-god's last sacrifice, the fired, enslaved city's revenge. It's no divine face-melting, but as the climax of a quasi-supernatural treasure hunt, it'll do. At the end of his Schliemann-like quest to "substantiate a legend," Burnet himself approaches only with wonder, tracing the snarling ridges of gold with the fearless tenderness of a lover. It is innocuous to him. He will take the mask not as a prize, like sceleratus Manilius—impious, accursed—or his modern equivalent Petris, but as a sacred trust, "a legacy from the past to the present." He even had a permit for the dig, which should keep him out of trouble with governments as well as gods. So many fictional archaeologists can't say the same.
If I have a serious complaint about this movie, it's that it doesn't lean into its Punicitas anywhere near as much as it could. Outside of alternate histories and/or the Punic Wars, Carthage is rare in fiction—mystifyingly, as far as I'm concerned. I have never seen another film use it as this one does, as the ancient civilization ghosting the underside of a contemporary land, even though you'd think that its position in the Western canon alone would make it a magnet for just this kind of lightly weird archaeological escapade. Burnt, depopulated, built over, Carthage haunted Rome so hard that it's wound to this day into its most famous literature, its founding epic, as if one must always be remembered with the other, so long as empires are anxious and gods hold such angers in their hearts; hence my disappointment with the film's assignation of the curse to Moloch, aside from the essential nonexistence of a bull-headed idol of that name in Carthage no matter what it says in Salammbô (1862). Even Baʿal Ḥammon would have been a near-miss. It's right there in the Aeneid, for the love of Juno Caelestis. Any legend of Carthaginian vengeance on a Roman conqueror should be ascribed to Tanit. I recognize that most audiences in 1953 as well as now wouldn't know tnt pn bʿl from Gesundheit, but I wouldn't have minded the infodump so long as Portman delivered it: he has such a good voice for telling the past. As it is, we get one fleeting mention of Dido in the same inescapable breath as Hannibal and otherwise the film ignores the ready-made turn of the myth-wheel staring it in the face. The point of the repressed is that it returns, even called formally out of her falling city, assimilated to a foreign pantheon, used to rebrand the ground which was once her own: like the crescent of the moon after its darkness, the goddess eclipsed by Aeneas' triumph persists. Moloch may connote relentless, insatiate hunger, but Tanit still calls rain in Tunisia. (I do not think she is quiet. No indeed.) The film doesn't take the gimme. It buries characters from the second century BCE in ornately sculpted sarcophagi; it buries one of them in a town that didn't exist until the first century CE. "What modern city, I wonder, when laid in ruins, will show one-tenth this splendor?" is a heartfelt tribute to Cuicul, but it doesn't change the fact that the son of a veteran of the Third Punic War shouldn't be interred there any more than his father should have a statue in Vespasian-era Sufetula. I can't discount it as normal Hollywood or in this case Elstree ignorance when there are touches elsewhere in the script that suggest someone did their research. The gens Manilia was a small and only rarely distinguished family, so the creation of a Manilius who ultimately got the worst of the Punic Wars reads like a deep-cut shout-out to the consul of 149 BCE who oversaw the burning of the Carthaginian fleet at Utica and then got skunked by Hasdrubal at Nepheris; in other words, it seems unlikely the screenwriter just forgot when Carthago deleta est. Shooting at Djémila made for good copy and gorgeous background and most audiences don't care about a difference of two centuries when the plot is already looking back across more than twenty; most audiences understand Moloch as Biblically bad news. I want the film to be a hauntology of North Africa, it wants to be an entertaining and sporadically erudite adventure. We both get about half what we want.
I am confident there are movies far more deserving of a theatrical revival, but since the transfer of South of Algiers currently available on TCM looks like it went through the wash in its cameraman's pocket, I'd like the full benefit of its Technicolor locations one of these days. The opening credits thank "the Algerian Government, the French Colonial Forces, the Department of Fine Arts and the Director of the Roman ruins at Djemila in Algeria." I conclude that shooting in Tunisia was much less of a pain in the ass. Even if I would have traded an oasis or two for a little more of the darkling numinous, it was worth it. I like Portman defending the past like his honor, I like Heflin genially needling, "Sounds like an even more disreputable character than I am," I like the novelty of a Carthaginian jinx when Egyptian curses are a penny a dreadful dozen. I have no evidence it was an influence on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), but Petris and Belloq must have cheated one another sometime. It's so close to something I would have loved desperately, there's nothing to do but write what it left out, like actual Punic religion. This legacy brought to you by my obscure backers at Patreon.
The premise deserves a title with more pulp. In his silvery, brisk, genteelly obsessive way, Portman's Dr. Burnet has spent the last fifteen years chasing the legend of the Roman general who stole a golden mask of Moloch—let's just pretend the film means Baʿal Ḥammon, Flaubert casts a long shadow—out of the sack of Carthage and carried it as his standard into battle, where he was never victorious again and in the end, believing themselves cursed by their commander's sacrilege, his men mutinied and gave him a grave in the Libyan desert, his ill-luck emblem with him. (Me, I am not one to set much store by cursings, or I was not in the old days.) The ruins of Cuicul seemed to offer a promising lead at last, but then a fatal accident stalled further excavation. With his permit expiring in weeks and his team short-handed, the professor's only hope of continuing the dig is to accept the assistance of the last kind of archaeologist he wants associated with his life's work, a globe-trotting amateur with a CV of "cheap, trashy books and childish articles for newspapers!" As he candidly admits, Heflin's Nicholas Chapman can afford to offer his services for free because he plans to recoup his losses with future publications; his brazen charm as much as his trenchcoat completes the picture of the American sensational journalist. Academics can't be choosers. Rounding out the party with the professor's daughter, his old friend's son, and the inevitably local comic relief, our explorers set out for an assortment of ancient sites across North Africa and I do not feel it is any kind of spoiler to reveal that in addition to bandits, sandstorms, and double crosses, they will have to contend with a competitor in the person of Charles Goldner's Petris, one of those urbanely unscrupulous operators who'll steal a find out from under a colleague's nose and make a fortune from it in the illegal antiquities trade. The curse itself hovers in plausible-deniable reserve: a toppling statue, a tomb cave-in, the shadow of sacrifices offered in blood and fire. All the same, anyone who bets against the advent of adorable child sidekicks will lose. Don't forget the donkey.
Written by Robert Westerby and directed by Jack Lee, South of Algiers never fully gears up to the thrill of the chase rather than the fun of the ride, but its pride in its location shooting is justified—under the semi-documentary eye of DP Oswald Morris, the souks of modern Tunis are photographed as vividly and ethnographically as the Antonine Baths of Roman Carthage, caravans assembling and spahis on maneuvers as naturally part of the terrain as the amphitheatre of Cuicul or the climactic broken-walled forum of "Sidamus, which is not on any map." Truthfully, the film could have trimmed some of its travelogue, especially as it shifts into the desert sojourn of its second half; I am legitimately more interested by the tribal dances than by the honeytrap fantasia of the belly dancer played by Simone Silva, but then the screenplay needed either to be loose enough to accommodate such digressions or tight enough to resist them entirely. However mission-focused our heroes, the audience should never forget that the vultures of Petris and his accomplices are shadowing them at every turn. Jacques Brunius' Kress got Chapman companionably drunk at the hotel bar in Tunis and then rifled his room for the inside dope on the expedition. George Pastell's Hassan inveigled himself onto the dig at Djémila where the wrong Marcus Manilius was buried, the son patre parum faustior scelerato whose hastily flash-captured epitaph was nonetheless a stroke of luck for Burnet, or anyone else on the trail of a million dollars in Punic gold. "Burnet may have led the way," Petris doesn't even gloat; he merely has the upper hand and a gun in it, "but I'll be the first to recover it." There is sufficient suspense and adventure in these machinations if left to themselves. A full-fledged battle between desert bandits and Algerian cavalry just gets in the way.
The cast at least can hold their own against the scenery. Past the zenith of his film stardom by the early '50's, Portman had lost none of his gift for attractive ambivalence: I was introduced to him with the cracked mysticism of A Canterbury Tale (1944) and it is somehow not entirely surprising to find him as an eminent yet quixotic scholar at the end of his funding, insisting to the head of his department at the British Museum that "it is a fact that Marcus Manilius was buried with the loot from the temple in Carthage" and receiving the dry reminder, "It is a fact to two obscure Roman historians and yourself." Extra-diegetically, we know he must be right or what are we watching this movie for, but we also grasp instantly why he gets on the museum's nerves. His interactions with Chapman are so brusque and corrective that it isn't until he abruptly apologizes for being "rather more like myself than usual" that we realize there's more going on than contempt for the American's credentials. He accepts his daughter's description of himself as "pig-headed and arrogant" and confesses to her, "Shyness is an agony you've been spared, my dear. You're lucky. It can make you very lonely." It should be a sentimental gesture when he finally unbends enough to hug a small child goodbye instead of trying to thank her with a handshake, but Portman performs it so unselfconsciously that it becomes as revealing as if this awkward man has stepped aside from himself for the moment, or perhaps back in. No stranger to ambiguity himself, Heflin handles the heel potential of Chapman by cheerfully denying none of the mercenary motives imputed to him, a kind of snake-oil sincerity which could signal almost anything. He disclaims an expertise in Punic Africa and identifies a find of Burnet's from Sbeitla. At the end of an exhaustive day in Tunis, he is grimly but perhaps not unfairly assessed, "His mind's a combination microscope, camera, and vacuum cleaner." For a hardened hack writer, he's peculiarly embarrassed about a crush of paparazzi at the airport, and he sounds much less commercial standing among the late-lit ruins of Carthage, musing on its ghosts; as he walks down a grass-patched, sun-bleached colonnade with Wanda Hendrix's Anne Burnet, he reveals a rueful, wistful awareness of how short his self-taught treasure-hunting falls of his youthful dreams of "real" archaeology even when he's just proven his mettle with a crowbar, a chisel, and a camera in a tight spot. He's kind to children and sarcastic to camels and when he's held at gunpoint by Petris in the dunes not far from Sidamus, we should be able to trust his apparent switching of sides as a ploy. He's risked his life for this expedition; surely he's playing to the cynicism of his reputation when he shrugs, "Anything Burnet finds, he'll just stick in a museum someplace, and that's not going to do me any good." Then he adds with the slight, wry wince of a grin, "Anyway, Burnet doesn't carry a gun," and it is suddenly, miserably possible that Heflin whose screen persona was never exactly a moral lodestone has fucked it up again. I like actors who can get reality, which is to say uncertainty, out of type-scenes. Anne has her tart, gauche moments, as her father's daughter should; I wish more were made of her own archaeological bona fides. It's good that she refuses to be cut out of the most exciting part of the adventure for her own protection, but it would have been even better had she read just one relevant inscription along the way. Jacques François' Jacques Farnod exists primarily to talk shop and bow out gracefully when he sees the romantic loyalty of the girl he always expected to marry waning in favor of a complicated stranger, but at least he does it without being a drip. The presence of Marne Maitland as the native gofer whose real name goes by so inconsequentially that even the credits refer to him as "Thankyou" mostly reminded me that in a film industry with any justice he would have made a beautiful Ezra Jennings.
There is no getting around the fact that when we finally behold the legendary mask, presiding balefully over the undisturbed tomb of Marcus Manilius, the victor whose spoils brought him to grief, it doesn't look a thing like our surviving examples of Carthaginian art, although with its twisted horns, starting eyes, and spiked and gaping maw, it might have done very well as a Lovecraftian cult object. To the bloodied wraith of Petris, staggering suddenly out of the dark with his gun still in his hand, it is nothing more than the weight of its wealth: "It's gold, Burnet! Pure gold!" He's just, desperately touching it when he dies, tumbling in a smear of blood to its feet like the tophet-god's last sacrifice, the fired, enslaved city's revenge. It's no divine face-melting, but as the climax of a quasi-supernatural treasure hunt, it'll do. At the end of his Schliemann-like quest to "substantiate a legend," Burnet himself approaches only with wonder, tracing the snarling ridges of gold with the fearless tenderness of a lover. It is innocuous to him. He will take the mask not as a prize, like sceleratus Manilius—impious, accursed—or his modern equivalent Petris, but as a sacred trust, "a legacy from the past to the present." He even had a permit for the dig, which should keep him out of trouble with governments as well as gods. So many fictional archaeologists can't say the same.
If I have a serious complaint about this movie, it's that it doesn't lean into its Punicitas anywhere near as much as it could. Outside of alternate histories and/or the Punic Wars, Carthage is rare in fiction—mystifyingly, as far as I'm concerned. I have never seen another film use it as this one does, as the ancient civilization ghosting the underside of a contemporary land, even though you'd think that its position in the Western canon alone would make it a magnet for just this kind of lightly weird archaeological escapade. Burnt, depopulated, built over, Carthage haunted Rome so hard that it's wound to this day into its most famous literature, its founding epic, as if one must always be remembered with the other, so long as empires are anxious and gods hold such angers in their hearts; hence my disappointment with the film's assignation of the curse to Moloch, aside from the essential nonexistence of a bull-headed idol of that name in Carthage no matter what it says in Salammbô (1862). Even Baʿal Ḥammon would have been a near-miss. It's right there in the Aeneid, for the love of Juno Caelestis. Any legend of Carthaginian vengeance on a Roman conqueror should be ascribed to Tanit. I recognize that most audiences in 1953 as well as now wouldn't know tnt pn bʿl from Gesundheit, but I wouldn't have minded the infodump so long as Portman delivered it: he has such a good voice for telling the past. As it is, we get one fleeting mention of Dido in the same inescapable breath as Hannibal and otherwise the film ignores the ready-made turn of the myth-wheel staring it in the face. The point of the repressed is that it returns, even called formally out of her falling city, assimilated to a foreign pantheon, used to rebrand the ground which was once her own: like the crescent of the moon after its darkness, the goddess eclipsed by Aeneas' triumph persists. Moloch may connote relentless, insatiate hunger, but Tanit still calls rain in Tunisia. (I do not think she is quiet. No indeed.) The film doesn't take the gimme. It buries characters from the second century BCE in ornately sculpted sarcophagi; it buries one of them in a town that didn't exist until the first century CE. "What modern city, I wonder, when laid in ruins, will show one-tenth this splendor?" is a heartfelt tribute to Cuicul, but it doesn't change the fact that the son of a veteran of the Third Punic War shouldn't be interred there any more than his father should have a statue in Vespasian-era Sufetula. I can't discount it as normal Hollywood or in this case Elstree ignorance when there are touches elsewhere in the script that suggest someone did their research. The gens Manilia was a small and only rarely distinguished family, so the creation of a Manilius who ultimately got the worst of the Punic Wars reads like a deep-cut shout-out to the consul of 149 BCE who oversaw the burning of the Carthaginian fleet at Utica and then got skunked by Hasdrubal at Nepheris; in other words, it seems unlikely the screenwriter just forgot when Carthago deleta est. Shooting at Djémila made for good copy and gorgeous background and most audiences don't care about a difference of two centuries when the plot is already looking back across more than twenty; most audiences understand Moloch as Biblically bad news. I want the film to be a hauntology of North Africa, it wants to be an entertaining and sporadically erudite adventure. We both get about half what we want.
I am confident there are movies far more deserving of a theatrical revival, but since the transfer of South of Algiers currently available on TCM looks like it went through the wash in its cameraman's pocket, I'd like the full benefit of its Technicolor locations one of these days. The opening credits thank "the Algerian Government, the French Colonial Forces, the Department of Fine Arts and the Director of the Roman ruins at Djemila in Algeria." I conclude that shooting in Tunisia was much less of a pain in the ass. Even if I would have traded an oasis or two for a little more of the darkling numinous, it was worth it. I like Portman defending the past like his honor, I like Heflin genially needling, "Sounds like an even more disreputable character than I am," I like the novelty of a Carthaginian jinx when Egyptian curses are a penny a dreadful dozen. I have no evidence it was an influence on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), but Petris and Belloq must have cheated one another sometime. It's so close to something I would have loved desperately, there's nothing to do but write what it left out, like actual Punic religion. This legacy brought to you by my obscure backers at Patreon.
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I'm sorry! It haunts me!