The Wind and the Lion (MGM, 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After A Thrill for Thelma TCM showed the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion, written and directed by John Milius – who as a filmmaker seems to have had all of Clint Eastwood’s testosterone and little or none of his talent. It was actually an intriguing companion piece to 12 Desperate Hours: both were looely based on true stories,both dealt with women with children who were kidnapped by morally ambiguous crooks, and both started out depicting the bad guy as just that but ultimately gave him more depth as the story progressed. The setting of The Wind and the Lion is Tangier, Morocco in May 1904, where a group of bandits headed by Ahmed al-Raisuli (Sean Connery), who in the film’s opening scenes is shown leading a band of marauders through the streets of Tangier. overturning peddlers’ carts and smashing their wares. Al-Raisuli ultimately stops at the home of American widow Eden Perdicaris (Candice Bergen) and kidnaps her and her two children. He takes them to his desert hideout in the Riff country and hods them hostage. In the film he isn’t clear just what he wants in exchange for them, but in real life he demanded a ransom of $70,000 and personal control of two of the richest districts in Tangier,which he later upped to six districts. The film cuts back and forth between Tangier and Washington, D.C., where President Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith) and his Secretary of State, John Hay (John Huston, making one of his first forays into acting since he played the super-villain in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown) try to figure out how to deal with the situation.

They ultimately decide to send in a series of gunboats and servicemembers to rescue the hostages by force, at least in poart because Roosevelt is worried that if he doesn’t look tough enough the American people will vote him out of office in the 1904 election.Roosevelt notes that no U.S.Vice-President who succeeded to the presidency after the death of his predecessor got elected to a full term in his own right – though Roosevelt pulled it off and several others (Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson) have since. Eventually the mission is a success, the hostages are freed and Roosevelt goes on to a big win in November 1904. The biggest change Milius made in the real story was to transform the principal victim, who in real life was a 64-year-old man aned Ion Perdicaris, both in Greece to the U.S. ambassador and his wife in 1840 but considered a U.S. citizen. The real Ahmed al-Raizuli kidnapped Ion Perdicaris and his stepson, Cromwell Varney, but Milius decided to make “him” a relatively young, attractive woman. I suspect he was trying to create the same kind of ronaltic/sexual tension director George Melford and writers Edith Maude Hull,June Mathis and Monte Katterjohn had back in 1921 when they made Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik. That film became famous for an interttile in which the kidnap victim (Agnes Ayres) asked the sheik who kidnapped her why he did it, and he replies, “Are y ou not woman enough to know?”

The Wind and the Lion is not an especially good movie; it drags on and on and suffers from a lack of pace even in the action scenes, where one would have expected Milius to excel. Its biggest importance was on real-life U.S. history; reportedly President Gerald Ford had just watched it in a private screening in May 1975 when officials of the Communist Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia (which they renamed “Kampuchea”) had seized the cargo ship Mayaguez and were holding the ship, its crew and its cargo hostage. Like Roosevelt, Ford ordered a U.S. naval mission to free the Mayaguez and its crew, and it was successful even though, unlike Roosevelt,Ford lost his bid to be elected to a full term as President after Richarde Nixon’s resignation in1 974. Instead he lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter, who in turn lost his re-election bid to Roanld Reagan largely on a major hostage crisis of his own involving the U.S. embassy staff in Tehran kidnapped and held for over a year by forces aligned with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Wind and the Lion would be a completely unmemorable movie were it not for its interesting effect on real-life American politics.