This film gave Sean the chance to show his abilities more expansively when
he was cast opposite Candice Bergen in this film from director John Milius. He was cast as a nomadic Arab cheiftan
El Raisuli, and despite praying to Allah several times a day kept his dulcet scottish tones. This film was loosely
based upon an incident soon after the turn of the century, when an American business man was kidnapped, this turned
into Candice along with her two children and they were taken by a Berber tribe led by Sean. The whole thing is
rather far fetched, but compulsive viewing none the less.
The flamboyance of the writer-director, John Milius, is initially startling; this film opens
with such a flourish and bang that the viewer may really expect a beautiful, old-fashioned swords-in-the-desert
epic. However, when the actors begin to talk (which they do incessantly), the flat-footed dialogue and the amateurish
acting take one back to the low-budget buffoonery of Maria Montez and Turhan Bey. Milius doesn't seem to be a very
gifted storyteller: he lets the actors toss away the information that the audience needs to make sense of the action,
and people are killed so arbitrarily that the whole epic seems dissociated. The plot involves Brian Keith as Theodore
Roosevelt. With John Huston as John Hay. Cinematography by Billy Williams. MGM; released by United Artists.
