Bully

By JAY COCKS

THE WIND AND THE LION

Directed and Written by JOHN MILIUS

Raisuli, Sherif of the Berbers ("The blood of the prophets flows in me") kidnaps a beautiful American woman, Eden Pedecaris ("He is a brigand and a lout") and sweeps her off to his castle in the desert. President Theodore Roosevelt is outraged ("Arabian thief! I want respect!"), and the U.S. Government dispatches an ultimatum to the powers in Morocco: "Mrs. Pedecaris alive, or Raisuli dead." There follow fights, betrayals, skirmishes, duels, U.S. Marine action and a couple of full-fledged battles. Nothing much like it ever happened in history, but it makes for a lovely adventure.

Childhood Reveries. The Wind and the Lion is the sort of movie that no one is supposed to make any more. The secret is, however, that no one ever did. A great part of its huge, shambling appeal is that The Wind and the Lion is made not in reverence for old movies but rather from a romantic distortion of them. Everything is outsized, scaled even larger than the heroics in Gunga Din or Beau Geste: soldiers are still braver, sheiks more dashing, the heroine more spiritual and loving.

There is an ingenuous charm at work here, the quality of a daydream. All the characters are creatures of the best reveries of childhood. This does not mean that they should be taken lightly. Writer-Director Milius has some distance on his dreams, but he is still absolutely devoted to them. The Wind and the Lion has a view of the glories of combat and courage that is both willful and wistful. All enemies are united in a common bond of honor. Blood shed is never ignoble, always ennobling, and adversaries fight with grace and mutual respect. The movie even has enough bluff and crust to look, at least superficially, like a real military romance, even a plea for manifest destiny. These notions are not being advanced as political theory but as the sort of antique sentiments that keep the movie true to its storybook sources. The glory, Milius knows, was mostly a dream. It is this knowledge that tinges the film with melancholy and also helps animate the battle scenes, which are among the most spectacular and vigorous in recent years.

Sean Connery, who has become a superb film actor, makes a dashing, funny Raisuli. Brian Keith conjures up a definitive T.R., strong and canny, with an edge of sadness and a real, rough dignity. One of the major surprises is Candice Bergen as Mrs. Pedecaris. Never the most comfortable of actresses, Bergen quickly falls in with the movie's congenial braggadocio and gives a performance that is wry and clever. She may not be quite the sort of woman for whom, as the ads say, "half the world may go to war," but she is good for at least a couple of hand-to-hand combats.

Writer-Director Milius may be good for even more if this movie is a fair indication. A screenwriter (The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean) whose only previous feature was the routine and derivative Dillinger (1973), Milius makes considerable--indeed, amazing-- progress here. It has been a long time since Hollywood has produced an adventure as sumptuous as The Wind and the Lion or a fantasy as rich.

--Jay Cocks

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