The Wind and the Lion (1975) is a magnificent spectacle—a specifically American prequel to Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a celebration of robustness, with Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith) posited as the counterpart of a sagacious, honorable Arab (Sean Connery), who defies the European-bought sultan of Morocco and kidnaps a tough-cookie American widow (Candace Bergen). Bergen seems phony during an execution scene, but, otherwise, the performances are spot-on. John Huston, as an aide to Roosevelt, seems as if he were wrested straight from the period.All that I really wish to take exception to here is the film’s American exceptionalism: Were our motives really that much nobler than the French and Germans, established powers whose only concern, apparently, was money? I love me some T.R., who certainly was a complex and honorable man, but I can’t accept that, just because we were (and are) a comparatively young country, our intentions and aspirations to power were somehow purer. The President invokes God at the end—an intended parallel, certainly, to Connery’s character’s belief that he’s merely a vessel of the will of Allah—but there’s a level of stickiness that John Milius, a political conservative, probably didn’t want to mop clean. And yet, there’s an undeniable allure in robust politicians—something that seems so emetic post-Bush, and yet something that movie gets at in an honest, powerful way. It’s difficult to watch movies set during the so-called Springtime for Europe (and big-stick America) because it inspires such contradictory drives: those of the beauty in strength and adulation of courage, the assuredness of divine right, and the disgusting repercussions of unchecked power, of the inhumanity that naturally sprouts out of arrogance. As Adam Gopnik pointed out, viz Paul Gauguin, courage is the most ambiguous of virtues. The Wind and the Lion, despite the concomitant ambiguity, makes you feel the power of power in your very core.
