The Wind and the Lion **** (1975, Sean Connery, Candice Bergen, Brian Keith) – Classic Film Review 1400

Writer-director John Milius’s lusty and violent 1975 semi-historical adventure movie stars Edinburgh-born Sean Connery, who triumphs over a highly strange idea of casting him as Arab chieftain Mulai Ahmed Mohammed er-Raisuli the Magnificent.

The Berber brigand abducts an American widow, Eden Perdicaris (Candice Bergen) and her two children in Morocco. This causes a diplomatic crisis involving the US president, Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith), who sends an armed invasion and rescue mission to Morocco.

Writer-director Milius creates an exciting traditional adventure, spiced with romance and Seventies-style trimmings, based on a real event. Connery is great, making a dashing hero, and Keith is perfect as Roosevelt.

It makes for a fine, exciting, great-looking film, but don’t look to it for historical facts. Milius’s screenplay freely mashes historical facts up into a fictional adventure but it is based on the real-life Perdicaris incident of 1904, which involved the kidnapping of middle-aged father Ion Perdicaris and his stepson Cromwell Varley, who were unharmed when Roosevelt sent the South Atlantic Squadron to Morocco.

Filming was in Spain, with Seville, Almeria and Madrid doubling for Tangier and Fez, and the Washington scenes shot in Madrid. For the deserts of Morocco, they used many locations in the Almeria region, which are also seen in epics such as Lawrence of Arabia and El Cid, as well as the Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns. The US Marines’ assault on Tangier was filmed over several weeks. Parts of it were filmed in Almeria and Seville, so the Spanish soldiers used were rarely from the same company as in the other sequences.

John Huston, Geoffrey Lewis, Steve Kanaly, Vladek Sheybal, Nadim Sawalha and Roy Jenson are also in the cast.

Milius found Connery ‘sour and dour’ to work with but greatly admired his performance, and felt Bergen’s range was extremely limited and that she was concerned only with looking good.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1400

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/