Comedians The (1967)

This drama produced and directed by Peter Glenville (Becket (1964)) and written by Graham Greene (The Fallen Idol (1948)) takes far too long to make its point that in life everyone’s an actor playing a part everyone’s a fraud when held up to the light etc.. Halfway through the film it starts to look somewhat like Casablanca (1942) with Richard Burton in the Humphrey Bogart role. Later references are made – ironically by Alec Guinness’s character – to Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Objective Burma! (1945) and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934). It’s safe to say that most will not get a true appreciation of this premise – and instead only experience the horror of living in a place such as the film’s setting – unless one watches it all the way to the end which is a tall task to be sure for it is definitely distastefully (if somewhat unnecessarily) bloody and hopeless in parts and certainly overlong at more than 2 1/2 hours.

Billed as a Burton-(Elizabeth) Taylor vehicle and utilizing ridiculously simple Anglo names (Brown Smith and Jones) the story is set in Haiti during “Papa Doc” Francois Duvalier’s corrupt dictatorial rule and his secret police Tontons are never far from the action or the others’ thoughts. Burton plays Brown a Britisher who runs a local hotel his mother used to own (like Bogie he’s reluctant to get involved in politics until he’s more or less forced into it in the end). Taylor plays the German wife of a South African ambassador played by Peter Ustinov. Her father had been tried and executed as a Nazi after the Nuremberg trials for “just following orders”. Her character has a limited purpose in the movie (other than titillation?); she’s having an affair with Brown. Guinness plays a Major Jones who claims to have fought valiantly against the Japanese in Burma during World War II and now purports to be an arms dealer hoping to do business with the current regime (until his partner in Miami screws up). Phil Ford and Lillian Gish play Mr. & Mrs. Smith who are entrepreneur vegetable vendors looking to establish a vegetarian restaurant et al in the country; he’s a former Presidential candidate who’d run and lost to Truman in 1948. Gish might play the only genuine character in the film which perhaps accounts for her ability to scare away some of Duvalier’s thugs – like Zakes Mokae and his captain (Raymond St. Jacques) – later in the story. Georg Stanford Brown plays a painter who rebels against the dictator by attempting to be a leader of similar men who have no experience with guns. Roscoe Lee Browne is the country’s phony greeter; he tries to give the impression that Haiti is an island paradise ripe for commerce which he clearly wishes it was. James Earl Jones plays a doctor that’s part of the rebellion but his character is not particularly well developed before he’s murdered. Cicely Tyson appears only very briefly with no more than a couple of lines; she plays a Port-au-Prince prostitute!

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