The Wind and the Lion

John Milius took the 1904 Perdicaris affair and reshaped it almost past recognition. The person actually kidnapped in Morocco by the Berber chieftain Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli was a man of sixty-six; Milius turned him into a woman with two children, Eden Pedecaris, played by Candice Bergen. He also shifted the date of the abduction by several months so it would fall closer to the presidential election. Both changes are deliberate, because his subject is not documentary accuracy but two men recognising each other from a great distance: Raisuli, played by Sean Connery, and Theodore Roosevelt, played by Brian Keith. They never meet on screen, yet each sees in the other the closing of his own era. Jerry Goldsmith's score is the element most people carry away. Seen now, the film's strangest quality is its foresight. In 1975, well ahead of the crises that would follow, it laid out how the seizure of an American citizen abroad becomes raw material for domestic politics. Who it is for: admirers of old-fashioned adventure cinema and of Milius's romantic idea of heroism. Who it is not for: viewers who want historical fidelity, or who bristle at the East rendered as a Western fantasy.