JÜRGEN MARTINI
The Little White Ship
HIS IS FOR GEOFF, in fond recollection of a symposium in Erlangen decades ago. You listened to my customarily untidy thoughts and T nodded your appreciation (as I have appreciated yours over all these years). Here they are, then. With a minimum of tidying up.
Edgar Wallace and film: the most movie adaptations of any writer.
Highbrow literature treated the British Empire with scepticism bordering on hostility. The Empire and imperialist attitudes were judged to be hollow, re- pressive, hypocritical. For the population at large, the Empire continued to be important: it served as a mythic landscape for romance and adventure. To read the epic of Empire was to experience excitement and stimulation in their purest form.
That Zoltan Korda movie from 19351 – quintessential action, not emotion; action that concerns the Empire, not Britain. The myth of Empire serves as the vehicle for excitement, adventure, the fulfilment of longing and desire.
A world of men in which love, passion, women play a wholly subordinate role.
A Boy’s Own yarn.
1 Sanders of the River (dir. Zoltan Korda; starring Paul Robeson, Leslie Banks, and Nina Mae McKinney; London Film Productions, UK 1935, 98 min.). 36 JÜRGEN MARTINI
Wallace and Korda’s movie: it is no longer the claiming of Empire that’s the issue, but its administration. Central themes are governance and the defence of what was conquered/acquired.
Important concepts: character, attitude. Justification is sought for the Empire: it is morally superior; the superior Brit- ish emerge as a mixture of gentlemanly behaviour and the maintenance of an ostensibly disinterested system of law, order, and justice. This generates the oft-described illusion that the Empire will never die.
Sanders as symbol: a pipe-smoker, full of good humour (towards Africans and Europeans alike). Someone to look up to. Singlehandedly, he brings peace and order, through sheer force of personality, or almost.
Simplified images, simplified situations; an excess of simplicity. The myth of the superman in its human variant: something, it would seem, attainable by anybody and everybody.
The Sunday Times on the film: it reveals “a sympathy with our ideals of colo- nial administration, giving us a grand insight into our special English difficul- ties in the governing of savage races, and providing us with a documentary film of East African nature in its raw state, a picture which could not be im- proved upon for the respect it displays to British sensibilities and ambitions.”2
Wheeler Winston Dixon characterizes Wallace’s narratives as providing a blueprint for the ideology of ‘divide and rule’, which, in his tales, is juxta- posed with the consolidation and observance of the law.3
The man on the spot, the man who knows what to do about restrictive laws that don’t suit the situation, or about the interference of politicians.
2 Sydney Carroll, Sunday Times (7 April 1935), quoted in Jeffrey Richards, “Boy’s Own Empire: Feature Films and Imperialism in the 1930s,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986): 152; also quoted in Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards, “The Sun Never Sets: Sanders of the River,” in Aldgate & Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (1999; London: I.B. Tauris, 2002): 32–33. 3 Wheeler Winston Dixon, “The Colonial Vision of Edgar Wallace,” Journal of Popular Culture 32.1 (Summer 1998): 121–39.