The film distorted a gentlemanly real captor into a savage monster
Evidence
Filmic Barbary monsters are numerous, and include the 1975 Sean Connery-Candice Bergen movie The Wind and the Lion. The film is loosely based on the 1904 kidnapping of Jon Perdicaris and his father-inlaw, Cromwell Varley, who, when released by their captor, described their lodgings to the New York Times as “Mr. Perdicaris’s Summer Home.” Their captor Raisuli was described as “a tribal gentleman of the old school, lodging his captives in a magnificent tent and dining with them each evening.” In the film, these details are transformed, starting with “the balding businessman Joe Perdicaris,” who “is transmogrified into a nubile Candice Bergen.” The captor (played by Sean Connery) beheads people with a smile and a wink while uttering Arabic phrases like “Bismillah.” Even though he does not rape or murder the Perdicaris family—a widow and her two innocent children all dressed in white—the threat is ever present. Bergen’s character’s white virginal dress, juxtaposed to her captor’s dark skin and clothing, is an example of the “chromatic sexual hierarchy” utilized in many films, in which the “white woman is desired” and is “made captive and virtually raped.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 593
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- QUESTION: The real Raisuli’s courtliness directly contradicts the film’s savage caricature — how common was this pattern of the historical record being inverted to manufacture the monster?
- CANDY: A real kidnapping victim described his captivity at a ‘summer home’ with a ‘tribal gentleman’ dining nightly — and Hollywood turned him into a nubile ingenue. Great conversation fact.
- SHARE: Worth sending to anyone interested in orientalism in cinema — the ‘chromatic sexual hierarchy’ device where white virginal dress is juxtaposed to dark captor skin recurs across decades of film.
- XREF: The ‘chromatic sexual hierarchy’ ties into the earlier theme of the monster as a vehicle for projected sexual anxieties about the white woman in captivity.