Zulu Dawn Review – Great cast showcases the hubris that led to the disaster of a British empire | film

THis 1979 film is a solid prequel to the hit Zulu 15 years earlier, a brutal bloodbath that featured lively performances from Stanley Baker and Michael Caine. It was about the Battle of Rourke’s Drift between the British Army and the Zulu tribes. Zulu Dawn revolves around the catastrophic defeat that preceded it: the Battle of Isandlwana. The fight scenes are impressively staged, but almost the entire film feels like a second-unit director’s sequence, and the fight itself is an over-extended, stylized B-roll with none of the internal drama, confrontation, and light and shadow that made Zulu so powerful.

Dawn of Zulu was greeted at the time with almost indifferent derision, although it did inspire a bizarre urban legend that a scene showing a British soldier being gruesomely murdered by three spears to the neck, one after the other – was supposedly greeted in cinemas up and down the country with joyful cries of “one hundred and eighty”. (Unfortunately, there is no such scene.)

To begin with, Zulu Dawn has a fair amount of clever, well-directed scenes that show us an arrogant (if not incompetent) officer class, and the promise of highly flavored performances from its star-studded cast. Peter O’Toole is the arrogant Lieutenant-General Lord Chelmsford. Burt Lancaster is the experienced and disillusioned Colonel Durnford, and Denholm Elliott – his natural face in that distinctive grimace of repressed fear – is Colonel Boleyn; Nigel Davenport is the highly respected Colonel Hamilton Brown who refuses to eat at Chelmsford’s lavish table until his men are fed. Simon Ward is the dapper adventurer Lieutenant Vereker who finally “rescues” the British colors from falling into enemy hands; And John Mills is the colonial administrator Sir Henry Bartle Frere. On the Zulu side, King Cetshwayo is played by South African actor Simon Sabella (Sabella was a Zulu soldier).

There’s a very good scene at the beginning, showing a party in the garrison’s garden, posing ladies and moustachioed officers and gentlemen, completely unconcerned with the way their commanders are provoking an unnecessary war with the Zulus to expand their territory and eliminate the perceived threat. “This will be the ultimate solution to the Zulu problem,” says one of them. Anna Calder-Marshall plays a poignant role as the bishop’s daughter to whom Durnford has a courage. Tendresse.

And then… well, then, Zulu Dawn thrusts its viewer into action, though almost the entire film could be spent waiting for something specific to happen, some crucial drama to come to the fore and in which the leading individuals reveal something about themselves. This doesn’t really happen. The British were defeated at the Battle of Isandlwana because, despite the superior firepower of modern weapons, they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and ammunition was limited. As one terrified soldier says: “We’re running out of bullets, but we’re not running out of spears.” The Brits lost, but in terms of the competition between interest and boredom, it’s a draw.