Of Patusans & Platitudes

Lord Jim is the story of a blue-eyed, boyish sailor whose dreams of glory are lost at sea. Joseph Conrad's intricate turn-of-the-century novel expands a solitary act of cowardice into a moot question about every man's moral identity. As chief mate of the Patna, a leaky old steamer with some 800 Moslem pilgrims aboard, Jim joins his panicky crew in abandoning ship at the threat of a gale, only to meet disgrace when the doomed tub rides it out unattended. Thereafter Conrad's hero drags the ghost of his honor through many perils to ultimate redemption in death.

In this long, foolhardy movie version of the book, Writer-Director Richard Brooks (Elmer Gantry) introduces Jim (Peter O'Toole) as a rather winsome, late Victorian Walter Mitty. A grand kid, but accident-prone. On a giant split screen, Jim visualizes such wild exploits as saving his captain from buccaneers. And the audience is warned by this literalism that Writer Brooks in tends to steer through Conrad's prose with stopovers in all the wrong places.

The rest of the movie, filmed in Hong Kong and at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, offers picturesque backdrops as a substitute for the subtle erosion of character. After the Patna scandal, Jim works as a coolie and coal heaver. In the Malay Archipelago, he saves a boatload of burning explosives, ferries them upriver to help the natives of the fictional land of Patusan, who are fighting a tyrant general (Eli Wallach, aping Fu Manchu). Victorious, Jim settles down with a dusky girl (Daliah Lavi), then has to dispose of villains who plan to sack the village treasury.

Such adventures might rival an old Tarzan serial, except for old Conrad's pesky profundity. Occasionally, Brooks backtracks to gather up a few platitudes about fate, courage and honor, and asks his actors to breathe life into them. The burden falls to O'Toole, whose best lines are in his clean-cut profile and whose mannerisms parody his flashy style in Lawrence of Arabia and Becket. Each time his manhood is tested, O'Toole's eyes fill with tears and a hand drifts to his throat as if to ward off a fainting spell. Everything he does looks intensely talented. But it hardly ever looks like Lord Jim.

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