Cinema: A Bad Good Deed

Guns of Darkness. Dreary is the word for Tom and Claire. The one (David Niven) is a mother’s boy who wants everything his own way, and when he can’t have it he sulks and drinks and insults everybody in sight. The other (Leslie Caron) is a loyal, long-suffering, sweet little wife who is pitied by everybody—especially herself. Dreary little people in a dreary little manana republic; sick of the heat, sick of the natives, sick of themselves; each blaming the other for the mess they are in, both too weak and lazy to clean up or clear out.

Life suddenly proposes a desperate remedy. A general overthrows the republic.

Wounded, the President (David Opato-shu) escapes, collapses by chance at the couple’s quinta. Niven finds him, recognizes his face. The situation is sticky indeed. To help the man is little short of suicide, but to turn him in is murder.

Impulsively, Niven puts wife and President in his ranch wagon, makes tracks for the border.

Up to this point. Guns of Darkness is just one more tropicalamity with a sounds-great-if-you-don’t-think-about-it title, tame performances by all concerned, and direction (by Britain’s Anthony Asquith) that does nothing to set the tame on fire. But from this point forward, thanks principally to an intricately reflective script by a young British playwright named John Mortimer, the film rapidly matures into a philosophical thriller of startling moral insight.

For about five minutes the getaway car rolls smoothly along the well-worn rut that cinema escapes almost invariably follow. But all at once the rut disappears and the signposts start to get confusing.

For one thing, the hero’s heroism looks less heroic every minute. No doubt he was moved by a generous impulse when he offered to rescue the President; but he was also moved by a merely conventional sympathy for the underdog, by a sentimental horror of violence, by a hysterical temptation to escape from his miserable self. What’s more, an admirable act has not made him admirable; he is still silly and incompetent, and when he isn’t barking at her mechanically he still wriggles with lap-dogged devotion for the bitch he is tied to.

And then there is the President. In the early scenes he seems a Latin Lincoln.

But as the story develops he develops into a conspicuously compromised politician who does not hesitate to use an evil means for what he assumes to be a good end: self-preservation. At one point the President coldly starts to strangle a small boy who has recognized him. “Hundreds will be shot if I do not escape,” he explains. “What is one life against so many?” Bewildered in the mazes of moral choice that inescapably invest a man who tries to do a good deed in a naughty world, the hero kills a comparatively innocent soldier in order to save the comparatively guilty President. As the film ends, he is wondering how he is going to live with his crime—a crime that turns out to have been unnecessary. Just across the border the President dies.