MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON
With Patrick Bergin, Iain Glen, Richard E. Grant, and Fiona Shaw
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Yet our hero teeters between two antagonistic cultures: between industrial civilization and the vast romantic wilderness where he enjoys a less cramped life-style. Sooner or later, though, a trickle and then a horde of bureaucrats and speculators will travel the very trails that the intrepid explorer blazed to escape them. In a devilishly ironic way, the great white hunter figure is an imperialist stooge. Another pitfall these fellows face in technologically inferior lands is the onset of egomaniacal madness. In various guises and locales (other than “great white hunter” in sub-Saharan “Africa”) filmmakers flush out over and over the cruel internal conflicts undergone by the protagonists of Lawrence of Arabia, The Man Who Would Be King, The Mosquito Coast, and even by the tormented Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now.
The expedition is decimated in a night attack. Burton is speared through the face; Speke, wounded, barely escapes with his genitalia intact. They recuperate in England. Apart from translating erotic Eastern literature and scraping together funds for another go at the source of the Nile, Burton woos and weds the formidably feminine Isabel (Fiona Shaw) while Speke is befriended by Oliphant, an unctuous and unscrupulous publisher (Richard E. Grant in a reprise of his How to Get Ahead in Advertising demeanor). Soon Burton and Speke resume the search.
