Many adventure films reflect a boy’s conflict over competition with his father and its genital overtones, often reflected in swordplay and marksmanship, but few so wonderfully, with both drama and humor, as the 1939 Zoltan Korda movie, The Four Feathers.
I was reminded of this old favorite by a patient in therapy. He is an army veteran, an unhappy man who was describing his feeling of dissatisfaction with himself because he was not in active combat even though that was simply a matter of timing and no fault of his own. His father, grandfather, and possibly great grandfather had been in World War II, I, and who knows. My first cinematic thought went to Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump who felt he had missed his destiny by not being killed in battle like all his forefathers. But then my thoughts naturally flowed to The Four Feathers, a ridiculous, but charming old film about a boy who was awed by his military ancestors.
The film begins with a scene that reminded me of “Totem and Taboo”, in which Freud envisions a horde of caveman brothers rebelling against and killing their tyrannical father. In the film, we see the “rebellious army of cruel Dervishes” overwhelming the garrison at Khartoum. Superimposed amongst the oncoming Dervishes we see Khartoum’s “brave commander, General Gordon” standing, holding a bible. A spear is thrust into his chest and a newspaper account reports his “murder.” General Gordon is clearly a paternal figure struck down by a horde of rebellious subjects who are driven by pure, uncontrolled aggression. As the music calms, the scene shifts to the quiet English countryside. In the ensuing scene, the violence will be described and felt, but not acted on and the inter-generational violence is reversed.
General Faversham is hosting a reunion of his old army buddies from the Crimea. The first to arrive is the company doctor, Dr. Sutton. He gives General Faversham the news that Gordon has been murdered. The old general says he has been expecting it. Gordon “wasn’t hard enough.” He yells out the word. They both agree that this would not have happened if there had been a Faversham in the army, but “I’m too old and the boy’s too young.” He then confides to the doctor that he is worried about “the boy.” “He’s 15 years old today. … I can’t understand the boy. I send him to the best army school in England, spend half me time telling him about his famous ancestors, and what do you think? I found him this morning reading a poetry book—Shelley of all people! So I want you to help me lick this boy into shape, make him hard.”
Harry Faversham is a slight and handsome boy who looks overwhelmed in the presence of the old war horses at dinner. Old General Burroughs begins to talk about the Crimea, “War was war in those days, and men were men, no room for weaklings.” He demonstrates how he led the charge at Balaclava, using fruit and wine from the table. The Russians are lined up as a series of walnuts, “guns, guns, guns.” The British infantry is a streak of wine, “the thin red line.” The Commander is a tomato. “And here was I,” he proclaims, putting a large pineapple down between the Russian walnuts and the British wine. “I saw the position in a flash. The 68th had to move forward.” A shaken subaltern told him that he was afraid to face those guns. “I said, ‘would you rather face me?’ Ten minutes later he was shot to pieces at the head of his men, as a soldier should be.” At this point, General Faversham and General Burroughs trade stories about soldiers from fine old families who betrayed their heritage through fear in battle. One had a Cossack’s lance go through the back of his neck and come out his throat. Another disgraced his family, “his father disowned him,” says General Faversham, and he ended up blowing his brains out with a pistol. He looks pointedly at Harry as he is talking, and ends by saying, “There’s no place in England for a coward.” Before Harry heads off to bed, General Burroughs leads them all in a birthday toast to him, “and may he prove the bravest of the Favershams.” Harry leaves the dinner, walking through a dark, high-ceilinged room adorned with the portraits of his military ancestors. Only the old doctor appears to be empathic. He follows Harry, and gives him a kind word and his card, should he ever need his help.
Thus, we have set up in Harry Faversham’s childhood the male side of the Oedipus complex. Here is a little boy faced with the larger than life feats of grown men, made larger by their tales of combat. They are threatening and frightening both as antagonists and as role models. What is more, they are narcissistically invested in their own grandeur and uncaring for the small boy in their midst. They encourage him to meet their standards, but they are insensitive to his feelings of awe and fear, preferring to support their own narcissistic needs by making him feel afraid and inadequate beside them. Only the doctor is secure enough in himself not to use the boy as a foil. In his sensitivity to the boy, he also accepts his own awareness of fear and weakness.
Harry’s father displays his open ambivalence towards his son. His attitude is not merely murderous. The descriptions of death and mutilation show a barely contained aggression, but he also does wish for the boy to be strong as a narcissistic extension of himself and his “ideal self.” We can easily sense that he combines this narcissistic need with his death wishes towards his son in a fantasy in which the boy dies a gallant death. John Munder Ross has written about the “Laius Complex”, a complement to the Oedipus complex, which describes the father’s rivalry and even unconscious death wishes towards his son.
General Faversham clearly sees masculine strength as coming from overcoming fear. In psychoanalytic terms, we might say that masculinity is insured by enduring the dangers of death and castration. Men are survivors and those who died trying. Interestingly, Harry has no mother. She has presumably died and is mentioned only in passing. Her surrogate in the film is Dr. Sutton, who tells the young Harry that she was his friend. My patient had a mother, but she was described as having been abusive, unsupportive, and unmotherly.
We have all the makings of a good Oedipal tale, and although much of the action and stylized acting makes us laugh, we shall not be disappointed. In these opening scenes, we see intense inter-generational warfare, presented in two parts. In the first, the father figure, General Gordon, is outwardly passive and helpless, and the rebellious adolescents, represented by the Dervishes, are actively murderous. In the second part, the son is outwardly passive and helpless. We can only guess at the aggression he feels or represses towards his father. The father expresses murderous wishes. When the doctor attempts to defend the young man who shot himself over his disgrace by saying that he showed courage by shooting himself, General Faversham says that that was just the only decent thing left to do.
We next see Harry Faversham ten years later as a young British soldier with a bad case of adenoids. (This mysterious ailment, marked by an extreme nasality to his speech, especially when he recites the name of his fiancee, Ethne, is never addressed directly in the film.) Ethne is the daughter of General Burroughs, the pineapple, and the sister of one of Harry’s three close friends in the regiment. Harry wins his suit for Ethne over another of that foursome, his gallant rival, John Durrance, played by a young Ralph Richardson. John acknowledges his hurt, but is gracious and gallant in a manner that seems terribly British. But Harry’s rivalries are not only intra-generational. He must also contend with Ethne’s father, the old general, and with the ghost of his own father, who has died one year earlier. At this point, Harry appears to have won an easy victory, with the approval of all concerned, but the plot takes a twist.
The regiment is about to be called up to fight in the Sudan as part of the Kitchener campaign against the Dervishes and Fuzzy Wuzzies (religiously fanatic Arabs and curly-haired pygmies) who had defeated General Gordon. All of the men are thrilled as if about to take on a sporting challenge, except for Harry. He abruptly resigns his commission, telling his shocked and outraged superior officer that he had only taken the commission for his father’s sake, “but when he died, my duty towards him was done.” There is a truly subtle flash of anger in Harry’s eyes when his officer says, “I never thought I should live to see a Faversham play the coward.”
Harry’s explanation to Ethne contains open rebellion against his father and his ancestors. He tells Ethne that they had long planned to settle down in civilian life. He speaks of the generations of destruction to the family property and the tenants who live on it caused by the neglect of Favershams who chose instead to go to foreign wars. This would be a telling argument in The Americanization of Emily in 1964, but in this film, produced in 1939 at the brink of World War II, it could not carry Harry to victory. His three friends accuse him of cowardice, each sending him his calling card with a feather. Ethne’s father will not look at him. Even Ethne does not understand. Seeing her disappointment in him, Harry pulls a large feather from a convenient ostrich plume (I’ve always wondered whether this was a handy adornment or a fancy feather duster) and joins it with the others as Ethne’s statement of his cowardice.
What is Harry’s motivation? We can easily sympathize with his desire to break with a bloody tradition and even see it as quite heroic in its time. But the childhood scene tells us that indeed Harry is frightened and in awe of his ancestors. He fears, on the one hand, death and mutilation and, on the other, failure and humiliation. In the terms of the film in which poor Harry lives, he can achieve Oedipal victory and victory over his ancestors only by fighting and fighting heroically. Like my patient, even being there would not be enough. He must answer the challenge of the narcissistic old men and the admiring daughter. He must defeat the old general on his own terms.
He is also driven by another ideal, more primitive and less conscious than the one he espouses to Ethne. It comes from family tradition. A good part of our ego ideal, our ideal vision for ourselves, comes from an idealization of parents and their ideals. Ancestors are commonly present as a component of the ego ideal that comes from the parent’s ego ideal (“He takes after his grandfather”). For the parent, this may have been an ambivalent relationship. Sometimes we cover over our anger or disappointment with a deceased relative or other powerful figure by idealizing them in memory. (In fact, we might say that Marc Antony had it exactly wrong, that the good men do lives after them and the evil is interred with their bones.) In some cases, children are consciously chosen to live up to the ideal of a deceased parent or grandparent. For my patient, his military forbearers were much grander than the family he knew. Even his father, who was alive during his growing up, was split between the image of the war hero and the less than adequate civilian. Harry Faversham fears his military ancestors, but is clearly obliged, both in his own presumed unconscious and in the dynamics of the film, to attempt to meet their standards of courage and behavior.
In fact, Harry’s conflict is brought into consciousness by the accusation of his friends. In a chance meeting with Dr. Sutton, he explains that his decision was born out of “cowardice.” He reminds the doctor of the story he had heard about the young man from a military family who had killed himself after disgracing his family with cowardice on the battlefield. He leaves out the other stories of death and mutilation on the battlefield. He says that he had tried to escape a similar fate, certain that he would be unable to meet his father’s standards of courage in war.
Apparently, he had hoped to avoid the needed test of courage to confirm his manhood and satisfy his partly foreign ego ideal. There are times when external support, particularly when given by highly valued people, can help overcome an unwieldy aspect of conscience or ideals. We are left to wonder if Harry’s ploy would have worked if his friends, and particularly Ethne, had accepted his reasons for resigning his commission. In fact, Ethne speaks up for tradition. Her stance is a passive one. She does not argue that the values of their fathers are correct, only that they must be followed regardless. Perhaps this is why Harry does not have a mother. In fact, Ethne has no mother, either. It would be difficult to include a mother who encourages her son to go to war. She would be expected to be in conflict with the filicidal fantasies of the father. In her place is the sympathetic Dr. Sutton, who despite his maternal role in the film has earned his place in the world of men. He can bridge the gender gap. This is a film about male fantasy. Women are used as a means to an end, to provide children—General Faversham blames himself for the absence of a Faversham in the army because he married so late—and as the prize for victory in male competition.
Having failed to bypass or overcome his ego ideal, Harry finds that he cannot live with his guilt and shame. He now must pass the test in order to return the four feathers. In the mythology of the film, which is clearly understood by the audience, this is not merely a necessity, but also an opportunity. By giving back the four feathers, Harry can solidify his masculinity and his self esteem. In doing so, he symbolically reinforces the self esteem of the men and boys in the audience (some of whom were about to go to war in 1939).
Harry follows the regiment to the Sudan. At this point, he adopts a technique very common to boys who fear castration. He simulates a symbolic castration in which another part of the body stands for the penis and the injury is only feigned. (No, he doesn’t go to the Sudan in drag.) He has himself disguised as a member of a strange sect who had rebelled against the Khalifa, leader of the Dervishes, and had been punished by being branded and having their tongues cut out. Harry does not actually have his tongue cut out, but he does endure a painful branding with a mark of the sect, symbolizing his mock castration and his survival of the ordeal. The Egyptian doctor who performs the branding calls him a brave man, bringing a momentary smile to Harry’s face. By identifying with this group, the Sengali, Harry feigns receiving the punishing castration for rebelling against his father. In fact, partial or feigned castration is often a symbol of masculine toughness and the indestructibility of the genitals, as for instance in the “Hathaway man” or the ferocious pirate with one eye patch. By adopting this mute role, Harry saves himself discovery through his British accent (and also temporarily solves his adenoid problem).
This film is known as an action/adventure film. In fact, most of the film does not involve action. Many good action films are marked not by the amount of action, but by the dependence on plot and the reliance on action to move the plot. Most of the tension and drama in this film is not achieved in action, but in dialogue. The action gives meaning to the dialogue. The action that now follows is all designed to give Harry Faversham the opportunity to prove his courage and his willingness to endure pain, rescue his friends, and give back the feathers.
In the process, John Durrance, his rival for Ethne, becomes blinded by sunstroke. This puts him into an intermediary category of courage and bravery. He has endured the hardship, pain, and symbolic castration of war, but the damage did not come in direct combat. (That was my patient’s complaint.) Gallant as he is, there are three factors that force him to lose in his pursuit of Ethne: The first is his blindness, which makes him dependent. The second is his failure to demonstrate as much courage as his rival, Harry. The third, and perhaps most important, is that he is rescued by Harry. In the mythology of this film and the culture it represents, it is masculine to rescue and feminine to be rescued. When he finally realizes that the mysterious Arab who has saved him by leading him across the desert to safety was really Harry Faversham returning his feather, he has no choice but to step aside in his pursuit of Ethne. In fact, the message of the film is that although it is brave to endure castration in some form, it is better to survive the attempted castration with everything intact. In the trek through the desert, one man is feigning muteness and the absence of a tongue, but the other has actually and permanently lost the use of his eyes.
Needless to say, after enduring much pain and danger, Harry cleverly and bravely saves his other two friends, Peter Burroughs and Willoughby, and in doing so turns the battle of Omduran into an overwhelming British victory and total defeat of the Dervishes. But all of that makes for a good adventure story with a moving plot and no more. It is the final scene that has made this film special for me.
Once again there is a festive gathering, perhaps to celebrate the victory and homecoming. General Burroughs congratulates Harry on returning the feathers to John, Peter, and Willoughby. Coyly, with laughter, Ethne reminds him that there is one remaining feather. She asks what daring deed he will do to return her feather. At this point, the old General begins his tale of Balaclava. “War was war in those days, and men were men.” This is actually the third time that he has begun the recitation in the film. Harry interrupts him. He sets out the pieces, walnuts, wine, an apple for the commander, and the large pineapple for General Burroughs. He says that this is all as it happened. “But you never gave the order to move forward.” He explains that his father had told him that the general was riding a high-spirited horse, named Caesar, that General Faversham had given him because of the horse’s lack of control. In fact, it was the horse who led the charge. “Off went the horse, off went you, off went the regiment, off went the commander.” He forces the old man to admit that he never gave the order. General Burroughs says, “I’ll never be able to tell that story again,” and Harry hands Ethne her feather.
This scene completes the cycle. The frightened boy who could not face his father is now a fully accomplished man who can speak up at the table with the old warhorses (much as the young men in 1939 must have hoped they would be able to return triumphant and shut up the old codgers with their stories from “the Great War”). It should be noted that despite his bluster, General Burroughs is a warmer, kinder man than Harry’s father. Clearly, a victory over the angrier General Faversham would have been far less pleasant and unambivalent.
The film is a fantasy. My own experience with men who felt they could never meet the ideals of their castrating fathers is that they were right. Like my patient, they never achieve the satisfaction of victory accomplished by Harry Faversham. I suspect that there are some who died trying. But I would hate to think that most of the film’s viewers had fathers who so openly wanted to send them off to a glorious death. In fact, I would think that some of those who did have such fathers might find the film more distressing than enjoyable. What is the general appeal of the film?
My own father was never in direct combat, and he made it clear to me that he was glad that he did not have to go through that. He certainly did not want me to go to war. He was a very early opponent of the Vietnam War because he did not want to see young men die needlessly. But he was a soldier during World War II. He wore a uniform, drove a motorcycle and a jeep, saw a pillar land on his vacated chair during a V2 missile attack, and stood his ground in a pub fight. The point is that even with the best of fathers, there is still a big pineapple on the table.
This will be the first of a short series on films that reflect themes of Oedipal conflict and superego issues to be posted over the next few months.
Published in slightly different form in the PANY Bulletin and in Double Feature; Discovering Our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein, M.D. (2002, E-Reads.com)