BEFORE: Peter Ustinov carries over from "The Bachelor", and that gets me to a set of Richard Burton films, both with and without Elizabeth Taylor. TCM made Burton their "Artist of the Month" last year around this time, and I knocked off a few films like "Equus" and "The Robe", and squirreled away the rest, because I thought the Burton/Taylor films might be more relationship-oriented and therefore belonged in a February chain.
Now, of course, TCM has an Elizabeth Taylor marathon coming up in just a few days (March 12-16) and I could pick up a few more and work them in, but that would require stopping here and waiting for a few days, and I can't do that, I'll fall even further behind. But I think that list of 30 films are generally either ones I've already seen ("Giant", "Butterfield 8", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof") or ones that I don't feel the need to add ("Doctor Faustus", "Beau Brummel", "X, Y and Zee") so I think I'll skip it. But it's weird that TCM and I sort of ended up on the same page again.
THE PLOT: A cynical Welsh hotel owner secretly romances a diplomat's wife in Haiti under the violent reign of despot "Papa Doc" Duvalier.
AFTER: There is something of a romance here, as Burton's character has an affair with the German wife of Uruguay's ambassador to Haiti, but it's buried under so much political drama that it's hard to even recognize it. I fell asleep after about an hour, why should I care about Haitian politics in the late 1950's? There's not anything remotely funny about this, so why is this film titled "The Comedians", what am I not understanding here?
It's clear that things are not going well in Haiti as we see four visitors arrive by boat - one is a British businessman and former soldier who's immediately taken into custody and strip-searched, two are an elderly couple there to set up some kind of vegetarian-based education center, and the fourth is the central character, Mr. Brown, who's inherited a hotel in Port-au-Prince, but has been unable to sell it. Shortly after his arrival, he finds a dead body in the (drained) hotel pool, a victim of Duvalier's police force. I suppose there was an opportunity for a "Fawlty Towers"-like comedy, with dead bodies turning up here and there, almost being discovered by the other guests, but it's just not that kind of film.
Brown gets some assistance from the local doctor, then manages to fall in with the rebel forces, who are planning an insurrection against Duvalier. I found this whole long middle part very hard to follow, and even harder to care about. Then we all get to see Alec Guinness hiding from the Haitian police by donning both drag AND blackface. That just ain't right...
It's notable, perhaps, to a "Star Wars" fan like myself, that this film features both Guinness, the original Obi-Wan Kenobi, and James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader. While the two actors might not have met during the production of Episode IV, because Jones' voice was dubbed in later, the two men worked together on this film, released about a decade before. I made the mistake of watching an episode of "Star Wars: Rebels" right before this film, so my mind was on that track. At several points in this film the two actors not only discuss rebels but also the Tonton Macoute, which was a special ops unit within the Haitian paramilitary force. But they usually just called them "Tontons", which is a French nickname for "uncle" - but to me, it tended to sound like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader discussing Tauntauns, you know, the large beasts that the rebels rode on Hoth in "The Empire Strikes Back".
Also starring Richard Burton (last seen in "Equus"), Elizabeth Taylor (last seen in "The Taming of the Shrew"), Alec Guinness (last seen in "The Swan"), Paul Ford (last seen in "All the King's Men"), Lillian Gish (last seen in "Sweet Liberty"), Roscoe Lee Browne (last seen in "Hard Time: The Premonition"), James Earl Jones (last heard in "Rogue One"), Georg Stanford Brown (last seen in "How to Steal a Million"), Gloria Foster (last seen in "The Matrix Reloaded"), Zakes Mokae (last seen in "Vampire in Brooklyn"), Douta Seck, Raymond St. Jacques, with a cameo from Cicely Tyson (last seen in "Idlewild").
RATING: 3 out of 10 hands of gin rummy
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