- Original release date: 24.01.58 (Paris, 98′)
- Country: France/Italy
- Director: John Berry
- Certification number / date: 26355 on 07.03.58
- Italian release date: 12/03/58
- Production companies: Films du Cyclope, Paris (France), Cei-Incom / DA.MA. Cinematografica.
- Alternative titles (+ dates and running times): Italy – Tamango; UK – Tamango (1960 – 95′)
- Cast: Curd Jürgens, Jean Servais, Dorothy Dandridge, Alex Cressan.
The first Italian film released in 1958 was John Berry’s melodramatic Tamango, which came out in Parisian cinemas on January 24th. Tamango actually didn’t have a great deal of Italian involvement, being primarily a French production and featuring an almost entirely French (or Algerian) cast. In fact, DA.MA. Cinematografica, the Italian production company involved, worked almost entirely in flms that were otherwise almost entirely French in origin, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they were an ‘accountant with an office’ outfit, set up to access state tax break or funding.
Curiously, the producer, Sig Shore, later went on to finance Superfly, creating a direct link between European exploitation of 1950s and the blaxploitation genre that came around some fifteen years later. Films like Tamango, apparently, were a hit on the college circuit, and were especially popular with the black audiences who were rather ignored by the US film industry.
Wikipedia notes:
Tamango is a 1958 film directed by John Berry, a black-listed American director who exiled himself to Europe. Dorothy Dandridge stars in the film. Based on the short story by Prosper Mérimée, the film is about a slave ship rebellion. Also starring Curt Jurgens and Alex Cressan, the film was banned in certain parts of the country because of the interracial love scenes with Dorothy and Curt Jurgens.
The New York Times wasn’t particularly impressed in it’s 1959 review:
POLEMICISTS for racial equality on the screen and the simply curious may find something enticing about the prospect of a Teuton-like Curt Jurgens making intense love to Dorothy Dandridge, a Negro, in Tamango. The prospect of such frankness carries a cultural augury that may attract the unwary of both races to the French-made melodrama that opened at the Capitol Theatre yesterday.
However, it is only fair to warn such partisans that Tamango, despite the fitful embraces of its racially opposite principals, does no great service to the cause of either racial understanding or plain entertainment. For this rather obviously dubbed English-language version of the story by Prosper Mérimée penetrates no deeper into the racial question-or any other question-than melodramatics demand.
On the contrary, it is the old creaking sea drama about the vicious ship captain, played by Mr. Jurgens, and his patch-eyed crew riding herd on a pack of Negroes during the days of the slave traders. The fact that Miss Dandridge’s loyalty is torn between her passionate master and her own people down in the hold seems remote from all reality as presented here.
Equally synthetic is any sense that this ship is passing through the seas of another era. The shipboard scenes have the stiffness of the studio. These are inter-cut with what appear to be shots of a model plowing through fan-whipped water. Despite the heavy breathing of the principals, they are exposed to nothing worse than the artificial furies of film makers. (Richard Nason, Sept 17th 1959)
More contemporary reviews, however, seem rather more positive. The TV Guide Review, for instance, says:
Tamango, a 1957 cult classic, tells a fascinating tale about a revolt on a 19th-century slave ship heading from Africa to Cuba. A restored 35mm CinemaScope print of this neglected masterwork was distributed in 1997, due to renewed interest in the career of its star, Dorothy Dandridge.
Tamango is set in 1815, when slave-trading had already been outlawed in France, but illegal trafficking endured. Aboard the ship, “L’Esperanza,” the Captain (Curt Jurgens) runs a cruel operation, where he keeps his prisoners, whom he captured on the coast of Guinea, chained and submissive, but strong and well-fed. One such prisoner, Tamango (Alex Cressan) chafes at the idea of being sold into slavery and openly quarrels with the Captain. Knowing that Tamango is a valuable property, the Captain teaches him a lesson by killing one of the other slaves, then tying up Tamango on the deck. While Tamango roasts under the hot sun, the Captain’s slave-mistress, a “mulatto” named Aiche (Dorothy Dandridge), tries to advise him to keep quiet.
Tamango rejects Aiche’s recommendation and plans a revolt with his warrior comrades. But when one of Tamango’s fellow prisoners is caught hiding on deck in preparation for the attack, the man is killed. Meanwhile, Aiche, feels caught between her love for the Captain and her loyalty toward her people. She also must fend off the advances of Corot (Jean Servais), the cynical ship’s doctor.
Below deck during a storm, Tamango seeks revenge for the killing of his friend by executing his murderer, the First Mate, Bebe (Roger Hanin), and the prisoners hide Bebe’s body under the floorboards of the ship. When Aiche learns from Corot that the Captain had never intended to marry her and that he has a fiancee waiting for him in France, she shifts her loyalties completely toward the prisoners. Now with Aiche’s help, Tamango and the others plot to steal the crew’s weapons and stage their mutiny. They succeed in killing eight men and taking Aiche hostage below deck, forcing the Captain to choose between his love for her and his revenge for the massacre. When smoking out the prisoners fails, the Captain chooses to shoot a cannon into the slave quarters, killing Aiche and all his human cargo.
If for no other film than Tamango, expatriate John Berry deserves reconsideration from the auteur critics who look seriously at the ways in which directors of the Hollywood era transformed stylistic and thematic conventions (Berry’s He Ran All the Way is strongest from his pre-blacklist Hollywood years). Tamango, one of several French-produced films Berry made, is special in a number of ways.
What’s immediately apparent in the new CinemaScope prints is that Tamango is a gorgeous-looking film; the use of color, lighting, and tableaux framing is combined stunningly. Even more remarkably, however, the screenplay by Berry, Lee Gold, Tamara Hovey and Georges Neveux (based on a novelette by Proper Merimee) is consistently sympathetic with the African prisoner’s point of view and never exploits their plight in a sensational way. (For this reason, it’s far more interesting than many “Blaxpoitation” films of the 1970s and the undeservedly hailed Glory of 1989). Moreover, Dorothy Dandridge makes her slave role (something the actress usually refused to play) moving and complex.
Not too surprisingly, Tamango received some good reviews in its day, but was poorly distributed in the US (in 1959, a full two years after its European release). Scenes that the censors thought would offend audiences were cut from the American release (including a kiss between Jurgens and Dandridge). Fortunately, the restored version is complete, although the English-language dubbing (substituting the French) severely hampers some of the performances in key moments. Otherwise, Tamango is a hugely engrossing, refreshingly progressive picture from a reactionary era.
Indeed, the film had a recent showing at the San Francisco Film Festival, which noted:
After being exiled to France by McCarthy and his cronies, John Berry directed this cult classic about a slave revolt that pits the beautiful Isha (Dorothy Dandridge) against her estranged lover, the captain of a ship carrying Africans in chains to the New World. A precursor of Amistad, this is a tougher-and much more interesting-film, tackling issues of race, sex and power in ways that put contemporary Hollywood to shame. The mixed-race Isha is squeezed between two worlds (much as Dandridge was in real life), and tries to use her sexual power as a means for escape. Her performance, at once sensual and touching, is among her very best. Universally attacked when it was first released, Tamango has become one of those rare films that is both legendary and rarely seen-that is, until the recent release of a newly restored color print, and a series of rave reviews, brought the film to a wider audience. As in his other films, Berry coaxes powerful performances out of his actors and keeps the film from slipping into either melodrama or ideological preaching. Instead, he remains in the human realm, showing how social and economic forces play out in real lives. As a result, this courageous film has a rebellious spirit that the smooth edges of a Hollywood production could never achieve.