On the 47th anniversary of its original release, Zulu Dawn, the underrated prequel to the classic Zulu, gets a new – no doubt, loving – release on Blu-Ray and 4K from Severin Films, as well as the unusual step ofbringing the film back to cinemas, starting today, the 13th March.
The film’s main events, once it gets into them, are the Battle of Isandlwana, the large-scale confrontation between the British Army and the Zulu which prefigured the events of Rorke’s Drift as depicted in Zulu.
Despite the passage of fifteen years between the two films, much the same team put together Zulu Dawn; the original film was written and directed by the polymath Cy Endfield, while this film is written by Endfield and Anthony Storey, based on a historical book by Endfield. Douglas Hickox, a veteran of British film, took over directing but maintains much the same visual style as the original classic. But this is a larger film, befitting the larger scale of the battle in question. With two large armies directly clashing in open combat, the chaos quotient here is greater: this is Pelennor Fields, not Helm’s Deep, to put it in terms of the filmmaker most explicitly, vocally influenced by Zulu.
This is also something of an angrier film, perhaps surprisingly so; Zulu was never the Imperial propaganda some may take it for, but its British characters are heroic individually and collectively, regardless of the goodness of the Imperial mission. Our British “heroes” here are almost without exception pompous, or cowardly, or bloodthirsty or brutally indifferent. But then, perhaps the late-70s were a more cynical time than the mid-60s.
While this is an interesting difference to observe, it should also be noted that the writing this time around is distinctly less nuanced: the snooty officers, the worldly Quartermaster, the naïve and timid boy-soldier are close to stock characters. This is understandable as a writers’ shortcut, but another difference between the two is that the actual business of the battle takes up a comparatively smaller chunk of Zulu Dawn, with the sort of human interaction that precedes the battle taking centre stage; this sort of approach really demands stronger writing to carry it.
And the fine cast could have done great things with such writing. Just as the original Zulu scored a coup with the casting of Michael Caine, on the cusp of greater stardom in Alfie, The Ipcress File and The Italian Job, so here we have nascent stars such as a pre-Long Good Friday Bob Hoskins, as well as the already-venerable Lawrence of Arabia himself, Peter O’Toole.
Still, the sense of sheer spectacle when the battle finally hits is undeniable in its power, Elmer Bernstein’s (The Magnificent Seven) doggedly old-fashioned score be damned. We see more Union Jack symbolism than any Bond film would dare, and it’s all the stronger for it. Some of the cinematography here is quite exceptional, and it’s showed off to good effect – no doubt more so on the big screen – though the print isn’t entirely free from wear and that “washed-out” look older films often acquire over time. Still, this is a classic British martial adventure, of the kind Severin seems to have had a taste for of late.