'Political inocrrectness' in The Wild Geese
Reading the promotional material for the film, and some supporting martial with the DVD i.e. accompanying booklet, DVD commentary, it is clear that the people who made it have tried to spin it as if TWG was a reform-minded and forward looking film which explicitly rejected racism and looked with sympathy on the plight of the people of Africa.
I'm no bleeding heart, but i can see why some people would disagree with this view. For instance, black people, for whom the credit sequence purports to show concern, are basically cannon fodder in this film, who can't shoot straight and simply get mowed down running at the enemy. The main black character, Limbani, is symbolically carried around the bush on the back of a white Afrikaner. The only other black character, Jesse, seems to be a token gesture, and certainly John Kani does not seem to have been selected for the role purely based on his acting.
Then there's the gay medic who seems rather out of place, like he belongs ina carryy on film, not some serious business like this.
But I thought the strangest part of pretence, which undermined the film's claim to be supportive of the black cause, was the hurried and uncomfortable way in which the Hardy Kruger chacater, a middle-aged Afrikaner racist, changes his entire mindset with regard to blacks after hearing a few platitudes from the exiled President Limbani. This is passed off as 'character development' and a revelation tp Pieter of the power of togetherness and unity, but his conversion if far less convinving than his cahracter's original views on the state of Africa, i.e.
"you're living on forieng aid, screaming about outside oppression while you'rekilling each other in great big bleeding batches. Now when you hav esomething better to offer, come to talk to us on the white side"
For me, purely the way that passage is written and delivered seem for more in line whit the character and the film, than his later conversion to non-racism.
We also see the standard British/American/South African use of Cubans and East Germans controlling Africans, suggesting that blacks are dummies to be moulded into whatever form those Commies like, and that no way could black Africans even come close to touching Faulkener's band of heros if the red devils weren't there to point the way. Blacks in the film seem incompetant - falling asleep in guard towers, taking a pee on guard duty, not being sharp enough to stop their base getting overrun by a vastly numerically inferior force etc.
The attitude towards women is also important: only two have speaking parts, and both 2female leads" are related to the producer (his wife and daughter). One is generally portrayed as a middle aged fuss pot who wants to live in pece and make the tea, the other is a bimbo who is gallant enough to take a beating for her serial philandering boyfriend, saying "it was a pleaseure to have served...isn't he a love?" - and this is while she is waiting for an ambulance to take her to hospital (and the dentist i guess), while he goes off on a three month trip to Africa immediately. The only other women we see are two more bimbos in Sonny's beroom, the way he dismissed them when he sees Shawn reminds me of the butslap, 'man talk' moment between Bond and Dink in Goldfinger.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not attacking the film for these sentiments, I am mere trying to chrnoicle and document instances of what some people would deride as 'political incorrectness', so that when this film's sentiments are discussed, we know what we are talking about.
"He's a bit of a rough diamond but his heart's in the right place."