The Four Feathers #1 (From Eric Beheim)

From time to time, Col. Herriott will use the 1939 British film THE FOUR FEATHERS as an example of a movie with scores of camels seen in large-scale action sequences. One of the all-time great adventure films, the 1939 version of THE FOUR FEATHERS was photographed on location in the Sudan and does in fact have camels galore. It also incorporates an actual historical event into its plot: the campaign to recapture Khartoum that was waged by Lord Kitchner and the British Army against the Mahdists (i.e. the followers of the Muslim Muhammad Ahmad, the Sudanese self-proclaimed Mahdi or leader) in the late 1890s. Although not a circus film, I thought it might be nice to do a brief pictorial summary of the plot of THE FOUR FEATHERS as an excuse to show some of the scenes with the massed camels. There IS, by the way, an (admittedly slim) circus connection to the film: Robert Segee, the convicted arsonist/pyromaniac who confessed to setting the fire that destroyed the Ringling-Barnum big top in Hartford in 1944, later attempted to change his story by claimed that, on the afternoon of the fire, he was in a Hartford movie theater watching THE FOUR FEATHERS. (Investigators later confirmed that THE FOUR FEATHERS was NOT being shown in Hartford on that day.