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ABSTRACT
This paper examines cinematic representations of mercenaries from the era of silent movies to the 1980s. It argues that cinema has been selective in the choice of historical periods to depict mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, ignoring for the most part the centuries of European state building in which mercenaries played a significant role. Most mercenary films are anchored in the near present and the paper focuses on Mexico and the Congo as terrains of political breakdown and external intervention. Since the 1950s, a range of films depict mercenaries in these terrains seeking money, adventure, and the thrills of killing, and the paper examines mercenary movies through the character structures of hero, anti-hero and villain. These three structures have shaped the portrayal of mercenaries in westerns and war movies as well as action and sci fi movies, where they have become hardened in the last two decades into range of stock stereotypes
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Eugenio Cusumano for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Halliday, Mercenaries, 10 and passim; and Percy, Mercenaries.
2. Mercenaries as a sub-genre of cinema is examined in Rich, Cinema and Unconventional Warfare, esp. 129–149.
3. Keegan, A History of Warfare, 343. One interesting exception to this is the important Swedish silent film Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919).
4. Paret, Imagined Battles, 29.
5. Ibid, 100.
6. Percy, “The Changing Character of Private Force,” 262. This neglect can be partly ascribed to the general indifference of many military historians to mercenaries. John France, in a pioneering collection of essays on mercenaries in Medieval times, has suggested that mercenaries have never had a good press due in part to what he perceives as an entrenched Puritan and Whig disdain among many historians for this form of warfare. See France (ed), Mercenaries and Paid Men.
7. One interesting exception is the 1954 Cold War romantic adventure movie Soldier of Fortune starring Clark Gable and Susan Haywood set in Hong Kong.
8. This imagery accorded with a wider cinematic image of the US-Mexican border in the post-war period as a locale where it was possible to explore core American values such as courage, patriotism, and self-reliance. See especially Fojas, Border Bandits, 2; Taylor, “The Great Adventure”; and Bartolli, “Adventurers, Bandit, Soldiers of Fortune.”
9. Fojas, Border Bandits, 69. See also Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War.
10. Server, Robert Mitchum, 297.
11. Epstein, Lee Marvin, 155.
12. Prince, Savage Cinema, 29.
13. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels.
14. Franco, The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage, 98–99. The ambivalence toward the bandit in Mexico was epitomised by one of the great early novels of the revolution, Los de abajo (The Underdogs) by Mariano Azuela, first published in 1915 as its main protagonist Luis Cervantes ponders whether to believe government propaganda that the bandit are really thieves. “Is it all a lie, then?” he thinks. “were their sympathisers talking a lot of exalted nonsense?” Azuela, The Underdogs, 42.
15. Fisher, Radical Frontiers, 156–157.
16. Paret, Imagined Battles, 2.
17. Black, Warfare in the Western World, 212–213.
18. None of the films focused on the problems confronting African mercenaries, especially those eventually left stateless in Angola who mounted a doomed incursion into Shaba in the Congo in 1977. Dawson, “1950s British War Movies and the Myth of World War 2,” 105.
19. Mockler, The New Mercenaries, 160–161.
20. Othen, Katanga 1960–63, 126–127.
21. Schramme, Le Bataillon Leopard, 80. One can speculate that many were sent by parents in Rhodesia already thinking that there would eventually be military conflict in Rhodesia and their white sons needed to be battle hardened to meet it.
22. Hoare, Congo Mercenary, 66; and Lanning, Mercenaries, 158–159.
23. Dodenhoff, “The Congo.”
24. For details, see Rich, “Manufacturing Sovereignty and Manipulating Humanitarianism,” 1967–8.
25. The film has recently attracted interest for its supposed portrayal of executions during the Zanzibar revolution of 1964. The authenticity of this remains disputed, though the film here can at least be seen to serve as a vehicle to investigate the past. See Fouere, “Film as Archive.”
26. Adler, “Screen: Following Some Mercenaries in the Congo.”
27. Meredith, The State of Africa, 114.
28. Rich, “Humanitarian Aid and Counterinsurgency,” 1964–1967.
29. Jaikumar, Cinema and the End of Empire, 189. The point is made in the context of a discussion about the film Black Narcissus (1947) which had Jack Cardiff as its cinematographer.
30. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 324; and Castaneda, Companero, 308–323.
31. Judt, Postwar, 300–301.
32. Duncan, “Italy’s Postcolonial Cinema and Its Historical Representation.”
33. Anon, “Tshombe: A Bit Better Alive Than Dead.”
34. Here the perceptive article by Stanley Meisler in The Nation remains of interest. Meisler, “Congo – Thee Mercenaries Change .”
35. Becker, The Denial of Death.
36. See, in particular, Avant, “Questioning the Post Heroic Warfare Logic.”