Khartoum: Staring Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier, and Ralph Richardson

Khartoum, a film created in the 1960s and staring Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier, and Ralph Richardson, is the sort of inspiring epic that could never be made in these politically correct times. That it depicts Islamo Fascists as evil is not even the half of it.

Khartoum depicts the events surrounding the siege of Khartoum, then as now the capital of the Sudan, in 1884-85 by tribal armies led by a religious/political leader who called himself the Mahdi, played by Olivier in the same blackface makeup in which he once played Othello. The goal of the Mahdi is nothing less than to sweep across the lands then under Islam, killing and destroying, with a view of purifying the land and people with blood and fire.

The film begins with a doomed expedition into the Sudanese desert by an Egyptian Army led by an incompetent British officer named Colonel William Hicks. The Mahdi leads the Egyptians into the arid, burning desert in a classic maneuver to wear them down and then, at the proper moment, ambushes them and destroys them. As a result, he lays hands on the Egyptians' modern weapons that he needs to further his jihad, starting with the taking of Khartoum.

The Hicks disaster perturbs that British government led by Prime Minister William Gladstone, played by Richardson. Gladstone has no interest in expanding the British Empire, which sending an army up the Nile to avenge Hicks would imply. But he has to do something or the political damage to his government might become irreparable.

Gladstone hits upon what even he admits is a "gesture", likely a futile one. He convinces Charles "Chinese" Gordon, played by Heston with a British accent, to go to the Sudan and see about setting things right. Gordon and Gladstone detest one another. But Gladstone is able to appeal to Gordon's sense of decency to give saving the Sudan a try, and so he agrees to go. To "help" Gordon (and spy on him) Gladstone assigns Colonel Stewart, an intelligence officer with knowledge of conditions in the Sudan.