Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus (1949) is a tale of suffering on the part of its protagonist, who spent long, frustrating years soliciting monarchs to finance his voyage, then after the initial thrill of discovering the New World, spent long, frustrating years governing a colony perpetually on the verge of chaos. The fact that the indigenous people under his notoriously tyrannical rule also suffered is shielded from viewers, lest this distract them from the nuanced personality of the man himself.

It is immediately clear that the film plays fast and loose with the historical details. In the first scene Columbus visits a monastery, hoping to send a letter to Queen Isabella via her confessor, and speaks to a monk about his certainty that a “New World” has yet to be discovered. The viewer is thereby informed that Columbus had a vision of the Americas that primarily motivated his voyage, whereas in real life his goal was to chart a quicker trade route between Iberia and the Indies. When the monk later asks Columbus why he plans to sail to India, he responds “Because there are thousands of heathen in those parts to be converted, and they are rich in gold and spices.” In 1485, talk of the “New World” is a glaring anachronism, and the viewer receives mixed cues whether to imagine India or Latin America as the object of the voyage, especially due to the repeated references to the gold in these unknown lands.

After weaseling his way into Court, Columbus secures a private meeting with the Queen, whose interest is piqued by his vision of an “empire” with “illimitable riches.” Trade-routes to India have now been put firmly on the back-burner; the prime goal is now the colonization of an imagined abundant landscape. Columbus delivers his evidence of the New World before a royal commission, and despite the machinations of one Francisco de Bobadilla, whose Mediterranean trade investments would be threatened by the discovery of an Atlantic trade route, he is given the go-ahead and his fleet of three ships cast off towards the New World. Columbus quickly realizes that he underestimated the length of the voyage and rumblings of discontent culminate in an attempted mutiny. Following this, Columbus swears that if they do not reach land in three days they will turn back. To his profound relief, land is sighted at the eleventh hour. The camera lingers on him, in a shot taken from below, outlining his furrowed brow and windswept hair, for a heroic portrait with orchestral accompaniment.

Columbus kneels and utters a prayer, then reads aloud a proclamation taking possession of the territory for the Spanish monarchs, naming the land San Salvador, and stating the intent to teach its inhabitants the Spanish culture and language. It is uncertain whether the Europeans are aware that a giant ring of these inhabitants is forming behind their backs, or whether they are too caught up in the rituals of conquest to notice. First contact occurs without the mutual surprise and fear one might expect; the Spaniards merely ram their flag into the sand and an indigenous person approaches them, then drops to his knees and releases his spear as a sign of submission. The two cultures are shown fraternizing, the indigenous people helping the Europeans and trading with them. Within a decade, however, the honeymoon is over and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella are shown fretting about the tales of “disorder and bloodshed” that come back from the colonies. Francisco de Bobadilla is sent to the New World and he brings Columbus back in shackles, arrested on account of his irresponsible and tyrannical governorship. The film closes as he leaves court demoted from colonial viceroy and embittered with life: the conqueror of the New World branded a criminal.

In Christopher Columbus, Latin America appears only as a tropical shoreline and its loincloth-wearing inhabitants are portrayed as friendly, guileless, peaceable, generous and, significantly, entirely mute. These individuals are so passive that they not only drop their weapons at the sight of the Europeans, presumably understanding that they lost their sovereignty when the Spaniards planted their flag, but they do not even have voices. Conversely, the Spaniards exercise the power of language to change everything around them, from the requerimiento, the declaration of sovereignty read before conquered populations, to the practice of (re)naming places. When Latin America is on screen, the viewer learns very little about it; it is merely a landscape in which to showcase Columbus’s ingenuity, fortitude, and benevolence. The devastation caused by the introduction of European diseases and the violence of Columbus’s ruthless governorship is barely alluded to and never shown. It is ironic that in the main scene showing good Indigenous/Spaniard relations, Columbus stops a deckhand from trading broken crockery for a gold necklace, chiding him that “We are here to convert these natives to Christianity, not to exploit them.” In actuality, Columbus's log books reveal his rapacious nature from the moment he set foot in America, containing plans to subjugate the indigenous people and enumerations of the resources to be extracted from their lands.

Carry On Columbus

So was Carry on Columbus Britain's contribution to the cinematic celebrations of 1992's five-hundred year anniversary of Columbus's first voyage? If so, it's a pretty pathetic offering.

The "Carry On" films were never really very funny, certainly not compared to, say, the Ealing Comedies. But they were of their time and illustrated a certain English low-brow kitsch of the 1950s and 1960s. They were the cinematic equivalent of naughty postcards bought in rundown seaside resorts. But that age was well and truly over by the time the series limped to a halt after almost thirty titles, with what are universally agreed to be the dampest of squibs in Carry on England (1976) and Carry on Emannuelle (1978).

The "Comic Strip" gang of alternative comedians that burst on to the scene in the 1980s seemed funny at first. But the novelty soon faded; and in any case, were Alexei Sayle or Rik Mayall (say) actually ever all that amusing?

In any case, Carry on Columbus is fruit of a misguided attempt to update the "Carry On" formula by breathing into it the fresh spirit of the Comic Strip. Unfortunately, what results is a pale imitation of the original, too respectful by half and too happy to rely on the lamest of double entendres and the shallowest of verbal jesting. Any film in which a line such as "Did you give it to her?" is meant to be amusing deserves to fail, and to fail badly. Had the film been a parody of the "Carry On" spirit, rather than its attempted reincarnation, and perhaps therefore traded more on the critical detachment that Julian Clary (the one half-bright spark here) gives to his role, that the film might have been rescued. But alas, no.

The strange thing also is that the alternative comedy movement of the 1980s gained fame initially for its dismantling of existing shibboleths, its political verve, and its cavalier disrespect for much beloved English cultural sensibilities. "Five Go Mad in Dorset", for instance, skewered Enid Blyton almost perfectly, catching the mood of a disenchanted country in the early 1980s, secure only when examining its own insecurities. One would have thought that the history of European imperialism might have merited similar treatment, simultaneously cavalier and thoughtful. But again, alas, no. The weak jokes about the Spanish Inquisition, for instance, are simply a leaf taken out of Sellars and Yeatman's philosophy that "history is all you can remember," without any of the potential political analysis of power, repression, and xenophobia that could have enabled some connection to the present, as exhibited by the best moments of, say, "Blackadder Goes Forth".

Perhaps the one imaginative aspect of this film is the portrayal of American Indians as street-smart wisecrackers who remark to themselves in broad New York accents about how primitive are the gold-grubbing Europeans who have landed on their shores. But this comes only after an hour of tired costume drama that revels only in cleavage and homophobia. Moreover, the portrayal is inconsistent, as the indigenous have to be kitted out with an obligatory shaman, as well as propositions to bed the visiting countess. They do have the last laugh, as they send Columbus and crew packing with what is literally fool's gold. But as with the rest of the film, it's not really much of a laugh in the end.

This movie is all about the decline of (one strand at least of) English mass culture, its descent into toothlessly inadvertent self-parody, lacking any other pretensions, political, cinematic, or even humorous. It's a misfiring piece of nostalgia for an England that should have been safely consigned to the past.

The Whippet Inn claims that this film did better at the box office than either Christopher Columbus: The Discovery or Ridley Scott's 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Whatever the demerits of these other movies... Ugh!

YouTube Link: the film's opening credits.