The Four Feathers
If I mention the political ramifications of The Four Feathers, I will inevitably be attacked by RETARDO (who is probably drunk already in honor of Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday) because the film didn’t have a complete history of Britain’s colonial empire and all the atrocities it perpetrated and an interview with Noam Chomsky. So I won’t.
There’s a shot near the beginning that begins on the crying but brave face of a woman who has just said goodbye to her soldier husband as he heads to the Sudan, pulls out to show a cheering crowd seeing “Auld Lang Syne", and ends up focusing on an old proud veteran. Today that scene would be a mildly interesting piece of cinema. In its time, it was groundbreaking. The modern sensibility to it makes it feel much less dated than other films released decades later by directors who were still trying to make plays with cameras stuck in the middle.
Likewise, its use of Technicolor must have been revolutionary in 1939. When a soldier nearly dies from heatstroke, audiences were looking at the African sun in a whole new way. So The Four Feathers turns out to be way ahead of its time visually, if more than a little dated politically. Whoops, there I go again.