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MovieTimes: Lions, Hunters and Hollywood
By John Hartl
The Seattle Times

As with T.E. Lawrence, there's much more to Lt. Col. John Patterson than his desert victories.

Paramount's new movie, "The Ghost and the Darkness," presents a reasonably accurate dramatization of Patterson's most famous accomplishment: the killing of two man-eating lions who mauled and mutilated more than 100 natives and Indian workers who were building a railway bridge over the Tsavo river in Kenya in 1896.

But it provides this Irish Protestant hero (played by Val Kilmer) with an American companion (Michael Douglas) who is largely fictional and unnecessary (it's like suggesting that Lawrence needed American help to unite the Arabs), and it leaves out perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Patterson's African adventure.

Because he didn't immediately succeed in executing the lions, Patterson was repeatedly threatened by the enraged Indians he was attempting to protect.

At one point, "hundreds of angry men, sworn in blood to each other to kill him, were coming at him, brandishing crowbars and hammers," writes Denis Boyles in his 1991 book, "Man Eaters Motel." "Patterson told them he knew all about their plot, but that it was a lousy one and many of them would be hanged."

The railway police eventually arrested the ringleaders and they were sentenced to hard labor. But there was more trouble to come from the workers: "They went on strike, demanded an audience with Patterson, and told him that they'd come from India to build a railroad, not serve as simba chow."

As the film does show, many of them abandoned the project by leaping on a train that they hoped would eventually take them back to India.

The movie's veteran screenwriter, William Goldman (who has another film, "The Chamber," opening in theaters today), based his script partly on Patterson's bestseller, "The Man Eaters of Tsavo," which Theodore Roosevelt called "the most thrilling book of true stories ever written."

Patterson wrote that the lions, which appeared to kill for pleasure, had "an extraordinary and uncanny faculty of finding out our plans beforehand . . . the lions would not be denied and men continued to disappear." He found himself "disheartened at being foiled in this way night after night . . . it seemed the lions were really `devils' after all and bore a charmed life."

The movie treats the beasts as almost mystical forces, nicknamed "the ghost" and "the darkness." Ironically, Tsavo is a Swahili term for "a place of slaughter." The bridge, which was finished after the lions were killed, was ultimately destroyed by the Germans during their East African campaign.

Goldman first heard the story during a trip to Africa in 1984. He claims it's the best factual story he'd heard aside from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which won him his first screenwriting Oscar in 1970. (The second came in 1977 for another fact-based story, "All the President's Men.")

Like Lawrence of Arabia, the movie's hero was more than Patterson of Africa. In the 1920s, he attempted to organize a Jewish army of 100,000 men to fight Hitler. A veteran of the Boer War and World War I, he was critical of the British government's handling of Palestine. In 1916, he wrote "With the Zionists at Gallipoli," followed in 1922 by "With the Judeans in Palestine."

"Determined to see the establishment of a Jewish fighting force in Palestine," writes Boyles, "he enlisted as a private in the Twentieth Battalion London Regiment and gathered around him a platoon consisting mostly of (Zion) Mule Corps veterans." They fought alongside Lawrence's Arabs in the battles against the Turks.

"But the formal establishment of a Jewish `army' came to an end shortly after the war," writes Boyles. Patterson eventually accused the British of policies that were anti-Semitic, "a foul stain on our fair name."

Although he is presented in "The Ghost and the Darkness" as ecstatically devoted to his wife, Patterson had an affair with a tourist's wife that led to the husband's suicide and got him tossed out of Kenya.

The incident inspired Ernest Hemingway to write "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," a 1936 Cosmpolitan short story that became one of the most succinct and least compromised of Hemingway movies: "The Macomber Affair," with Gregory Peck in the Patterson role.

It was released in 1947, the year Patterson died at 80 at his son's home in La Jolla, Calif. The lions he killed are mounted and displayed in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Copyright © 1998 The Seattle Times Company

 

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