ianlouisiana Review of Lord Jim

Lord Jim (1965)

A coward dies a thousand deaths before he can be reborn....

[7/10 · 13 September 2008]

From a time when Civil Servants,Remittance Men and Army Officers and their Ladies ruled half the world,"Lord Jim" is the sort of tale set before starry - eyed British public schoolboys to encourage them to sally forth and perpetuate the Empire and spread Victorian Values to the "Fuzzy Wuzzies".A Public School Man would understand that Jim - by deserting an apparently doomed ship - had broken the self - imposed "Code" of the upper middle classes.Stokers and stewards jumped overboard,Etonians and the like were supposed to be "Useful at a Hunt Ball - indispensable in a shipwreck" and behave accordingly. Jim would be termed a "funk" and face social ostracism - frankly he would have been better off dead.Nonsensical today,but de rigeur a century and a quarter ago. Chaps who adapted to the indigenous culture were deemed to have "gone native" and considered beyond the pale.Jim had well and truly burned his boats. Former seaman Joseph Conrad was an early proponent of post - colonial guilt(see "Heart of Darkness"),and most of his European characters are greedy and self - serving,if not downright criminal.Only Jim with his perceived need for redemption has a pure heart.He is played with blue - eyed innocence by Mr P. O'Toole.As a colonialist who has broken ranks he is treated sympathetically by his creator.Mr O'Toole never gets much beyond B.O.P. level with his character,the philosophising falling uneasily not to say oxymoronically from his lips.Messr Mason and Wallach benefit from the relative lack of restraint imposed on their respective characters.Mr Mason in particular has a fine old time and lifts the movie up several notches just when it has given every appearance of having become moribund. Miss Lavi as "The Girl"(Is this indicative of Conrad's disinterest in women except as ciphers or is she representative of his conception of "Eternal Woman"?)has an intelligence to match her beauty. Redemption is of course one of the Great Themes of literature and "Lord Jim" as a novel is clearly concerned with it throughout it's length.The movie - on the other hand - uses it only in passing.It is not it's raison d'etre.Part travelogue,part adventure,it's sometimes beautiful to look at,well - photographed,directed in a deceptively breezy style and always worth watching.But it is not a serious exploration of the fragile psyche of a self - styled "coward" and an enquiry into how many people have to die before he can be "reborn".