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Yar, you be here: Zulu > Customer Reviews Zulu Customer Reviews (10 - 12 of 42 Reviews)A wonderful film
This is an extremely well done film covering how the British with a small number of men held out against overwhelming odds against massive attacks by Zulus in South Africa in the late 1800s. Home Entertainment = cheap DVDs???
Two star rating is only for the Home Entertainment release. Otherwise this is a fantastic 4 or 5 star film. See the other reviews. I am warning about the Home Entertainment release. Audio is AM radio quality while the orchestral score absolutely requires multichannel high fidelity. Or better. Video quality is soft; it looks ok through an RF adapter on a 19" TV, but I think anyone with high quality equipment will probably be very disappointed. I got it for a dollar less than five bucks and now have to buy the studio release; don't know if I would even give it away. Probably should be destroyed. As unique and wonderful as a war epic can be
My comments are based on many years of rerunning the 16mm and Criterion laserdisc versions of this landmark film. Zulu, made in 1964, is the greatest achievement of actor/co-producer Stanley Baker's career -- and it is one of the greatest location/historical action movies ever made. (Baker co-produced Zulu with director Cy Endfield.) Nothing else in this genre really measures up, including the so-called "prequel", Zulu Dawn, or other epics based on British colonial wars, such as Khartoum. Based on the events of the action at Rourke's Drift, during the Zulu War of 1879, it was filmed in the grandeur of Natal, South Africa, with descendants of the Zulu warriors who took part in the original action portraying their forebears. The prominent Zulu politician and traditional chief, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, played the Zulu leader, Cetewayo, and the mass Zulu participation in the project guaranteed the uplifting dignity of cross-cultural characterisations of the film. Stanley Baker believed so strongly in Zulu, despite difficulties in raising finance, that he sank much of his own money into it. Playing a British Army engineer officer thrust by events into leading a desperate defensive action, he heads a strong cast, including a young Michael Caine as an upper crust infantry officer. There are wonderful cameo roles by Jack Hawkins as an alcoholic missionary; Nigel Green as the imperturbable Colour Sergeant Bourne, always ready with a calming order or a bayonet; James Booth as Private Hook, the ne'er-do-well who wins one of the several Victoria Crosses (Britain's Congressional Medal of Honor) awarded at Rourke's Drift; Patrick Magee as Surgeon Reynolds, continuing up to his elbows in surgery even as Zulus try to break in. The narration by Richard Burton is very fine, and in character with the Welsh theme of the British participants. Welsh and Zulu singing on the battlefield is spine-tingling. This film deserves the very best digital restoration and DVD transfer that technology can provide -- although, from the comments of other reviewers, it may not yet have this. A retrospective on the making of the film also should be added to a new collector's edition DVD.
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