We might say of Men of Two Worlds that it is a film of two genres as well as two worlds. One of them is a relatively traditional colonial melodrama not so very far upstream of Zoltan Korda’s Sanders of the River, despite Thorold Dickinson’s recollection in 1947 that ‘always we had to prove to the coloured people that our film was to be no Sanders of the River, that bugbear of every educated person of colour’ (‘Search for Music’, 13).  But the other is a more progressive, densely imagined Shavian or Brechtian debate on the intractabilities of political dirigism in far-off lands. Much of the credit for its subtlety and intelligence in this respect belongs to Joyce Cary (with whom Dickinson would work again on Secret People, 1952), whose experience as a colonial officer in West Africa helped to bring political sophistication to the treatment.

Men of Two Worlds aims to represent a conflict not between Europe and Africa, but between a reactionary Africa and a progressive one being helped by the colonial British to change for its own good. Its tendentious case is aided by making the figure of the witch doctor, Magole, an outsider aiming for power and not himself a member of the Litu tribe over whom he exerts authority.  He vies not only with the District Commissioner Randall but with other non-Litus– the more enlightened Mr Ali, the pharmacist, and Mr Abrahams, the schoolteacher, their names suggesting cultural origins belying Nazi racial theory.

The tribe itself, as this plethora of authority figures may indicate, is characterised as torpid and infantile. Part of what Randall does for them is to get them working. Dickinson shows their resettlement not in terms of a population being passively moved, but actively mobilized. Montage sequences with encouraging music show them building a road, erecting a bridge, clearing the land, constructing houses. This is a vision of the colonial power benignly facilitating active lives. ‘The land’s worn out’, according to Randall, and the Litu ‘lack initiative’. An alternative view of the story was astutely proposed by an African reviewer, James EneEwa, who suggested that the Litu may have been reluctant to move because of previous experiences of colonial forced labour. The anti-colonial radicalism of this idea is beyond the possibility of a film with the remit and origins of Men of Two Worlds. Moreover, the Litu might, for example, very reasonably want to go back after the sleeping sickness passes. Randall at one point tells Gollner that he wants to move them because greater population density will make them easier to marshal for his welfare plans. We are looking here at a place where reformism meets dirigism. The ending of the film realises something like Cary’s vision of progress, a utopian welfare state, with natives in trucks going over a new bridge to new lands under the guidance of a paternalistic colonial rule. This final forcing of the issue represents the limits of the liberalism of Men of Two Worlds, and the reality behind its dream of a synthesis of the two cultures.

On the other hand, the film goes out of its way to encourage us away from a belief that Europe is simply more ‘advanced’, and urges us to link the social and psychological make-up of the two worlds, articulating the director’s own belief that the nations were profoundly united at the most important levels.

Men of Two Worlds includes an extraordinary recreation of a tribal dance, a more complex return to one of the scenes in The High Command. Dickinson recorded the process with his usual relish for a technical challenge. The dance group at Moshi, he recalled, ‘danced for us in the daylight and allowed us to film a “movie notebook” of every aspect of their dancing, for use against our return to the studio in England, where the dance was to be reproduced in moon- and firelight’ (‘Search for Music’, 13). There is no space here to describe the filming of this extraordinarily rich and complex set-piece (for more details see British Technicolor Films, 97-98) but, in so far as it is an authentic record of something profoundly non-European, it alters the thesis of the film. Its narrative function is to exclude Kisenga from the Litu tribe, but it is replete with an excess of detail, thesignificance of which is not revealed to the audience. There is an implicit concession here made to the European viewer’s limited ability to understand other cultures, and so, perhaps, limited title to govern them; the scene is arguably more eloquent in its lack of transparency than one of the other set-pieces, Kisenga’s hallucinatory dream sequence.

The story is worked out through a central conflict between Kisenga and Magole; but the scene where Randall challenges Magole is dramatically the most exciting in the entire film, with some of the ritualised grandeur of showdown scenes in Westerns. At this point, the conflict between the colonial ruler and the rebel leader marshalling native resistance tends to overshadow the more optimistic story of collaboration; and Magole, moreover, is given some arguments which are never refuted, for all that he himself is discredited.

Peter Swaab (July 2010)