Cultural historian Wendy Webster has identified three categories of British 1950s films about war and empire.  The Black Tent sits between two of them.  The first, predominant strand, the Second World War film, provided ‘an image of British male heroism set in the recent past’ (Webster, 573).  A second strand, British films about contemporary colonial wars, encompasses films such as The Planter’s Wife (Ken Annakin, 1952), which addressed postwar Communist insurgency in Malaya.  This second strand grappled with a ‘loss of British male authority’, and ‘portray[ed] a time on the cusp between British resolve to stay on and maintain colonial rule and the end of empire’ (Webster, 573, 566-7).  A third strand is exemplified by Storm Over the Nile (Zoltan Korda, 1955).  This adaptation of the often filmed 1902 novel The Four Feathers, also starring Anthony Steel, celebrated white imperial soldier heroes, and partly circumvented contemporary concerns about the end of empire by being set in the late nineteenth century.

Although Webster’s categorisation doesn’t quite do justice to the diversity of 1950s British war films, The Black Tent can be seen in general terms as a hybrid of the first and third strands. The alliance between a British officer and Libyan Bedouins avoids complicating the popular memory of the Second World War in the way that a narrative involving Indian, African, or West Indian troops, aspiring to postwar independence, might have done.  On the contrary, explicit references to colonialism are noticeably absent from The Black Tent.  Libyan Bedouins were nominally subject to Italian colonial authority prior to the Allied victory in the North African campaign, but this is never mentioned in The Black Tent.  The only Axis forces represented in the film are not Italians, but the Afrika Korps men David Holland and the Bedouins ambush. The film’s primary narrative focus is the romantic story of a British officer seduced by the charms of the Orient who nevertheless does his duty by returning to the fighting.

Although The Black Tent is set during Charles Holland’s (Donald Sinden’s) postwar investigation into his brother’s fate, with extended flashbacks to the Second World War, several newspaper reviewers related the film to the early twentieth century romantic Orientalist novels of Robert Hichens, Ethel Dell and Edith Hull.  The film was therefore seen as somewhat archaic even at the time of its initial release.  The Black Tent hybridised elements of Webster’s first and third strands of British films about war and empire, combining elements of a Second World War narrative with perspectives on the non-Western world that could be traced back to the turn of the century.  The dominant trend in 1950s British cinema towards representing the Second World War as a great British achievement militated against any attempt to introduce issues relating to contemporary colonialism and the end of empire.

Popular media in 1950s Britain were rife with concerns about ‘miscegenation’, specifically anxieties about sexual liaisons between black immigrant workers and white British women.  The Black Tent’s romantic Orientalist version of this, safely located in the exceptional circumstances of the Second World War and a timeless Orient, was less challenging to 1950s white British sensibilities.  Fictional British white male adventurers, in the broad tradition to which Hichens’, Dell’s and Hull’s work belonged, often entered into romantic and sexual liaisons with oriental women. For various reasons, however, such unions could not often be sustained, and they were rarely symbolic of meaningful cultural exchange. 

The possibility that boundaries between primitive Bedouin and advanced British culture might be permeable is ultimately quashed in The Black Tent.  Mabrouka’s and David’s son Daoud decides to stay in Libya with the Bedouin side of his family.  The film’s lush visual spectacle prompted one reviewer, however, to describe this outcome in terms which attested to the continuing appeal of romantic fantasies of the Orient: ‘Their son, faced with the awful prospect of going back to England with dreary old Donald Sinden, decides to stay in the colourful desert background which is the best thing in the film.’ (Reynolds News, 18 March 1956).

Martin Stollery