TheMovieVampire’s review published on Letterboxd:
Gillo Pontecorvo is a director who had a pretty weird career all told. He scraped by making mostly documentaries for most of the 50s and 60s, had a huge international breakthrough with his masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, made the movie Burn!... and then basically retired. He did make one more movie about a decade later and had a couple documentary projects, but in many ways Burn! seemed to be the end of the line and I’m not sure why because this is hardly a movie to be ashamed of. The film is set sometime in the 19th Century in a fictional Caribbean island under the colonial control of the Portuguese and Marlon Brando stars as a British agent sent to forment a slave rebellion on the island, not out of any humanitarian concern but to advance British interests in taking control of the island themselves. It’s a bigger budget work than The Battle For Algiers for better or worse and doesn’t have quite the same documentary-like intensity that that film had and the interactions between Brando and some of the less experienced actors in the film can be a touch stiff. However, the political content at the center of the film are palpable. I’m pretty sure Pontecorvo’s aim was to compare the 19th century colonial freebooting seen in the film with the Cold War driven proxy wars and foreign interference that was going on in the world when the film was made. It’s not quite the unimpeachable innovative classic that its predecessor was but it’s worth a look.