Word: sharif
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Based on a florid Joseph Kessel novel, The Horsemen concerns a master Afghan rider named Uraz (Omar Sharif) who enters the game of buzkashi to assert his manhood and prove himself to his stern and demanding father (Jack Palance). Buzkashi, the national sport of Afghanistan that seems almost medieval in its ferocity, is a considerable test. Contestants ride fiercely against each other, struggling for possession of a headless goat that they must carry twice around the playing field before depositing it at the feet of their king. In the unrestrained fury of the competition Uraz breaks a leg and loses...
Even American culture is imported for the convenience of Americans in Laos. The theatre in the USAID compound shows movies nightly. I went one night to see Omar Sharif in "Che," which drew a rather large audience. Many chuckled knowingly towards the end of the film...
Lean also exacted precise performances, with Peter O 'Toole's Lawrence-both sensitive and hateful, frolicsome and brutal-one of the most convincing portrayals of a man of eccentric genius in all film. Anthony Quinn and (surprisingly) Omar Sharif effectively project the vigor and broad coloration of their tribal chieftains; only Alec Guinness as Feisal and Arthur Kennedy as a caricatured Lowell Thomas struggle with roles which are too obviously vehicles for thematic development...
...only a weak chin but a vague ethic. The killer beast refuses to let his mercenaries enjoy any of the village sports: rape, pillaging, torture. Instead, he insists on discipline and mollifies a local priest (Per Oscarsson), all because of the influence of a wandering intellectual (Omar Sharif). As for the atrocities of the period, they are conveyed in formal compositions that amount to decorations, not disasters. Plague-ridden corpses are artistically strewn on smooth fields; soldiers flash evil grins in cartoon style-one even ecstatically licks the blood off his knife. Clavell has doubtless been studying Pieter Bruegel...
...attempting to articulate fatuities, the cast pulls out all the glottal stops. Caine shuttles between Anglo-Saxon, German and Cockney. Oscarsson, a Swede, is absurdly fanatic, with energy and witches to burn. Sharif, the first Near Eastern Westphalian, has, as ever, the wettest eyes in Christendom. Yet it is Clavell who bears prime responsibility for this drive-in Mother Courage. His battle scenes are stagy and confused; even his anachronistic editorials ("War is all I have") ring false. Clavell misunderstands the nature of historic evil, of political hysteria, and of war itself -Thirty Years' or any time, anywhere...