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Dogs of War
Part 1 of The Making of The Wild Geese
“Their home is the battlefield. Their calling is war. Their only loyalty is to each other. They are The Wild Geese – the best ****ing mercenaries in the business.” A quarter of a century after The Wild Geese exploded onto cinema screens, Tony Earnshaw revisits the mother of all mercenary movies.
A lone mercenary weaves his way through the African bush. Close behind, their approach frighteningly loud, a squad of bloodthirsty Simbas crashes through the undergrowth, steadily gaining ground on their quarry. It is a life or death moment. With seconds to spare the mercenary piles into the overhanging branches of a nearby tree, then flings himself to the ground. Moments later he unleashes a merciless, murderous fusillade of fire followed almost immediately by a grenade, which explodes with devastating effect. As bodies crash to the earth the sounds of battle die away. A voice breaks the mood: “Cut. That’s a print. Thank you, Richard.”
The mercenary drags himself to his feet. His beret bears the cap badge of the Welsh Fusiliers. His uniform denotes his rank – that of colonel. His face is unmistakable: he is acting legend Richard Burton, and today has been a tough shoot. It is 120 degrees in the shade in Tshipise, Northern Transvaal, and Burton’s hand reaches out for a cold drink. For this old soldier, war is over for the day. Battle will recommence tomorrow in the burning African sun as Burton, playing Colonel Allen Faulkner, leads 50 mercenaries in a desperate do-or-die fight for a blockbuster called The Wild Geese.
In the pantheon of war films The Wild Geese stands head and shoulders above the majority. Undoubtedly the best mercenary movie ever made, the film this year celebrates its 25th anniversary. With the majority of its cast either dead or well into their dotage, and with rumours spreading over the possibility of a remake, the time has come to reconsider one of the great action classics of the 20th Century and its bloody roots in the heart of darkest Africa.
By 1976 the brutal civil war in the Congo had been over for almost ten years, but the exploits of the mercenary soldiers who had been hired to restore the rightful government, and who saved hundreds of Europeans from being butchered by marauding Simba rebels, had become modern myth. Their leader had been Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare, a former British Army officer who had created 5 Commando, a well-disciplined unit of white mercenaries - known as The Wild Geese - at the request of President Moise Tshombe, Congo’s legitimate leader.
In the space of a few weeks Hoare and his men had put down a rebellion and restored some semblance of order to the Congo and its principal city, Stanleyville. Their courage, guile, resourcefulness and speed of attack, combined with Hoare’s leadership and strategy, made them heroes in the eyes of many – and prime fodder for a rousing novel.
So it was that Hoare and his men became the basis of The Wild Geese, a thrilling novel written by a 33-year-old Rhodesian, Daniel Carney, in 1977.
Formerly an officer with the British South African Police, Carney divided his time between writing and defending Rhodesia’s borders against guerrilla attacks. He was perfectly placed to create a story about mercenaries – an African phenomenon during the 1960s, and one that continued to reverberate into the Seventies.
The story – fifty crack mercenaries snatch a deposed African president from a bloodthirsty dictator in a daring raid but are left high and dry when betrayed by their sinister paymaster – would become a best-seller.
Carney’s book, then known as The Thin White Line, was still in manuscript form when it landed on the desk of 53-year-old British producer Euan Lloyd in the mid-1970s. Lloyd, a producer and old-fashioned showman whose films had included the westerns Shalako and Catlow, the thriller A Man Called Noon and the drama Paper Tiger, read the proofs in one sitting. Instinctively he recognised within it all the hallmarks of a hit movie: a tremendously exciting story, believable characters, heroes and villains and, above all else, the conflict of good versus evil. Within days he had bought the film rights from an ecstatic Carney, who had originally consigned the book to a dusty shelf after it was deemed “too violent” by his agent.
The book was the epic adventure Lloyd had been seeking ever since he became a producer. Swiftly he hired Reginald Rose, the acclaimed author of 12 Angry Men, to write the screenplay. Next came the cast. Top of the list to play the hard-drinking veteran Irish mercenary Allen Faulkner was Richard Burton. To his astonishment shortly thereafter Lloyd received a call from Burton’s agent, Robbie Lantz. The conversation was short and to the point.
“Mr Lloyd, Richard Burton has to do this picture.” Burton, then on the rebound from the disastrous Exorcist II: The Heretic, quickly came on board. With Burton, still a bankable star name despite his well-publicised battles with the booze, and the solid and reliable Rose, Lloyd knew he had the makings of something special.
To play Faulkner’s friend and strategist Rafer Janders, Lloyd turned to Burt Lancaster. The-then 63-year-old Hollywood legend expressed interest in the script but Lloyd walked away from any deal when Lancaster suggested the storyline be altered to make Janders – and Lancaster – the focus of the picture. Instead he cast Richard Harris, like Burton another hellraiser and an actor whose reputation was in tatters following a succession of drunken shenanigans on a previous Africa-based film, Golden Rendezvous. “It’s a good property, it really is, but Richard Burton and Richard Harris in the same movie… Jeez, you’ll never finish it,” said Lloyd’s business cronies. “It’ll be a disaster. Don’t do it.” Nevertheless he persevered, and concluded his casting coup with the inclusion of Roger Moore, aka James Bond Mark III and a substantial star in his own right. With so much star power under his belt Lloyd expected the major studios to fall at his feet. Instead they fled.
“Hollywood resisted, all of them, except for one studio: United Artists,” recalls Lloyd today. “They stayed in. They saw the possibilities of that combination – the three big stars. Later Hardy Kruger was a plus. One big meeting was meant to close the deal.”
For his director Lloyd recalled a one-off conversation with John Ford who, in loyalty and friendship, had championed his protégé Andrew V. McLaglen when Lloyd had met him in the late 1960s. “There’s a young fella who’s going to make a great movie one day. A big picture, I promise you. He’s good. He’s a general in the field, and that’s what you need,” said Ford. In the years since working with Ford McLaglen had made a name for himself as the director of several tidy John Wayne vehicles, among them Hellfighters and Chisum. Lloyd thought him perfect to handle Burton, Harris and Co, and he was offered the job in spite of strong opposition from United Artists, who pressured him to dump McLaglen in favour of Michael Winner. Lloyd passed and the deal collapsed. Instead Lloyd came to an arrangement with Allied Artists. The Wild Geese were ready to fly.
Lloyd and McLaglen hired other familiar names and famous faces. German star Hardy Kruger would play white supremacist Pieter Coetzee. Ageing matinee idol Stewart Granger was persuaded to return from semi-retirement in Spain to play villainous banker Sir Edward Matherson. Jack Watson, tough-nut soldier in any number of war films, was hard-as-nails RSM Sandy Young. Kenneth Griffith was the homosexual medic Witty. Other mercenaries were played by Percy Herbert, Brook Williams, Ronald Fraser, Stanley Baker’s 19-year-old son, Glyn, South African theatre star John Kani and professional soldier Ian Yule.
“I wanted the group of mercenaries who backed up the officers to be not over-the-hill but towards the end of their life,” recalls Lloyd. “I wanted a mixed bag of men and a lot of familiar faces to play those parts. I had one major disappointment in doing so. Stephen Boyd was one of my favourites. I used him in a number of pictures and I had him in mind to play the sergeant major. To this day I believe he would have been wonderful. Then he dropped dead on a golf course just before the film.” Tight-lipped Jack Watson, then aged 62 and 17 years Boyd’s senior, played the role instead.
Carney had set his story in a Congo-esque African country, so Lloyd, McLaglen, Burton and the rest were locked into shooting the movie on the dark continent. The choice of the location was vital, and Lloyd scoured South Africa having failed to find what he wanted in any neighbouring country including Kenya and Tanzania. “I looked at them all. They were all corrupt. They all had terrible problems and I couldn’t possibly take those people with that responsibility into an environment that was too risky. So I went to South Africa and was vilified for doing so later by all kinds of left-wing groups, but it was the perfect place. I flew in patterns over Northern Transvaal and, from the air, I knew we’d found the right place. The locations were absolutely ideal,” says Lloyd. He settled on the spa town of Tshipise, close to the Mozambique border.
During location scouting in South Africa word got out that a major mercenary movie was on the cards. Among those who offered their services was Ian Yule, a former real-life soldier of fortune who had served in the Congo at the tail end of the war. It was 44-year-old Yule, then living in Johannesburg, who was instrumental in putting Lloyd in touch with ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare.
Yule contacted Hoare, set up an appointment with Lloyd and sat outside Lloyd’s hotel suite while the moviemaker and the mercenary talked. Hoare agreed to join the film, and Lloyd was delighted. Hoare then showed his loyalty to Yule by volunteering him as his assistant and weapons expert on the film, which is how Yule ended up fulfilling two roles: supporting actor and weapons instructor.
“I ended up doing all the legwork, which was a very stupid thing to do,” recalls Yule today. “You don’t wear two hats on a big picture because you’re gonna upset people. It was never officially announced and I never got a credit for it, so on the picture half the guys thought I was interfering.”
The name of Mike Hoare, the Congo’s legendary hero, added an extra cachet to the making of the movie when he was announced as special military advisor. What’s more, it soon became clear to one and all that Burton’s character was a thinly veiled version of Hoare himself.
In the liberal environment of the Wild Geese unit blacks and whites would work together in harmony. In hiring a fully integrated cast and crew Lloyd broke all kinds of barriers in apartheid era South Africa – especially when it came down to including Tony Award-winning Broadway stars John Kani and Winston Ntshona, playing sergeant and president, respectively, within the tight-knit group of principal actors that included Burton, Moore, Harris and Kruger. “Euan Lloyd was very bold,” says John Kani. “It was a major breakthrough for black actors and it blew a lot of people’s minds, especially white people. To see us standing shoulder-to-shoulder with great stars like Richard Burton or Roger Moore of the Bond movies burst the bubble that ‘blacks can’t be actors’. It was an incredibly bold move for him to do it in South Africa – especially because [in the movie] he was going to put a black president in control. That for me was the biggest challenge - for him to say that to South Africans, who were racist and believed in white superiority.”
It was – and remains – a perfect cast: four international superstars, a clutch of superb character actors and two black Africans with an enviable theatrical pedigree. Together with Lloyd and McLaglen they would create one of the most memorable, star-studded adventure movies of the 1970s.
This article originally appeared in Impact magazine.