General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Burn!

Burn! (original title Queimada) is a 1969 political drama film directed by the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, produced in Italy and France, and starring Marlon Brando as a British agent who instigates, and then must suppress, a slave revolt on a fictional Caribbean island.¹ It was Pontecorvo's follow-up to The Battle of Algiers (1966), made with a budget more than three times larger, and it was written by Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio with a score by Ennio Morricone.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	Queimada; Italy and France, 1969, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo¹
Principal cast	Marlon Brando (Sir William Walker), Evaristo Márquez (José Dolores), Renato Salvatori (Teddy Sanchez)³
Key crew	Screenplay Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio; music Ennio Morricone; cinematography Giuseppe Ruzzolini and Marcello Gatti; producer Alberto Grimaldi³
Setting	The fictional Caribbean island of Queimada in the mid-19th century, a Portuguese sugar colony⁴
Budget	$3,000,000, against $800,000 for The Battle of Algiers²
Running times	132-minute version; Spanish video classifications list 132 min (2008) and 112 min (2007)⁵
Recognition	David di Donatello award for Best Director for Pontecorvo⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in the 1840s on Queimada, a fictional Antilles island under Portuguese rule. According to the film's backstory, the island's original population was exterminated and the land repopulated with enslaved Africans to work the sugar plantations.² Britain, seeking to break Portugal's sugar monopoly, sends the secret agent Sir William Walker (Brando) to incite a slave revolt.⁴

Walker befriends José Dolores (Evaristo Márquez), a black dockworker, and persuades him to lead the uprising. The revolt succeeds, the Portuguese are driven out, and a government favorable to British commercial interests is installed.² A decade later, with the new order threatening British sugar profits, Walker returns to Queimada to destroy the rebellion he created, facing Dolores, the rebel leader he once trained.¹ The film ends with Dolores executed and the island returned to servitude, a narrative the critic Pauline Kael read as showing the murderous folly of colonialism.⁷

Themes and sources

Pontecorvo described his aim as wedding "the romantic adventure and the film of ideas": the film wears the surface of a swashbuckling adventure while attacking 19th-century Portuguese and British imperialism, and by implication the United States in Vietnam.² The script was heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam program calls the film a colonial allegory extended into neo-imperialist politics that allegorized the fate of many former colonies in the Caribbean and Africa.¹ The FICCI festival catalog describes it as loosely based on a slave revolt in Guadeloupe.⁸ Scholars have also connected the film to C.L.R. James's history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, and to events in 19th-century Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica.⁹

The film's central tension lies between Walker, who embodies colonial calculation and manipulation, and Dolores, whose insurgency the film treats as irreducible. The FICCI catalog frames their confrontation as political rather than merely dramatic: an insurgent force against a power seeking to organize it.⁸

Production

Pontecorvo came to the project on the acclaim of The Battle of Algiers, which had won the Golden Lion at Venice and earned Academy Award nominations. He resisted studio pressure to cast Steve McQueen as Walker and Sidney Poitier as Dolores, holding out for Brando and for Evaristo Márquez, a black Colombian peasant farmer.¹⁰ Danny Peary, the film critic and author of Cult Movies, records that Márquez was an illiterate cane-cutter who had never seen a movie.²

A troubled shoot. Filming took place near Cartagena, Colombia, where heat, danger, and tension pushed the production over schedule and over budget. Brando and Pontecorvo grew estranged; Brando accused the director of paying the black actors less money and feeding them cheaper food than the white actors. When Brando walked off the Colombian shoot, the production was completed in Morocco to accommodate him.¹¹ Brando later said that some of his best acting was to be seen in Burn!.¹¹

The change of colonizer. The island was originally conceived as a Spanish colony, and the film's title, Queimada, means "burned" in Portuguese (the backstory has the colonizers burning the island to crush a native uprising). Fearing that the Spanish government would ban the film and block United Artists from using Spain as a location, the studio had the colonizing nation changed to Portugal, although Portugal had no Caribbean colonies.¹⁰^•¹¹ The Brazilian critic Rubens Ewald Filho noted the resulting historical errors, including a line in which Walker calls Portugal and England traditional enemies, a rivalry that in fact characterized Spain and England.¹²

As costs rose, United Artists demanded concessions, including final cut, and for the American release had the film cut by about twenty-five minutes.¹⁰ The American title was changed to the opportunistic Burn!.⁷ The British Board of Film Classification passed a 112-minute cinema version in November 1970, distributed by United Artists.¹³ In Spain the film was released on 21 January 1971.⁵

Music

Ennio Morricone's score contrasts drums, associated with the island's underclass and seen in montage through blood-red filters at the beginning and end, with church music for the European overlords. For the climactic scene of Dolores's execution, Morricone quoted the theme from Bach's "Come, Sweet Death."¹¹ The FICCI catalog notes that the score's epic tone is never fully triumphant, wrapping the action in constant unease.⁸

Reception and legacy

The film was a commercial failure; Film Comment describes it as a massive flop, and Pontecorvo did not direct another feature until the low-budget Ogro in 1979.¹⁴^•¹⁰ Pontecorvo nonetheless received the David di Donatello award for Best Director for the film.⁶ The critic Edward Said called The Battle of Algiers and Burn! "the two greatest political films ever made".¹⁰ On its re-release, the film scored 72 on Metacritic, with the Washington Post's Stephen Hunter judging it not as great as Battle of Algiers but retaining "its vitality, its outrage, its savagery and its spirit".¹⁵

Retrospective commentary has noted how little attention Burn! receives next to its predecessor. Screen Slate observes that its massive battle sequences are given a handheld fluidity, and that Walker's ruminations on colonial force expand the even-handed monologues of Colonel Mathieu in The Battle of Algiers.¹⁶ The film was banned for years in Brazil, where it was released in 1971.¹² In Spain it drew 1,229,189 spectators and receipts of 219,256.22 euros as recorded by the ICAA catalog.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1966 to 1969

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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