General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Queimada

Queimada, released in English-speaking markets as Burn!, is a 1969 political drama directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, produced by Alberto Grimaldi, and starring Marlon Brando as a British agent who instigates, and then destroys, a slave revolution on a fictional Caribbean island.¹ A French-Italian production shot in English, it followed Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) and extended that film's third-world politics into a colonial allegory with neo-imperialist themes.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Gillo Pontecorvo (1919–2006), 1969; France and Italy¹
Principal cast	Marlon Brando (Sir William Walker), Evaristo Márquez (José Dolores), Renato Salvatori (Teddy Sanchez, the governor)²
Key crew	Screenplay Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio; music Ennio Morricone; cinematography Giuseppe Ruzzolini and Marcello Gatti; editing Mario Morra²
Running times	Complete version 132 minutes; the American release was cut by about 20 minutes and retitled Burn!¹^•³
Setting	The fictional Caribbean island of Queimada, in the 1840s and the decade following⁴
Spanish release	21 January 1971; 1,229,189 spectators and €219,256.22 in receipts recorded by the ICAA⁵
Critical standing	Metascore of 72 on Metacritic's re-release aggregation; Edward Said called The Battle of Algiers and Burn! "the two greatest political films ever made"⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set on Queimada, an imaginary Antilles sugar island whose original inhabitants were destroyed and replaced by enslaved Africans.⁸ In the film's back story, the Portuguese suppressed riots by burning the entire island to the ground in the sixteenth century, then returned with African slaves to work the sugar plantations.⁹

In the 1840s the British agent Sir William Walker arrives to foment a slave revolt that will break the Portuguese colonial sugar monopoly and open the island to British interests.¹ He manipulates José Dolores, an enslaved African he first meets as a waterfront porter carrying his bags, into becoming the revolt's leader.¹^•¹⁰ The rising drives out the Portuguese government and creates an independent Queimada, but the freed slaves fall under a mulatto bourgeoisie while British merchants control the sugar trade.⁹

Ten years later Walker returns, now working for the British-backed Royal Sugar Company, to destroy the rebellion he himself created, which has begun to damage British sugar interests.¹ A montage condenses the intervening decade: in May 1845 Dolores dissolves his army and Queimada becomes a republic; in 1847 the republic cedes the right to exploit the sugar plantations to the Antilles Royal Sugar Corporation for ninety-nine years; in 1848 the cane cutters enter the city and set it ablaze, and Dolores's army reorganizes.¹¹ The film ends ambiguously: Walker, stabbed as he walks to his ship, hears a voice asking "your bag, señor?", the same words Dolores spoke to him on his arrival and first departure.¹²

Production

Pontecorvo came to the project on the acclaim for The Battle of Algiers, and the script by Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio was heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.¹⁰^•¹ The film was loosely based on a slave revolt in Guadeloupe.¹³ Pontecorvo resisted studio pressure to cast Steve McQueen as Walker and Sidney Poitier as Dolores, keeping Brando, who considered it his favorite performance.⁷^•³

Spain to Portugal. As the film went over budget, United Artists demanded concessions. Fearing that the Spanish government would ban the film and block the use of Spain as a location for other projects, the studio had the colonial power changed from Spain to Portugal, although Portugal had no Caribbean colonies.⁷ The title had been Quemada, Spanish for "burned"; Spanish authorities pressured Pontecorvo into substituting Portugal as the imperial power, and the Italian release title became Queimada.³^•⁴

Editing and release. Pontecorvo was given eight weeks to edit the film, leaving no time to work on the musical score with Ennio Morricone as he had on Algiers, and United Artists demanded final cut.⁷ For the American release the studio had the film cut by about twenty minutes, retitled Burn!, and, in Jonathan Rosenbaum's account, "dumped" it, so that it never reached a wide public.³ The Italian censorship visa was issued on 18 December 1969, and the film opened in Spain on 21 January 1971.²^•⁵ It was banned for years in Brazil.¹⁴

Cast and filming

Marlon Brando played Sir William Walker, an English agent provocateur working for Her Majesty's government; the character shares only a name with the real nineteenth-century American military adventurer William Walker.¹⁰ Evaristo Márquez, a nonprofessional actor from San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, played José Dolores; critics have read his presence as inscribing the film in the history of Afro-Caribbean resistance.¹⁵ Renato Salvatori played Teddy Sanchez, the island's governor.²

The film was shot in Colombia, including Cartagena, with international and local crews.⁷^•¹⁵ Pontecorvo was shooting in Colombia when the American Academy nominated him as Best Director for The Battle of Algiers in 1969.⁷

Reception and interpretation

Critics have read Queimada as a study of how revolution can be induced, directed, and finally reabsorbed by imperial power.¹⁵ The Princeton historian Natalie Zemon Davis recognized allusions in the film's imaginary island to actual events "from Brazil, Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, Cuba, and elsewhere in the Caribbean".⁹ Pauline Kael, reviewing the American release in The New Yorker, called it "perhaps the least condescending film that has ever dealt with slavery" while judging that the film "goes wrong" in execution; she elsewhere described Pontecorvo as "the most dangerous kind of Marxist: a Marxist poet".⁴^•⁸ Time Out found it "a flawed but fascinating film", praising Brando's performance and Pontecorvo's "sharp, provocative analysis of colonialism".¹⁶ On the re-release aggregation at Metacritic it holds a Metascore of 72, with a 90 from the Washington Post.⁶

Morricone's score has been noted for an epic tone that never becomes fully triumphant, wrapping the action in constant unease.¹⁵ Later scholarship has used the film in interdisciplinary work on anticolonial struggle and on how social movements are represented in education.¹⁷^•¹⁸

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 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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