Reeling Backward: The Deceivers (1988)

The largely overlooked Merchant-Ivory Productions adventure hasn't held up well, and isn't helped by having Pierce Brosnan in brownface for most of the movie.

“The Deceivers” is not what you’d expect from a Merchant-Ivory Productions picture. Known for high-minded dramas and historical costume pieces, this effort is a straight-up adventure film with plenty of violence starring Pierce Brosnan as a lightly fictionalized version of the British officer who crushed the Thuggee cult during their colonial rule of India in the 1800s.

The movie is pretty well forgotten today, despite arriving right in the middle of the Merchant-Ivory heyday, in between “A Room with a View” and “The Remains of the Day.” I’m betting this is partly due to the fact that the lead actor appears in most of the film wearing skin tincture to impersonate an Indian, or what today would be called brownface.

The times being what they are, I’m surprised somebody hasn’t brought this film back up to cancel Brosnan. I recall Aziz Ansari getting quite vexed after finding out that his childhood favorite film of the same vintage, “Short Circuit” and its sequel, featured an Indian character played by a non-Indian actor.

(Ansari was later canceled himself, then generously un-canceled, though his career has never really recovered.)

Purportedly the novel by John Masters was based on the real British officer who went after the Thuggee, who actually did disguise himself as one of them using some kind of stain for his skin. I don’t think that would satisfy today’s bloodthirsty Twitter mobs — nothing does, in case you haven’t figured it out — but it at least it gives some historical cover for a movie portraying something that actually happened.

Brosnan doesn’t make for an especially convincing Indian, especially in the early going, though I grant it gets better once his beard grows out:

He plays Col. William Savage, a district administrator for the East India Company circa 1825. Just married to his superior officer’s daughter (Helena Michell), he’s an upstanding and honorable man more interested in helping the locals than extracting profit for his colonial masters.

Revered as the “savage sahib” by the residents, he first dresses as a missing weaver, Gopal, to convince his grieving wife (Nenna Gupta) not to commit ritual suicide by burning. In this guise he stumbles across the killing of an entire merchant train by some poor nomads they had let travel with them. This leads to the legend of the deceivers, aka Thuggee, followers of the six-armed death goddess Kali.

Savage uncovers the mass burial “gardens” used by the Thuggee, including the body of a missing British officer. Removed from his command for his harsh roundup of suspects without warrants or cause, he resolves to go undercover and infiltrate the cult with the help of Hussein (Saeed Jaffrey), a Thuggee who decides that Savage’s Christian god is more powerful than his beloved Kali.

The Hussein/Savage relationship forms the crux of the narrative dynamic, and I wish it had focused more on these two men trying to understand each other, even as they are using each other for their own needs. I think the film, written by Michael Hirst and directed by Nicholas Meyer, would’ve worked better as a character piece than action/adventure.

Hussein introduces Savage to his cousin, Feringea (Tariq Yunus), the local Thuggee leader, and in due course he becomes indoctrinated into their way of life. He never actually kills any innocents himself, though he digs graves and at one point holds the legs of a victim while he’s being strangled.

I was most interested in the logistics and motivations of the Thuggee. They kill without guns or knives, using the simple rumal scarves carried by most men. Hussein shows how they tie a few rupee coins into one end to give the cloth some weight, then instantly snare it around the neck of their intended victim. Savage himself learns this trick, which is performed dozens of times throughout the film, always accompanied with the same “ker-SHWAP!” sound effect.

Hussein explains the Thugee don’t rob everyone, and don’t kill everyone they rob. It all depends on the whims and signs of Kali, of course interpreted through her very fallible human servants. They even gather for big Thuggee parties to sell off their spoils, drink and debauch with whores.

Savage gets an enemy in the form Piroo (Salim Ghouse), one of the most ardent Thuggees, who suspects him of being an “approver,” or spy. (In movies, the paranoid crackpot usually turns out to be right.)

Things get a little goofy in the last half as Savage starts to become entranced by his ersatz life, experiencing mind-altering periods induced by the sacred sugar they are fed and having to use his rumal for real when the actual Gopal, himself a Thuggee adherent, turns up.

Indeed, it seems as if the deceivers are around every corner, with British army conscripts and even the local nobleman, Thakur-ji (Manmohan Krishna), a friend of Savage’s, turning out to be a sympathizer. A beefy looking specimen who acts as Savage’s wife’s servant, and is continually suggested as a Thuggee, turns out to be a good guy in the end.

I have to confess that watching the movie I kept thinking of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” with its similar trappings and Thuggee antagonists. I thought I had even spotted several of the same actors, especially in the famous banquet sequence, though it turns out I’m mistaken.

(For the record, most of these Indians were played by white dudes, too.)

Another deceptively familiar face is Shanmukha Srinivas, a beautiful mute young boy kept by one of the Thuggee as an adopted son-slash-mascot, who is often made to dance for their intended prey as a distraction. (I thought the actor was the one who played the maharajah in ToD, but he’d have been as surly teen by then.) There’s a subtle suggestion that the boy is also shopped out for sexual favors as needs be.

David Robb turns up as George Anglesmith, a secondary antagonist, a friend and competitor to Savage who covets his lady love. Later on, Savage encounters him in his Gopal disguise and is not recognized, and is shocked to discover that Anglesmith is aware of the Thuggee activity but permits it in exchange for a generous cut of the loot.

“The Deceivers” winds up right about where you’d expect. Savage is discovered, chased and nearly killed but the Brit cavalry rides to save the day against the dastardly Indians — double Western entendre! — just in the nick of time. Though it’s suggested that Savage is haunted by Hussein’s (inevitable) death and is permanently estranged from his wife.

Now out in a nice Blu-ray reissue from Cohen Film Collection, “The Deceivers” might be accused of not toeing the line with today’s increasing scowly standards. While it boasts some charms, I think it hasn’t held up for reasons other than its (literally) tainted protagonist.