The Message (1976)
(archive.org streaming, December 2019) Some movies are not simply movies—events get attached to them whether the filmmakers want it or not. You can watch The Message as a film about early Islamic history, designed as an old-fashioned epic not too dissimilar to westerns or Hollywood-on-the-Tiber biblical epics. It has vast battle sequences and stilted dramatic scenes, but it scrupulously avoids any on-screen depiction of Muhammad and some other central figures. The desert clearly takes centre stage as a backdrop. The result can be interesting when there is some action, dull when there isn’t, and familiar like many epic films are. As a movie, it’s a mixed bag. But then you start looking into the film’s production and release, and that’s when things take a turn for the fascinating. The film was led by a director, Moustapha Akkad, who wanted to popularize Mohammad’s life for western audiences, was financed by the governments of Morocco and Libya (i.e.: Muammar al-Gaddafi), was retitled at the very last minute due to a threatening phone call, and its American premiere contributed to a 1977 hostage-taking incident in Washington, DC, in which two were killed. Just to show you how weird history is, future infamous DC Mayor Marion Barry was wounded during the attack and one of the hostages was the father to David Simon, who would later go on to create The Wire. Amazing. Of course, we’re now so far away from The Message as to be trivial, but that’s the point: The film is far less interesting than the events that surrounded it. That happens.
