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Treatment
Production Schedule & Attachments
This is a story about events in Egypt in 1906, where the British rulers perpetrated a terrible injustice on the poverty-stricken inhabitants of a village in the Nile Delta, and how those events set alight the Egyptian Nationalist cause, and influenced a young serving officer, Captain Lawrence Oates, the Antarctic explorer, to volunteer for Scott’s ill-fated polar expedition of 1912.
The credits of the film are run over images of a foxhunt, apparently in Middle England. As the hunt begins to ride, it is however revealed that this is the British army at play in Egypt with the Pyramids and Sphinx an unlikely backdrop. As the hunt progresses, it is apparent that darker influences than pure recreation are involved.
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Officers in Oates’ regiment, the Inniskilling Dragoons, a Northern Ireland Protestant regiment, make an incursion into the estate of Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a poet, proto-conservationist, anti-imperialist pamphleteer, and, most relevantly for the British officers, an apologist for the Catholic minority in Ulster. Blunt’s Egyptian servants gallantly seek to stem the incursion but the huntsmen still manage to ride through his estate killing a female jackal, which is suckling fox cubs.
Captain Lawrence Oates arrives on the scene from action in the Boer War where he has been wounded and has established a reputation as a hero, is unwillingly seconded. He is immediately taken with Violet Boyle who is a beautiful American widowed sister-in-law of Harry Boyle, the mysterious British spymaster in Cairo. Violet takes exception to Oates’ regiment’s conduct in overrunning Blunt’s estate, which has resulted in the |
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