| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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THE DECEIVERS
Rating: 
UK. 1988.
Director – Nicholas Meyer, Screenplay – Michael Hirst, Based on the Novel by John Masters, Producer – Ismail Merchant, Photography – Walter Lassally, Music – John Scott, Special Effects Supervisor – Brian Smithies, Makeup – Gordon Kaye, Production Design – Ken Adam. Production Company – Merchant Ivory Productions/Michael White/Cinecom/Film Four International/Masters Film Productions.
Cast:
Pierce Brosnan (Captain William Savage), Saeed Jaffrey (Hussein), Helene Michell (Sarah Wilson Savage), Keith Michell (Colonel Wilson), Shashi Kapoor (Takagi), Tariq Yunus (Feringeea), David Robb (George Anglesmith), Neena Gupta (The Widow)
Plot: India, 1825. William Savage, a rising young captain in the British Army, travels with his new wife to take a command in the district of Marya. But there he witnesses Indians strangling a group of travelers and afterwards finds a mass grave containing 68 ritually strangled bodies. Further investigation reveals this is the activity of Kali-worshipping Thuggee cultists. Disbelieved by his superiors, Savage decides to dye his skin and go undercover to infiltrate the Thuggees, but there finds himself succumbing to the cult’s influence.
This interesting production comes from Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, the producer-director team behind such acclaimed art films as Heat and Dust (1983), The Bostonians (1984), A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993). Most of Merchant-Ivory’s work tends to revolve around and hold a nostalgia for a bygone era of British imperialist aristocracy, and many of the films are also set in India (Merchant’s birthplace). Merchant-Ivory return to that era with this production, claimedly a ‘based on truth’ account of the historical Thuggee cults. The directorial chair they have handed over to Nicholas Meyer, novelist (of some of the wittiest of the Sherlock Holmes pastiches, most famously The Seven Per Cent Solution) and genre director of Time After Time (1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), The Day After (1983) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) fame.
Merchant-Ivory serve the production up on a reasonable budget – it certainly looks good, as their films always do. But the plot is strictly B-budget and frequently sinks into some horridly melodramatic devices – about Brosnan having to pose as the suicidal woman’s husband and then later meeting him. Meyer, who is a far better writer than the script in the film, directs rather routinely. At times he does rise to create some occasionally striking imagery – a love sequence between Brosnan and a Thuggee whore whose shadow on the wall suddenly develops six arms. Although Meyer’s symbolism – Brosnan eating the sacred sugar of Kali intercut with his wife Michell receiving Holy Communion – is somewhat heavy-handed. Despite being a relatively lavish production and starring a popular actor in Pierce Brosnan the film has been little seen.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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