Wings Over Ethiopia (Paramount). Last year a Swiss cameraman, E. Berna, and a Swiss director, L. Wechsler, flew into Ethiopia to make a picture which they hoped to sell, partly as a travelog and partly as exploitation for a newly formed Swiss-African airline. They had little luck in either direction until Mussolini went to war and they found themselves owning a feature worth, perhaps, a million dollars.
Wings Over Ethiopia proves that a grasp of that wild land is not complete even when one knows that the army marches barefoot and the Emperor wears a beard. Women, black and well-formed, with big teeth polished white, put butter on their hair and brand their children for identification by cutting their faces with razors. Each generally takes one husband, five lovers. Warriors cannot marry till they have killed an enemy. Against the tawny brushwood slanting up & down enormous gorges, their squat villages are undetectable at a few hundred yards. The jungle flowers with snakes, acacia and spiky plants whose juice can blind a man. Tribes pass around infectious skin diseases in gay, communal bathing and make war without caring much whether they use spears or ancient muskets dumped into Africa from the continental wars of the 19th Century.
The camera is at its best in Addis Ababa, an unreal capital of tin roofs, eucalyptus trees, pomp, zoos, and scalawag promoters, with an apostolic Christianity 1,400 years old and a law and etiquet unflustered since the First Crusades. Debtors are chained to creditors. Sentences for murder are executed by the victim's relatives. Swedish drillmasters school the royal army of black bucks, and in a carefully landscaped estate Haile Selassie's daughters, olive-skinned young women with intelligent, quiet faces, wander listlessly with a little silky dog as if wondering what good their European education was doing them. There are shots of the Emperor's councilmen, their straight backs, long fingers, curved nostrils and slumberous, dominating eyes telling of Arabic aristocracy mixed with the blood of Solomon. And in the jungle, there are marvelous silhouet shots of nude bodies slithering in a love dance with white eyeballs rolling, flanks quivering and palms upraised. War-drums, gabble, the music of the freed slaves in Emperor Jones costumes and other incidental sounds were dubbed in at the Paramount laboratories together with a sensible verbal accompaniment.