1921 No wonder Brian (pronounced Bree-an) Moore was Graham Greene’s favourite living author. He wrote thrillers, and novels about Catholic doubt, and had got ‘a good grounding in shifting relativities and ambiguous loyalties’ (as Bernard McGinley in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has put it) while working in Poland after the war for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
After UNRRA he emigrated first to Canada, where he worked as a journalist, then to the United States, finally settling in Malibu, California. He wrote nineteen novels and eight screenplays, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) and the script for Black Robe (1991), an ambitious recreation of the Jesuit mission in what is now Quebec City and the territory to the north-east of it, based on his own novel of the same name, published six years before.
To write Black Robe, Moore had immersed himself in the letters and reports back home of the Jesuits trying to convert the natives, a perspective that radically altered the conventions of the usual cowboys-and-Indians epic out of Hollywood – reinforced in the film, made in Canada and directed by an Australian, the seasoned Bruce Beresford.
Not that Hollywood hadn’t already begun to undermine its own clichés. Little Big Man (1970; see 24 June) had reversed the old dichotomy between terrorised white families and predatory natives. Now the savages were the very US Cavalry that had so often ridden in at the last minute to save the beleaguered settlers, and their victims the Indian women and children camped on the Washita River. Dances With Wolves (1990) postulates one thoughtful man who takes the time and trouble to learn the ways of the Oglalla Sioux, only to have his good work cancelled out by unruly soldiers who come across his camp.
In Black Robe a party of Algonquins sets off with some Jesuits (‘Black Robes’ to the natives) to relieve a distant mission to the Hurons. It quickly becomes clear that the two cultures are entirely different, mutually incomprehensible, with no John Wayne out of The Searchers (1956) or Kevin Costner out of Dances With Wolves to read the natives’ behaviour. Yet they have a culture if not equal to, then at least capable of confronting that of the whites. Though marvelling at writing and trying to make music from a European recorder by blowing in at the wrong end, they can shoot a partridge on the wing with a bow and arrow.
But there’s nothing left of the noble savage. Indians fight their enemies just as bitterly as do the European and native white settlers. They are expert, exquisite torturers. The whites are unheroic, but they are not the murderous, rapacious cavalry out of Little Big Man. Though rough, they are courageous, hard-working and sincerely bent (for good or ill) on leading the Indians to Jesus.
Not that they succeed – on any level of grace. The Hurons resist the missionaries because their shamans have told them they will be destroyed if they convert. When they reluctantly accept the Gospel it’s because they believe it will save them from another white import, the smallpox. The film’s closing legend supplies the bleak dénouement:
Fifteen years later, the Hurons, having accepted Christianity, were routed and killed by their enemies, the Iroquois. The Jesuit mission was abandoned and the Jesuits returned to Quebec.