When Walker arrives as an agent of the British admiralty – Britain is at odds with Portugal at this time – he finds the island’s revolutionary leader being executed by the Portuguese army. Walker knows he needs a black man willing to stand up to the white man and start a revolution, and he finds his candidate in a poor porter named Jose Dolores (Evaristo Marquez). Walker tells Jose that he can provide a ship back to Africa and away from the island’s tyranny if he and other men from his village help him rob the island’s bank. He agrees, and when Jose is forced to kill a Portuguese soldier who stops him in the act of taking the stolen gold to his village, the first part of Walker’s plan is in place. Walker then craftily plays both ends against each other. He tells the Portuguese army he has seen men from Jose’s village with stolen gold and arrives in Jose’s village with guns to arm Jose’s men against the Portuguese army. Under Walker’s tutelage, Jose and his men slaughter the Portuguese who come to investigate.

Jose, now convinced that he is responsible for the safety of his people, decides to stay and fight rather than flee to Africa. He becomes a general of his own revolutionary army. Walker, meanwhile, helps local native Teddy Sanchez (Renato Salvatori) into the capitol by helping him assassinate the Portuguese president and become the leader of the new provisional government. Sanchez invites Jose into the government to take part in the new independent Quemada, but the politics of the island’s sugar crop– the politics of commerce – are so beyond his understanding that his presence becomes a liability to the government. Before Walker can assassinate Jose in the name and good of the provisional government, Jose steps down and returns to his village, and Walker leaves for other adventures. ("I don’t suppose you’ve heard of a place called Indochina?" Walker asks Jose, thus placing the film in the context of Vietnam.) Walker has successfully engineered a revolution – or so he thinks.

Ten years later, Walker, now a drunken barroom brawler, is called back to Quemada by Royal Sugar Company (as "military advisor") to put down an even bigger revolt by Jose Dolores, who has mobilized an army against president Teddy Sanchez and his policies. In order to stop Jose and his guerrillas, most of the small villages have to be burned to the ground ("the logic of profit," Walker declares), Sanchez deposed and executed, the British army called in as militia, and finally Jose Dolores caught and executed. But at what price? Doesn’t Jose now become a martyr, perhaps even a legend?

For a film with all that on its mind, Burn! remains terrifically entertaining with Brando’s stiff-upper-lipped Walker perfectly realized – an essential performance for Brandophiles. The color cinematography by Giuseppe Ruzzolini and Marcello Gatti is vibrant while retaining a documentary feel, and Ennio Morricone’s musical score is one of his most memorably quirky (a cross between the Congolese "Missa Luba" and "Louie Louie"). While the screenplay by Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio may seem perhaps too stuffed at times, it nevertheless shows that no matter how much politics serves those greedy for a profit at any cost there are ideas no leaders can oppress in the long run.

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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.