Set in India in 1825, The Deceivers is a Merchant Ivory classic based upon a John Master’s novel of the same name. Centered on the character of Captain William Savage (Pierce Brosnan), the movie follows his journey into Raj’s criminal underworld. Shortly after his marriage to Sarah Wilson (Helena Mitchell), Savage is assigned control over a district.
While disguised as another man in an attempt to keep a young woman from committing suicide he stumbles upon a nefarious plot deep in the jungle: mass murder and the graves dug to hide it.
The next morning, he leads his men to the gravesite and excavates, finding possibly hundreds of years' worth of bones as well as the body of a missing East India Company captain. Later, on a patrol, he recognizes a man who participated in the coverup of the murder and robbery and imprisons him.
With his superiors breathing down his neck, Savage gives Hussein (Saeed Jaffery) his freedom in exchange for information about these thugs and entry into one of their groups. Savage enters into a Heart of Darkness style descent into madness as he becomes Gopal the weaver in an attempt to root out the thuggee bandits in his district and abroad.
This movie is three things: slow, boring, and racist. There are almost 15 minutes of footage before there’s any real exposition and this becomes a pattern quickly. What should be an exciting depiction of a tiger hunt is stunted by bad cinematography, boring dialogue, and the fact that they’ve hired an army of local peasants to do the work for them while they shoot from elephant back. The entire film seems to be a misrepresentation of Indian cultures, Hindu spirituality, and history (two of the film’s producers were even arrested by Indian authorities for misrepresenting Hindu culture). Beyond the nearly 45 minutes of Brosnan in brownface, the story’s obsession with Kali worshiping Thugs is based on a racist, imperialist lie perpetuated by the East India Company and the English Crown.
Historian Sagnik Bhattacharya, along with many other experts in pre-colonial India, asserts that what the British dubbed ‘thuggees’ were either nomadic groups who refused to bow to their dominion or disbanded soldiers who occasionally turned to brigandry out of financial desperation and not a vast web of cultists seeking to topple or otherwise usurp the Raj by violent force. The film lacks any such nuance.
I was surprised to learn it was released in 1988 for the poor quality of the filmmaking. My original guess would have been the mid-1950s had it not starred Brosnan. The fact that Captain Savage is rewarded for murdering his way through India and otherwise usurping the rule of law makes the film even more disappointing. What could have been a serious period drama simply comes across as orientalist garbage and is not recommended for any history collections.