Zulu

Zulu (1964)

18 quotes

★★★★☆

(6 votes)

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Lieutenant John Chard: The army doesn't like more than one disaster in a day.
Bromhead: Looks bad in the newspapers and upsets civilians at their breakfast.

Pte. Thomas Cole: Why is it us? Why us?
Colour Sergeant Bourne: Because we're here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.

Surgeon Maj. Reynolds: You know this boy?
Orderly: Name is Cole, sir. He's a paper hanger.
Surgeon Maj. Reynolds: Well, he's a dead paper hanger now.

Lieutenant John Chard: Good. I can find work for baritones as well as tenors.

Colour Sergeant Bourne: A prayer's as good as bayonet on a day like this.

Cpl. William Allen: Heave! Put a bit more weight on that rope, you men.
Pvt. John Williams: He's even got a voice like a corporal.
Pvt. Fred Hitch: Yeah, sort of like a female hippopotamus in labor.

Lieutenant John Chard: You didn't say a thing to help, Bromhead.
Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead: Well, when you take command, old boy, you're on your own. One of the first things that the general - my grandfather - ever taught me.

Private Thomas: Why worry about a calf? I thought I was tired of farming. No adventure in it. When you look at it, this country's not a bit as good as Bala and the lake there. Not really green, like. And the soil. There's no moisture in it. Nothing to hold a man in his grave.

Lieutenant John Chard: Mr. Witt! When I have the impertinence to climb into your pulpit to deliver a sermon, then you can tell me my duty.

Hughes: Colour Sergeant Bourne! What's that shooting?
Colour Sergeant Bourne: A rifle, Hughes.
Hughes: Eh?
Colour Sergeant Bourne: If you're sick in hospital, I'd suggest you go and lie down.
Hughes: Yes, Colour Sergeant.

Cpl. Frederic Schiess, NNC: A Zulu regiment can run, run, 50 miles and fight a battle at the end of it.
Pvt. William Jones: Well, there's daft, it is then. I don't see no sense in running to fight a battle.

Pte. Henry Hook: Rourke's Drift... It'd take an Irishman to give his name to a rotten stinking middle o' nowhere hole like this.

Pvt. William Jones: What's he up to, 593?
Pte. Robert Jones: Oh, I think he wants to be hero, 716.
Cpl. Frederic Schiess, NNC: Haven't you rednecks got names instead of numbers?
Pte. Robert Jones: 'Tis a Welsh regiment, man! Though there are some foreigners from England in it, mind. I am Jones from Bwlchgwyn, he is Jones from Builth Wells, and there are four more Joneses in C Company! Confusing, isn't it, Dutchy?

Hughes: Hey, Hooky... who's doing all that shooting? Who do you think?
Private Henry Hook: Who do you think? Mister flamin' Bromhead, shooting flamin' defenseless animals for the flamin' officers' flamin' dinner.

Reverend Otto Witt: Death waits you! You have made a covenant with death, and with Hell you are in agreement. You're all going to die! Don't you realise? Can't you see? You're all going to die! Die! Death awaits you all.

Cpl. Frederic Schiess, NNC: I belong to Natal Mounted Police.
Pvt. William Jones: Is that true then? He's a peeler, 716. Come to arrest the Zulus.

Bromhead: Fire at will.
Pte. Owen: That's very nice of him.

Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead: Sixty! We dropped at least 60, wouldn't you say?
Adendorff: That leaves only 3,940.

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Mistakes

Continuity mistake: When Corporal Allen pulls Private Hitch off the ramparts when Hitch is shooting at Zulu's in the hills with his pith helmet on backwards, Hitch gets shot in the leg, and Allen pulls him in. Allen is shot in the chest, he clutches his chest, falls inside ramparts with blood underneath his clutching hand. When you see him after camera cut he is clutching the OTHER side of his chest.

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Trivia

Trivia: In the scene at the start of the film where Lt. Bromhead is riding his horse along and across the stream, it is not Michael Caine on the horse, as at that stage in his career he could not ride, he told the director he could as to get the part. Caine did try to ride it but he could not do it, so one of the filming crew took his place as a riding double. That's why the camera pans down onto the horse as it crosses the stream.

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Questions

Question: I first saw the movie in a cinema when it was first released. I'm quite sure I saw a scene which was later edited out, perhaps to accommodate the ratio of television screens. Before the attack various soldiers stop to listen to a strange sound echoing over the hills - "like a train" someone says. After we hear the sound twice my memory is that the movie cut to a panoramic view of thousands of Zulu warriors running across the veld, banging their shields with their spears, on their way to Rorke's Drift. This is what was causing the "train" sound, a phenomenon that is not explained subsequently anywhere in the edited version of the film. The dramatic effect of the shot, panning across what looks like thousands of armed Zulus, was riveting and served to emphasise the impossible odds faced by the British. Am I the only one who recalls this scene?

Answer: Absolutely correct. This exact scene is in my DVD of Zulu. They may have changes when the TV version aired, but this definitely in the original.

stiiggy

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