Judged on its own terms, Voice of the Whip is an excellent film….One problem is that the filmmakers’ implicit organizing device (a comparison of Sudanese drovers with American cowpunchers) is never revealed. Without this clue, the viewer finds it difficult to discover the film’s purpose…We need to know why the drovers are drinking such repulsive, dark brown water, what the dusty brown objects are that they eat, and why one drover rubs his hands in the dirt. Above all, the narrator must stress that we are not watching ordinary life…There is no sustained focus on human problems or relationships, and so we tend to pay more attention to the camels…
-Film Review, William C. Young, in American Anthropologist, 93, 1991
When I presented Voice of the Whip at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, from the stage I mentioned that I’d been enthralled since young by the yarns of the Chisholm Trail, and especially by Montgomery Clift’s hot-headed cattle drover in Red River. But that wasn’t my implicit organizing principle on the Darb al-Araba’in. William Young got it wrong.
Instead it was Clint Eastwood’s bad hombre in A Fistful of Dollars, when he is filmed walking unburdened across a desert flatland as night falls, having been left behind on foot by his mates, and there he lies down, sleeps without cover, gets to his feet at dawn with barely a yawn, and then continues his trek after a short tug on his poncho. No breakfast, no toothbrush, no mouth rinse, his pillow wherever he lays his head.
So yes, on the trail there was repulsive water to drink, dusty objects to eat, and dirt to wash our hands. That’s what the drovers and I called ordinary life, the camera uninterested in anything more about us. It was all about the camels, and we knew that before setting out for Egypt from the wells of Al-Nahud. It’s what we’d signed up for.