If you prefer your movies to fit into nice neat categories, you might want to avoid Il gioiello di Khama. There’s so much going on in this fabulous Italian film. It’s like a smorgasbord of delicious ideas. We don’t want to give too much away, but it looks a lot like an Indiana Jones movie – though the Mr. Jones character is a gentleman adventurer rather than an archaeologist. And it’s also a robbery movie – though the crime takes place in an Indian temple rather than a bank. And it’s an action movie, too – albeit a gender-bending action movie whose two main heroes are women rather than men. And if that’s not enough for a silent film from 1918, there’s a starving bohemian artist who gets roped in to play a doppelgänger and a crazy religious cult bent on revenge and a full-fledged flashback sequence, not to mention other ingenious scene-settings and plot-twistings. Meanwhile, and despite all of this ‘pre-modern, but post-modern’ eclecticism, Il gioiello di Khama is still very much a film of its time. The main protagonist is a man of the leisured classes, bored and rich and playing at life, and with a head full of suitably-pukka colonial attitudes. And the darker-skinned foreigners, despite wearing quite elegant suits, are revealed as the barbarians they truly are underneath. So, let’s dim the lights and let the colourful entertainment begin. We can’t say what genre you’ll think you’ve seen, but we are sure you’ll come away with a smile on your face, and a very clear understanding of why Amleto Palermi went on to become a very popular director in Italian cinema history.

Karl Wratschko