Khartoum

A massive all-star cast and a huge budget help to make the more vacuous moments of this epic comparatively painless. It is scripted with a ponderous attention to detail by the notorious pseudo-zoologist Robert Ardrey (author of The Territorial Imperative), but it has some very heavyweight performances, with Heston as General Gordon and Olivier as his bloodthirsty opponent the Mahdi (the face-to-face confrontation between the two is entirely fictitious). There's also Richardson as Gladstone, Nigel Green as General Wolseley, and Michael Hordern as Lord Granville, so despite inadequacies in both direction and screenwriting, anyone interested in the period will probably find quite a lot to enjoy.