Cinema: Misery for Fun & Profit

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Slave Trade in the World Today is an Italian-made documentary that pursues its righteous ends with unseemly gusto. It begins in almost Biblical solemnity, citing the U.N. declaration that "slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms." Next, Novelist Robin Maugham, nephew of Somerset, reports that he himself bought a slave in the Sahara for $105 and set him free. And who is to blame for the traffic in human beings in Africa and the Middle East? Who else but the U.S., which, Maugham says, cares only for her "vast oil interests. Britain does nothing because she does not want to offend Washington."

From that preachy starting point, the film plunges into a peep show of questionable authenticity, poking its lenses through garden walls and desert shrubbery, suggesting much, proving little. The most chillingly persuasive sequences show the whipping of African natives who are for sale to Arab herdsmen, a raid on a caravan smuggling enslaved children from Chad to Saudi Arabia. Later a trader inspects a naked native woman as if she were horseflesh, coolly examining her teeth.

Though slavery certainly exists, the moviemakers who exploit misery for profit repeatedly flesh out their meager evidence of it by ogling puberty rites and bare-breasted concubines. Footage of a strip show in Beirut brings on a French tootsie who casts a hard eye at the camera and says she will gladly trade off her pasties to any sheik, sultan or oil-rich daddy who can meet the cover charge. This may be slavery, but most of the civilized world has another name for it.