Posted 13 May 2004 - 12:56 PM
The christian name stuff you are remembering wrong. She DOES ask him about his christian name, but he doesn't understand her. Finally when she says your first name or something to that effect, he reels off ALL of his names ... Muhli Achmed Mohammed El-Rasuli The Magnificent, Lord of the Riff, Sultan to the Berbers.
I've seen this movie a LOT of times (caught it in the theater with Roger Moore's GOLD on a night when my folks thought the theater had a Bond double bill, believe it or not!), and I memorized Connery's speech at the end (via letter) to Brian Keith's Roosevelt before I got out of high school. John Millius really used to know how to write! Between the dialog here, and the 'make my day' speech he added to DIRTY HARRY and the INDIANAPOLIS scene in JAWS, Millius seems to have his finger in most great scenes from the 70s.
As for Muslim accuracy ... the history of the piece is completely BS anyway. The Raisuli was actually a wise man who lived on a mountain somewhere, not an arab. And the Pedecaris woman abducted by an arab during this era didn't exist ... a man WAS taken, but this movie is just using select elements from history and mixing them together, not trying to be a reenactment. I don't cut MISSIPPI BURNING much slack, because they represent that as history when the truth was that the FBI just bribed info from folks, but W&L is just a fun big adventure, not subject to that kind of scrutiny.