The Wind and the Lion

The Wind and the Lion (1975) is a historical adventure directed by John Milius, available to watch online on iFILM. Morocco, the early 1900s. Berber chieftain Raisuli — played by Sean Connery with the kind of gravity that makes you forget he's Scottish — kidnaps American widow Eden Pedecaris and her two children. Washington expects a diplomatic crisis. What follows is more complicated than that.

Candice Bergen plays Eden as a woman who arrived in captivity expecting savagery and found instead a man with his own strict code of conduct. President Theodore Roosevelt, played with bluster and relish by Brian Keith, uses the hostage crisis to flex American muscle on the global stage — and Milius lets you feel the gap between the political machinery and the actual human situation in the Moroccan hills.

The film is loosely rooted in a real 1904 kidnapping incident, but Milius used it to build something closer to a classical epic about old-world honor colliding with modern power politics. It is the kind of wide-frame adventure film that Hollywood rarely funds today. Stream The Wind and the Lion (1975) online on iFILM.