Mister Johnson (1990 Bruce Beresford)

Male Joyce Cary spent time in Africa and wrote 'Mister Johnson' in 1939, and the character was based partly on the letters of a local fantasist he read as part of his censorship duties and on a terrible clerk he worked with.

William Boyd's adaptation - he has a good way of dropping you straight into the story - places the action in West Africa 1923, where the titular clerk, played by  Maynard Eziashi, works for local official Pierce Brosnan. He is reckless, spendthrift, entrepreneurial, positive, polite and impeccably dressed and apes the European style - it is the destiny of every man - he says - to be civilised. This is the key - without it all, Johnson wouldn't have these materialist dreams. On the other hand he is a flawed human being (Brosnan: "You'd steal the smell off a goat".) And stealing from the local store owner (Edward Woodward) leads Johnson to kill the man - in self-defence, we assume, but nevertheless he must face his fate.

While all this is going on he tries to behave as a husband, though his wife Belle Enahoro is constantly being returned to her village when he cannot pay the bridal duties, and dealing with the shady local liar Waziri (Femi Fatoba).

Also with Dennis Quilley, Beatie Edney, Nick Reding.

Good (Nigerian) flavour and music (one frenetic song with the road-building sounds strangely close to a 1980s fruit machine), earthbound music by Georges Delerue, photographed by Peter James and edited by Humphrey Dixon (Room With a View). Seems to exist only in crappy from-VHS 4x3 cropped version.