When going to see the integral Italian version of Queimada (known in North America as Burn!), my mind kept tripping over the same troubling thought: would the film survive the overdubbed absence of Marlon Brando's voice? To be sure, virtually all Italian films are postsynched, and foreign performers rarely get to enunciate their own lines, but we're not talking about just any old timbre here. Marlon Brando possessed what was probably the most subtly nuanced screen voice of all time, so its disappearance seemed to augur catastrophe.

Happily, the substitution wasn't nearly as alarming as I'd feared. Although the anonymous Italian might have lacked the American actor's sense of irony, his voice was not only not an embarrassment but in some ways an ideological embellishment of the text. Burn!, after all, is probably the most Marxist movie ever made, and even liberal Yanks rarely get the hang of dialectical materialism (a struggle manifested off-camera by the almost murderous struggle waged between director Gillo Pontecorvo and his notoriously difficult star).

Better yet, in terms of its politics, the film seems as fresh today as it did in 1969. If Pontecorvo and screenwriters Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio were primarily thinking of Vietnam and Frantz Fanon's revolutionary essay "The Wretched of the Earth" when they were working on the screenplay together, their insights apply equally well to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq. Like the parachute general in Battle of Algiers, the head villain, a British secret agent known as Sir William Walker (Brando, of course), is the most knowledgeable on-site political commentator, with his command of realpolitik including a surprising degree of sympathy from the poor devils he first seduces, then abandons.

Set on a sugar-growing island in the Caribbean (because of political pressure from Madrid, its colonial origins were transferred from Spain to Portugal), the film shows how the smooth-talking Walker sets up a puppet government with the aid of water carrier--turned--revolutionary hero José Dolores (real-life Colombian cane cutter Evaristo Márquez).

Ten years later, when Dolores decides that liberty should be more than just a word, he revolts against the new oligarchy, a planters' cabal that is suitably complacent in the face of British monopoly. Walker is called out of retirement and plans the counterrevolutionary campaign that will reestablish the status quo. He also sets in motion the one thing he couldn't have predicted.

In a film crowded with great scenes--20 minutes of which you've probably never seen before, incidentally--one stands out from all the rest. In the wake of his first victory, Dolores canters down a golden beach on a white horse surrounded by his ecstatic followers; as he rides, Ennio Morricone's most extraordinary score rises to an emotionally overwhelming pitch, one that can only be compared to the two Sergei Prokofiev minutes preceding Aleksandr Nevsky's battle on the ice.

It's one of world cinema's greatest moments, and if you don't see it, you're doing yourself a major injustice.