The 1987 film White Mischief is a fictionalised reimagining of true events that took place in Kenya during the early years of the Second World War and centres around a decadent and dissolute group of British ex-pats who are living the high life while back home people suffer the Blitz and rationing. A 57-year-old British aristocrat and his young beautiful wife enter this social world and whirl, where his wife meets and falls for a dashing, caddish and penniless aristocrat nearer to her own age, with the resulting fallout and jealousies leading to a murder which became a high-profile scandal.
It features an almost ridiculously starry British and international cast a number of who before, at the time and after have been very high-profile actors including Greta Scacchi, Sarah Miles, John Hurt Charles Dance, Hugh Grant, Trevor Howard, Murray Head, Gregor Fisher, Ray McNally, Susan Harker, Susan Fleetwood, Joss Ackland and Jacqueline Pearce who have appeared in all kinds of A Year In The Country favourites from the overlooked exploration of class boundaries The Hireling to Stephen Poliakoff’s intriguing secret state cycle conspiracy thriller Hidden City and the urban edgelands black comedy of No Surrender and, well… 1984, Ultraviolet, The Black Windmill, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Family Way, Blake’s 7, Scandal, Sapphire and Steel audio dramas etc etc etc.
Many of the ex-pats are wealthy, or live as though they still are, and their lives appear to be a constant round of drinking, gossiping, affairs and an almost childlike level of pampered luxury and self-indulgence. However, their “japes” and “jollies” don’t actually seem all that fun filled but rather a desperate empty way of trying to fill the days.
Their way of life and its dissolute nature brings to mind many of the young men and women’s lives in the LA set films Less Than Zero (1987) and The Informers (2008), both of which are adaptations of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1980s set novels, and in which despite, or perhaps because of material privilege, the characters have tumbled almost willingly into a dissolute existence that lacks any form of direction or moral compass.
White Mischief and the lives of its characters also seem to interconnect, echo and have parallels with those in the 1989 film Scandal, which focused on historic events that occurred as part of the Profumo Affair in the early 1960s, which was another high-profile scandal that involved British aristocrats, lusts, decadence and death.
Another aspect that all of these films share is that their often-tragic events are set against and contrast with a variously stylish, seductive and/or ravishingly beautiful backdrop of locations, outfits etc. White Mischief however is distinctive in that it takes such tales of dissolution away from their more common urban settings and transplants them to the African landscape, which is often described in the film as being a paradise but is actually nearer to a self-built form of purgatory where its inhabitants are (almost) forever caught in a dissolute stasis.
