For about 2/3rds of its two-hour length, Jack Cardiff's Dark of the Sun (1968) is an entertaining and superior drive-inn movie. By this I mean that the picture is fast-moving, exciting, and well-made in a trashy sort of way. The plot is classically constructed according go time-worn archetypes -- in effect, the movie is a heist-Western with Simba rebels in the Congo playing the part of the Apaches. The film was made in an era where the notion of political correctness would have been scoffed-at and the movie is racist in some respects. Indeed, I vaguely recall that when the picture showed in theaters, and, I think, sold a lot of tickets, some of the more enlightened viewers and critics were a bit uncomfortable with the film's content. Needless to say, a movie with this subject couldn't be produced today, let alone devised as a rip-roaring adventure picture. This is not to say that we are more enlightened in the year 2021. In some ways, our present cinema is more prudish, timid, and abstract than the pop film culture that spawned this gory thriller.
Rod Taylor, who has nice buttocks and looks great in tight shorts, plays an American mercenary named Curry. He appears in the Congo during the middle of the Simba rebellion. The Simba are insurrectionists who specialize in hacking White people to pieces after first raping the women and sodomizing the men. (Probably, they are meant to be savage surrogates of the Commies.) No one really cares about the threatened colonial population. The real stakes in the film involve diamonds, gemstones that we would now call "blood diamonds" that President Ubi needs to shore up his failing regime. Curry is supposed to recruit a team and, then, travel 300 miles by rail through Simba-controlled country to rescue one-hundred civilians in a remote mining town -- although the ostensible mission is clearly subordinate to the plot to retrieve the diamonds and bring them back to the Capitol to Ubi. Curry agrees to undertake this mission, which is more or less suicidal, for a mere $50,000 -- clearly, the price of vainglorious, if mercantile, courage has suffered inflation in the years intervening between this picture and today. (I think in Zack Snyder's The Army of the Dead, which has a similar plot, the mercenaries charge 50 million dollars for their efforts.) Curry goes to a military base and engages 40 Congolese soldiers under the command of a vicious Nazi, Henlein -- he struts around wearing a swastika, a bad sign as to his mental stability in my estimation. Curry also recruits an alcoholic doctor to "stitch up" the wounded. The train is equipped with .50-caliber machine guns and, at least at the beginning of the picture, seems to be the true hero of the movie -- it's a spectacular coal or lumber burning engine coupled to about five cars, pushing a mounted machine-gun nest with its cow-catcher and trailing along another sandbagged gun emplacement as a caboose. The train has a fat Black engineer who looks perpetually startled as he chews on his fat, black cigar. Cardiff loves this train and the hissing, steaming, smoky engine with its resourceful engineer is by far the best thing in the movie -- the train, certainly, gives the best performance in the film and, when its coupled together, the director can't resist heroic camera angles, a Soviet style montage of crashing couplers, and images that feature huge clouds of smoke rising into the light of dawn.
All of this has a racist edge which is supposed to be ameliorated by Curry's sidekick, a powerfully-built Black man named Ruffo. Ruffo (James Brown) is a Congolese student educated at UCLA, an over-achiever who speaks five languages, and, of course, a paradigm of patriotic virtue -- he's enlisted in the mission for the sake of the poor tribal folks living in the Congo. (Brown delivers a big speech about how his parents, who were progressive, didn't have his teeth filed in the old primitive, savage manner customary in the jungle.) Ruffo distrusts Curry's motives but the two men forge an uneasy alliance to execute the train-raid on the northern mining village where the diamonds are kept in a big, elaborate vault.
The journey up to the mining town is pretty thrilling. There are plane attacks on the redoubtable little train. The Nazi guns down a couple of little kids with whom the gentle and kindly Ruffo has just bonded -- Henlein doesn't want them squealing about the mission although raw sadism is probably his real motive. Curry tells the Nazi to pin his swastika back on his chest since he has "earned it" by murdering the children. This leads to a fight in which Curry and Henlein duke it out with various weapons including a chain saw. Curry has got Henlein's head under the wheels of the train and is bawling that the engineer should put the thing in gear. But Ruffo intervenes and stops the incipient beheading. (At this point, the movie's narrative becomes pretty implausible -- if your two commanders are fighting with chainsaws and locomotives, it just might be that the mission is dysfunctional and will likely run into problems in the future; however, Henlein and Curry agree to make-up -- all is apparently forgiven, including the attempt at decapitation by locomotive. The action continues in an exciting way. At a plantation, the Simbas have killed everyone, apparently by spectacular torture, except for a comely French blonde played by Yvette Mimieux. Somehow, she's lost most of her clothing and, in fact, keeps getting her togs torn off her as the film progresses. Ultimately, the train reaches the remote mountain mining station where there are a hundred terrified White people clamoring to escape by rail. But the diamonds are in a time-locked vault and the safe won't open for three hours. This gives Curry the chanced to try to rescue some French missionaries who, of course, refuse to depart. (It's pretty predictable what will happen to them.) A native woman is suffering through a breech birth and, so, Curry goes back to town, picks up the alcoholic doctor (who is drunk and has been machine-gunning booze bottles in the bar with the Nazi.) Needless to say, the doctor has to summon up his last ounce of fortitude to perform an emergency C-section, apparently while he is blind drunk. He saves the woman and her child and decides to stay at the mission with the obstinate priest and nuns. All of this is comfortingly familiar to the viewer, the staple stuff of hundreds of Westerns. Back in town, the Simbas are attacking by the hundreds. There's a desperate fire-fight and the train, under heavy fire (and with the diamonds in the possession of Curry) escapes just in the nick of time. But there's a scary railroad trestle to cross and a mortar shell decouples one of the passenger cars crowded with Europeans. The car rolls back down the hill into the village controlled by the homicidal Simba troops. Here is where the film ratchets up the violence to a disturbing level. The Simbas drag all of the Europeans off the train and begin torturing them to death. The diamonds were in the train compartment captured by the Simbas. Curry is slung over the shoulder of Ruffo who, now, capitalizes on his Black skin and excellent language skills to infiltrate the town filled with intoxicated and murderous rebels. There are lots of scenes of White folks being raped, tossed high in the air like rag dolls, and Congolese white soldiers being sodomized by enormous Black revolutionaries. Curry and Ruffo pull out their guns, slaughter hundreds of Simbas and escape back to the train now stalled in the forest near the ruined railroad trestle. It's at this point that the proverbial train runs off the tracks decisively. First, Curry and Ruffo have a sort of male-to-male love aria which ends with some bizarre dialogue between Ruffo and Yvette Mimieux's character: Ruffo says plaintively of Curry (who has just left in a jeep to get petrol for some lorries that have been conveniently commandeered): "He won't give you that little part of himself that you need," "So what do you do?" asks the French beauty, directing her question to the lovelorn Ruffo. "Hurt," James Brown says sorrowfully,"you just hurt but he's worth it." After this bit of dialogue, perhaps, fortunately, the Nazi skewers poor Ruffo, and the bad guy, disappointed at not finding the satchel of diamonds, flees on an improvised raft down a deep river gorge full of rapids. Curry has found the gas and hurrying back to where the train is stalled, finds Ruffo dead. (The relationship between Curry and Ruffo has passed into Leslie Fiedler's perverse account of Jim and Huck: "Come back to the raft, Huck honey.") Before fleeing the encampment, the villainous Nazi has tried to rape Yvette Mimieux, half-drowned her in the river, and torn off her clothes again. She tells Curry about what has happened and he goes berserk. He drives the jeep through the rain forest without the benefit of a road, crashes the vehicle down about a four-hundred foot cliff to reach the gorge where the Blonde Beast is surfing a fragile-looking raft down the river to "the Uganda border." Curry, then, drives the jeep into the river and chases the Nazi down the rapids in the vehicle -- this is idiotic and has to be seen to be believed. Catching up with the Nazi, the two men fight in a abysmal cavernous canyon that has suddenly appeared in the landscape -- they climb down vines together fighting maniacally all the way to the waterfall plunge pool at the base of the gorge. There, Curry bests the Nazi, smashing the bones in his arms and legs and, then, dropping the screaming villain into a deep pool where he flops around as he drowns, unable to swim because his extremities have all been broken to pieces. A noble Black soldier appears out of nowhere and shakes his head in horror: Who are the real savages here? Curry, then, turns himself in and asks to be court-marshalled. The diamonds have been saved and will reach the capitol city when the convoy comes down from a mountain pass overlooking the town. The last twenty minutes of the movie is stupid beyond belief.
Yvette Mimieux also looks great in tight white jeans. She has an almost perfectly heart-shaped derriere. In the closing scenes, Rod Taylor has been beaten to a bloody pulp and with his face swollen, he looks just like Popeye as played by Robin Williams. Indeed, he even sounds like Popeye. The movie is well-executed until it bursts through all bounds of credibility in its last minutes. If vehicles could readily drive through rivers full of rapids and waterfalls, why would we ever need such a thing as a road? And how does a couple of jerry-cans of gas pumped mid-way in the 300 mile trip provide enough fuel for a whole fleet of trucks to drive all the way to the Capitol? And, most importantly, what happens to the handsome train and its handsome engineer? The picture was shot on location and the African landscapes are enthralling. Interior scenes were made in the studio in London and feature some remarkably inept rear projection -- all of the images showing people in vehicles exploit this technique. Cardiff shot some of Michael Powell's best movies and was renowned as a technicolor cameraman and the movie has a handsome burnished appearance. This is the kind of picture that would make a deep impression on you if viewed when you were about 12 -- the action scenes are realistically and brutishly violent and the plot has a pleasingly classical structure: the so-called heterosexual journey and heist picture. (And there are are undertones from other famous movies -- at one point, Curry's dialogue seems to quote at length from Kipling's "Gunga Din" although without seeming to acknowledge that source.) Yvette Mimieux's not inconsiderable pulchritude is wasted in the film -- Curry is in love with Ruffo and she can't seduce the Black man due to the color bar and he's also hopelessly in love with Curry.
Once, when I was about ten, I saw on TV an action film similar to this movie, The Flame of India. I recalled that movie as about the best picture ever made -- it was full of train chases, massacres, elaborate fights and featured a burning railroad trestle about a thousand feet high. I imagined that movie to be a great film until I saw it again when I was about sixty. It was, of course, appallingly bad.
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