Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

mark.waltz A fantastic cast gets caught up with a pretentious drama/adventure that is more sleep inducing than a day long power outage. For a film with excellent Oscar nominated music, photography and sets, what is wrong with it? Well, considering that it's the story that really grabs the viewer and refuses to let go, I'd have to say the plot that in spite of being filled with nonstop action is simple just pretentious, unbelievable and deathly boring.A great cast does what they can with this story of conflict between the British military and native tribes, another case of "uh oh, there goes the neighborhood!" of those do-gooder Englishmen trying to control every piece of soil they land on. Bruce Caboy and George Sanders lead the white men in conflict with the natives, told in a curse that among the six men there, one will die. The issue is that there's only five of them (including the Italian cook p.o.w. Joseph Calleia), that is until the great white hunter, Harry Carey, shows up. Reginald Gardiner and Carl Edmond are the other two.Then there's the exotic looking Gene Tierney, playing a half Arab/half French princess like outcast, speaking perfect English and involved in the knowledge that one of the European men is a traitor. While this gets going a bit with the occasional attack on the fort and provides a few shocks here and there, it's overflowing with absurd situations, such as Tierney's being caught in a non-stop machine gun fire, and ending up with barely a scratch. This looks great in its advertising, but quickly looses its grip thanks to frequent pacing issues and ridiculous melodramatic events. Plus, it's hard to root for the British considering that they are obviously the intruders. Well intended art becomes something you'd walk by in the Museum of Modern Art and be instantly perplexed by what it's all about. A sudden religious twist at the end triples the absurdity with an out of the blue cameo by Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

edalweber This is a pretty good adventure tale of WWII before the US got involved.Perhaps the most interesting character is Pallini, the humane, civilized Italian gentleman who is not sorry to be a prisoner of the British rather than fighting on the side of the Axis.Maybe the most striking scene is the one in which they find the rifles that are being smuggled in to arm the natives against the British, and acid is used to raise the markings that have been ground off.When the markings indicate the Skoda Works in Czeckoslovakia(which had been occupied by Hitler several years before, so it was not the Czecks who were smuggling the guns) Pallini says with a shudder. "Its THEM!Its always THEM!".Without ever mentioning Nazis.Supposedly this was because we weren't in the war yet, but in fact it is extremely effective,like a monster whose presence is sensed, but not seen.It is as though Pallini is referring to some evil that is so terrible that he can't even bring himself to mention its name,the horror that is even more horrible because it has no name.

ferbs54 On the wall of my foyer hangs a framed issue of "Life" magazine dated November 10, 1941. Its front cover features a B&W photo of an impossibly beautiful, 21-year-old Gene Tierney from her new motion picture, "Sundown." Well, needless to say, I have wanted to see this film for years, but every time it pops up on one of the local PBS stations here in NYC late at night, it always seems to be in a lousy-looking 16mm print. Thank goodness I waited for this supremely crisp-looking DVD to be released! "Sundown" turns out to be a pretty well done WW2 action movie, dealing with an English outpost in Kenya, those nasty Nazis supplying guns to the natives, and a young caravan trader (Tierney) who helps the Brits out. And what a cast we have here: Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, Harry Carey and Cedric Hardwicke are their usual fine selves, and (sneeze and you'll miss 'em) Woody Strode and Dorothy Dandridge add interesting support. But it is top-billed Tierney, here in her 5th film, who steals the show. Decked out in harem girl attire for most of the picture, she really is something to behold. In her 1979 autobiography "Self-Portrait," Tierney reveals that "Sundown"''s authentic-looking locales were actually filmed at Ship Rock Hill, New Mexico, and that she couldn't stand the hot weather and the reek of camels during the shoot. She also tells us that one of the camels tried to nip her on the derriere. Finally...a camel after my own heart!

telegonus The story is nonsense, and Gene Tierney couldn't act, yet this Henry Hathaway-directed a adventure picture set in North Africa is solid entertainment thanks to Hathaway's no-nonsense handling of the material, Miklos Rozsa's stirring score, and its splendidly chosen largely no-star or near-star cast: Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, Harry Carey, Cedric Hardwicke, Marc Lawrence. Cabot is especially good in the lead, and his work here makes one wonder why he didn't become a bigger name. Walter Wanger produced this one, which was a big hit, and also somewhat of a hybrid, a mix of Korda-and-Sabu style exotica with Nazi intrigue out of Fritz Lang and Hitchcock, with Tierney in the Lamarr-Lamour exotic princess role. Ersatz, and never for a minute convincing, but hard to resist.