Robert J. Maxwell Doubtless, the weirdest score even written by Miklos Rozsa, a pounding of drums and a howling chant by the Africans of Hollywood. Maddening. Enough to send Walter Neff into an epileptiform seizure.A bit slow out of the starting gate. Bruce Cabot and Reginald Gardiner are two British officers in charge of an army outpost in northern Africa in the early years of World War II. Their soldiers are committed native troops, unlike the neighboring Shenzi tribe who are warlike and xenophobic. Cabot's and Gardiner's sole enemy POW is Joseph Calleia, an Italian Captain who has given himself up to the British and now takes pride in his cooking. There's not much to do. "Miles and miles of nothing to do," remarks Gardiner.(PS: Kids, Italy joined Germany in fighting the Allies in Europe. This is World War II, the one that came after World War I.)But then George Sanders arrives and takes command of the post, a humorless by-the-book officer who brings news that the Shenzi are being provided with modern weapons by the Germans. The pace picks up when the Brits are joined by the young Gene Tierney, owner of hundreds of boutique shops around the world, half Arabic, leading her camel caravan through the desert. Yes, the pace picks up. How could it not, when she sprawls so languorously in her "Arabic" get-up across a bed so large that Moby Dick could sleep in it, in the bedroom of her Hollywood mansion with its filmy drapes, beaded curtains and its candles? She's supine on that bed because she was nicked by a bullet fired by a Thompson sub-machine gun into Bruce Cabot's sparser military quarters. It may be the first time that tracer bullets are depicted on screen, and put to effective use. Director Hathaway was no artistic genius but he knew how to put a movie together.It ends in a proper shoot out and a sentimental death.It's not a major picture and it does drag at times but it isn't badly done.

ihshils-649-173072 One judges films like this with criteria different from those applied to contemporary works, otherwise, it would receive a failing grade. However, as cinematic nostalgia it works well. The struggle against the Nazis and Fascists spread to Africa where the colonized population was enlisted to fight for the Allies in order to prevent a calamitous spread of an "evil empire". The images of "natives" is consistent with the stereotypes current at the time, but the plot---preventing the arming of tribes whose assistance was also desired by the Axis powers---is plausible. The techniques use to tell the story and the sets and scenes of skirmishes are a bit amateurish. The exteriors were obviously filmed in the Southwest and a large rock formation described a "Rhinoceros" mountain or peak looks like the Shiprock formation. For someone like me who spent Saturday afternoons at matinées, it's a trip back to another era of cinema; therefore a bit of fun. But,it's not a very good film.

drystyx SUNDOWN is what you might call a minor epic. It is about the old British grandeur. Instead of Heston, we get Bruce Cabot, who still looks King Kong tall, before he was dwarfed by the duke in later films.Gene Tierney's beaut was probably the big marketing device here, and Hathaway directs to make full use of it.The story is one that some people today mistakenly think was normally acceptable as how people viewed life. Knowing people from the era, as they spoke in the sixties and seventies, it is obvious that they thought it was just as silly in 1941 as it is thought of today, the grand British presence in Africa, the "sahib", the almighty "bwana".Set during World War II, we get a look at the different countries and how their people naturally allied themselves. The Italian is a proud man, willing to live with the British, for instance.What you will probably note most about this film is that it doesn't adhere to modern acceptable story telling standards. It is expository with sudden jumps from one idea to another, particularly at the end, which seems to come out of nowhere. That doesn't mean it is bad story telling. It just isn't what we're taught today.Full of fairly common clichés, it doesn't dwell too much on any one of them, and proceeds to tell a story with believable characters.

futures-1 "Sundown" (1941): Starring Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, and… here's why I like this movie in the "guilty pleasure" category: it also stars Gene Tierney, the most beautiful woman of the 1940's. (THEN come Dorothy Lamour, Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake, and others…) The video box reads: "A jungle woman…" (Tierney): well, there is NO JUNGLE or JUNGLE WOMAN in this movie, "…helps the British in defeating the attempts of the Nazis…" (there are NO Nazis in this movie), "…to take over and occupy the jungle!" (There is NO JUNGLE!). So, OTHER THAN THAT load of crap, there IS a DESERT, there is WWII for the British (not the U.S. yet), and there IS Pinup-olicious Gene Tierney. Another odd piece of junk is that "the main bad guy" is Dutch. IF you know anything about that war, the Dutch were Allies, folks, ALLIES. You know, hiding Ann Frank, etc.? Some of the photography is good, acting is average at best (and awful at times – watch the actor's eyes (who plays the "bad guy") as he reads his lines left to right, left to right, left to right. Whatta shmo. If you've ever wondered what Gene Tierney's belly button looked like, THIS is your chance. She also has a nice, statuesque walk. Guilty pleasures arise and be proud!