Movie review - "Campbell's Kingdom" (1957) **1/2 (warning: spoilers)

In the late 50s the British film industry, in particular the Rank organisation, went on a Commonwealth countries kick - you had films shot in Australia (Robbery Under Arms), South Africa (Nor the Moon by Night), India (The Wind Cannot Read, North West Frontier) etc. This was Canada's turn, so you've got lots of British actors wearing flannos talking in vaguely American accents.

This has been called Rank's attempt at a Western which it isn't really, although it's set outside in North America, has a couple of scenes set in a saloon and is about a mystery man who comes into town to beat the baddies, avenge a problem and save the day. For one thing it's set in the present day, it's about digging for oil rather than gold or the railways, Dirk Bogarde isn't a gunslinger (there are no guns) but rather a doomed Byronic man who has six months to live, and he doesn't do all the heroic work himself but rather gathers a group of friends around him: an engineer (Michael Craig), driller (James Robertson Justice), pretty girl (Barbara Murray), friendly driver (Sid James). This ensemble, everyone-pitch-in-to-help teamwork ethos marks the movie as very different from Hollywood, with its lone-man-against-the-elements ethos.

It isn't a great movie - Ralph Thomas never made a great movie, he was too much of a hack - but it's not bad. It's from a Hammond Innes novel so there's always plenty of action, there's some spectacular location work (mountains, dams, rivers), the setting is novel, a couple of good action sequences (blowing things up, a dam collapse at the end). Bogarde is effective with a terminal illness (it does kind of cheat that at the end he's miraculously better), Michael Craig lends handsome support, Stanley Baker could play this sort of villain role in his sleep. No one seems vaguely Canadian but at least it's in Canada.