This has one of the most striking openings of 1950s British cinema - a Kenyan is bicycling through the country on a sunny day, singing, when he comes across a bloodied white man. The Kenyan pulls out his hatchet and finishes the guy off. Dirk Bogarde arrives in town to meet his brother, who has been killed. He then sticks around to find to who's responsible, like a hero in a Western - which is what these British neo-Imperial adventures were often like: The Overlanders, Campbell's Kingdom.
It's a politically fascinating piece, with its racist white settlers, liberals, Uncle Tom doctors, savage Africans. There's also similarities between the novel and film Something of Value which makes me wonder if the makers of that didn't watch this - to wit, we get to know an established White Kenyan couple, he's racist unrepentantly and his wife isn't but he loves her, and the Mau Mau cut them up but she just manages to live. There's also a romance between a lead couple, one of whom returns home after being away for a while, which is a vague triangle with a black African. And a final image where a nice African dies... but we cut to the face of a young boy. (As in, "it's too hard to work things out with the blacks now - but hey maybe we can do it with the next generation.") On the flip side of this there's a district officer character, played by Donald Sinden, who is reminiscent of the Anthony Steel part in The Planter's Wife - nothing is original.
Bogarde's performance is a great weakness - he simply doesn't look at home in Kenya, or this type of movie, to be honest, and one wishes the original choice Jack Hawkins could have done it. Or even - don't laugh - Anthony Steel, who was a more believable physical type. (Bill Travers is another actor from this time who could've done it. Or Kenneth More.) Bogarde's miscasting is a big problem because one of the central dramatic conceits of the movie is Bogarde's character moving from hating Africans to accepting them and being positive for the future - Bogarde is not convincing doing any of this. Another debit is the awkward cutting between location footage and studio, which is jarring and keeps pulling you out of the reality of the movie.
On the sunny side Virginia McKenna is convincing as a white Kenyan (this is relative - she at least looks like she lives outdoors, which is more than you can say for most British female stars of the time), Donald Sinden is fine, Earl Cameron grabs all his chances in what is a flawed part, a self-loathing black doctor who keeps talking down about his race, but is still a character of some complexity, more than most black actors got the chance to play at the time.
The photography and colour are impressive, the director handles the action sequences with flair (it's an exciting movie), the script is only really concerned with white people as opposed to blacks, it doesn't really offer any solutions more than "be nice to each other", the racist whites are humanised in a way the racist blacks aren't... anyway, academics could have a field day with it.
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