I get they wanted to use stock footage but did they have to use so much? The basic idea of this movie isn't bad - group of survivors of a Mahdi attack trudge up river - but they fumbled the casting. Anthony Quayle good an actor as he is is far too posh speaking and inherently genteel to play a lower cast sexy brute of a sergeant, a part that needed, oh I don't know, a young Sean Connery or Patrick McGoohan.
Sylvia Syms should have been ideal as the hoity toity miss but for some reason here comes across as sexless - she was hot as anything in Ice Cold in Alex but not here. Maybe she needed J. Lee Thompson, not Nathan Juran.
Derek Fowlds is the other soldier, who is no threat for Quayle - would have been a better movie if he'd bee more of a rival or villainous. Jenny Agutter, looking so so young, is the fourth member. She plays a non Brit if I saw that right.
The construction of action and scenes around stock footage is really annoying. People do things just to use stock footage and there's far too much narration during the opening montage
It picks up when the group run into black Africans and they're never sure if they'll be killed or not - this section is quite good.
But really not a good movie.
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